“My old man took off and left my mother before I was born.” He reached over and moved away the canopy of leaves to reveal clusters of Merlot grapes. We were weeks away from picking them, probably not until some time in early October. “I never knew him.”
The sandy loam soil hadn’t compacted yet into concrete where they’d fixed the post and trellis. I picked up a handful and let it run through my fingers. Leland had been around, but I hadn’t really known my father, either.
“Eli said…” I paused.
“Yes?”
“He said there was a lot of blood. Where…?”
He looked uneasy. “There was. I wasn’t sure what to do about it, so I brought one of the coolers and poured water everywhere until it was gone. Kind of returning him to the land, if you know what I mean. It seemed okay, when I thought of it that way.”
“Thank you. That was very thoughtful.”
“You know what was strange?”
“What?”
“I found a bullet here when I did it. I thought it might have been…well, it was old. Really old. It must have been there for years.”
“It could have been from the Civil War,” I said. “We find things all the time. Bullets. Pottery. Even a belt buckle, once, from a Confederate soldier.”
He was silent, then he stood and held out his hand to me. I took it and he pulled me up. “Are you okay?”
“I think so.”
When we got back to the Gator, I poured the rest of my water bottle on Serafina’s rosebush.
He started the motor. “You still want to see those new sites?”
“Yes,” I said. “Let’s go look at the future.”
His mouth curved in a small smile, but he didn’t say anything as he swung around and we drove away.
Highland House is set back more than a mile from Atoka Road, the main road, so much of our vineyard is actually in front of the house, though it’s not evident because we’ve got so much land. My mother and Jacques had planted only twenty-five of our five hundred acres in vines, yielding about five thousand cases of wine a year. In California, twenty-five acres is nothing, but in Virginia it’s a decent-sized vineyard.
“How many more acres were you thinking of planting?” I asked.
“Ultimately I was figuring on seventy-five. Fifteen thousand cases. I also think we don’t have to plant only French grapes.”
That would catapult us into the big leagues. It would also cost us a fortune. “You’re very ambitious.”
“We’d do it in stages.”
“We’ll have to.” It takes at least three years before a vine will yield fruit that can be used for making wine, real quality grapes, meaning there are three years of up-front costs before there’s a return on the investment.
Long ago my mother had cross-stitched a quote of Thomas Jefferson’s she liked that she’d framed and hung in her office. It read, “Wine being among the earliest luxuries in which we indulge ourselves, it is desirable it should be made here and we have every soil, aspect, and climate of the best wine countries.” Though Jefferson had tried for years to grow grapes at Monticello and encouraged a wine-making industry in Virginia, it had never happened during his lifetime. Now, sitting next to Quinn, I thought about the possibilities and promise of what could be, that here we
We had passed the last of the existing vineyards. I figured he was headed toward a series of old fields rimmed with more dry-stacked stone walls that checkerboarded the landscape. Beyond them, the terrain swept up to the highest point of our property. It was covered with trees and underbrush. If he wanted to use that hill, we’d have the additional expense of clearing it, but then slopes were the best place for siting vines.
He stopped by one of the stone walls and pointed to the hill. “Beginning over there,” he said. “It’s cooler and a different micro-climate from the rest of the vineyard so we could experiment. South-facing slope. Good drainage. It would be above any frost pockets and we’ll take out any impediments to cold-air drainage.”
I’d gotten out of the Gator when Quinn had been speaking and was about to head across the field.
“Umm.”
“Hey,” he said, “are you listening, or am I talking to the crows? Where are you going?”
I hadn’t been to this part of the farm for years, quite deliberately. The vegetation had changed the topography of the landscape, so at first I hadn’t been sure.
“Excuse me for a moment.”
After a few tries I found the small flat cross made of gray field-stones next to the wall. It was nearly buried by tall grass and weeds that I pulled away with my metal cane, using it like a scythe. I’d made the cross years ago to mark the place where my mother had fallen after Orion, her horse, had thrown her. I knelt and was pulling weeds when I heard Quinn’s footsteps behind me.
“I never saw that marker when I was here before.”
“You wouldn’t have. It was covered by brush.”
He grunted. “You bury a dog here or something?”
I finished clearing away debris around the stones and wiped the dirt off my hands on my jeans. I leaned on my cane and pulled myself up. “No.”
“What’s the cross for, Lucie?” he asked as we walked across the field to the Gator.
“My mother. Look, can we please get out of this heat?” I turned away from him.
“Sure,” he said gently. “Let’s go.”
When we got back to the Gator he said, “We don’t have to plant here.”
I shook my head. “She’d like it if we did.”
He chewed on a piece of wild chicory and said nothing.
“You know,” I continued, “my mother thought only the French could make good wine. I wonder what she’d make of you being the vintner here.”
He smiled that half-smile again. “Thomas Jefferson said every man has two countries. His own and France. I figure that makes me a little bit French. Besides, Jefferson’s good friend was Filippo Mazzei. A good
I stared at him with my mouth open, as though he’d just spoken to me in perfect Attic Greek. “Well,” I said at last, “I guess so.”
“Good.”
We didn’t speak on the trip back to the winery. Quinn began humming relentlessly, something tuneless and off-key and loud enough to be heard over the puttering Gator. Like white noise, I tried to let it block my thoughts, but without much success.
Producing wine is as emotional a task as it is technical. To drink a glass of a wine you have helped create is to remember the weather that year, the events that happened in the world, and, inevitably, the events in your own life. As a result, I could never drink one of our wines from the year my mother died, for it seemed I always tasted a sadness that had seeped into the finish.
I wondered if it would be the same with wine from this harvest, the year of Leland’s death—whether Quinn would somehow unintentionally infuse it with a sense of loss or whether he could overcome that and instead we’d taste his hopes and the promise of the future as he produced his first vintage in Virginia. I didn’t say any of this to him, because I didn’t want to jinx things.
But after he dropped me off at the house no matter what I did the sterile anonymity of Section A46, Row 4 stayed with me. I thought about Quinn washing away all that blood and the hasty funeral my brother had organized.
Leland hadn’t been out there in the vineyard alone. Someone—someone I knew—had been there with him.
