“Let’s think about it. We’ll figure out something,” I said. “By the way, Ryan agreed to be our auctioneer and said he’ll write up the wine notes for the catalog. It looks like we’re going to have plenty of donations thanks to the Romeos. They’re like the Mafia volunteer squad putting the squeeze on people. Everyone’s contributing at least one bottle. Sometimes more.”
“I’ll bet your new neighbors aren’t.” Amanda’s eyes went cold. “The Orlandos.”
“I don’t know. They only just moved in,” I said. “I haven’t met them.”
“His law firm represents animal rights groups.” She slapped the folder with the spreadsheet shut and jammed her glasses into a small Burberry case with a sharp shove. “She’s the kind who throws paint on people who wear fur. They came by the kennels asking about the condition of the hounds. Very confrontational. Shane happened to be there and was more polite to them than I would have been. He said the hounds were well treated and not to worry. Then they insisted on coming inside to see for themselves. So he told them it was private property and asked them to leave. The next day they sent a letter saying we should consider their farm closed to the Goose Creek Hunt. Until hell froze over.”
She picked up her wineglass and downed the contents.
“I didn’t know that,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“They have the right to keep you from foxhunting there if they want to,” Eli said. “It’s their land now.”
“Which has been part of our territory for more than a century.” Amanda banged the base of her wineglass on the bar emphasizing each word. “Oh, God, sorry. I’m just livid every time I think about it. I
“No visit from the Welcome Wagon?” Eli said and smirked.
I slashed an index finger across my throat and shook my head. He smirked some more.
“You grew up here,” Amanda said. “On this farm. Or have you forgotten about it, now that you’re living in subdivision land?”
“Come on, Amanda, that’s not—”
Amanda cut him off. “George Washington had foxhounds. He wrote about hunting all the time in his diaries. So did Jefferson. The earliest surviving record of organized foxhunting in America comes from right here in northern Virginia—a pack organized by Lord Fairfax in 1747.” She recited the names and figures, glaring at Eli. “Foxhunting is part of our history, our culture. You know perfectly well how hard we fight for the open spaces, to keep land pristine and undeveloped. The Orlandos came from Manhattan. Acres of concrete between two rivers. The only place more disconnected from reality and the world of nature is Disneyland.”
“Have you tried talking to them?” I eyed my brother, who grinned at me and picked up my cane, hooking it around his neck to fake a swift stage exit.
Amanda looked at Eli like he was dryer lint, then glanced at her watch. “Not yet. There’s a meeting at the kennel in half an hour to discuss what we’re going to do. In the worst case, how to work around losing all that land. I’d better get going. I’ll call you about the guest list in a day or two, Lucie.” She nodded stiffly at my brother. “Eli.”
After she left I looked at my October fixture card. They’d scheduled a meet at Highland Farm for the sixteenth, in nine days. Mick now rode with the Goose Creek Hunt. Maybe I could ask him what the hunt decided to do about losing the Orlandos’ land as part of their country. With the auction coming up, I didn’t want to get Amanda worked up on that subject again.
Eli picked up her glass and set it in a dish drainer behind the bar.
“Man,” he said, “is she pissed off.”
“You didn’t help.”
“I just played devil’s advocate. You know it’s their right to close their farm. If she takes their head off the way she just did with me, your neighbors are in for it, babe.”
“Sure sounds like it,” I said.
Ryan Worth showed up at five o’clock, just as we closed for the day. I’d warned Quinn he was coming by.
“I’ll be sure to get lost,” he said. “And leave you two lovebirds alone together.”
Ryan had panned one of our wines—our Pinot Noir—in a recent review. Quinn was furious. Without telling me, he called Ryan and gave him a piece of his mind.
Apparently that was the high-water mark of their conversation because after that Ryan brought up Le Coq Rouge, the California vineyard where Quinn worked before joining us. Quinn hadn’t known Ryan’s good friend was Tavis Hennessey, the owner. Nor had he known that Ryan was completely au courant of the scandal involving the winemaker—Quinn’s former boss—who’d gone to jail for selling adulterated wine on the black market in Eastern Europe. Business at the winery tanked and Hennessey finally closed Le Coq Rouge. Though Quinn had never been charged with anything, Ryan had made a when-you-lie-down-with-dogs-you-get-up-with-fleas crack to Quinn. As far as I knew they still weren’t speaking.
“Why did you have to call and yell at him like that?” I’d asked. “I didn’t think the review was fair, either. But you get more with honey than you do with a club.”
“Maybe,” he’d said, “except you don’t feel as good afterward.”
I met Ryan by myself at the ivy-covered archway to the courtyard. A gust of wind blew an unused cocktail napkin that had eluded our cleanup crew in front of us as we walked to the barrel room. I picked up the napkin and stuffed it in my pocket, glad I’d worn a jacket. The temperature had dropped at least twenty degrees since this afternoon.
“Your winemaker joining us?” Ryan asked.
“Unfortunately he’s got another appointment this evening he couldn’t get out of.” With his washing machine.
“Too bad.”
Ryan held the door to the barrel room for me and I hit the lights as we walked in.
“How many lots have we got so far?” he asked.
“Fifty-five and still counting.”
The barrel room smelled of the tangy, slightly acrid odor of fermenting wine. About the size of an Olympic swimming pool, the semiunderground cave had thirty-foot ceilings, fieldstone walls, and four interconnected bays, where most of our oak barrels lay undisturbed in cool darkness. The stainless-steel fermenting tanks stood along the far wall. The gentle gurgling of the glycol-and-water solution circulating inside the refrigeration jackets was soothing as we walked the length of the room.
Ryan pulled out a chair from a long table we used for winemaker’s dinners and private parties. He sat down, flung his briefcase on the table, and took out a reporter’s notebook.
“We’ll take the top forty and put them in the live auction.” He began making notes. “Everything else we’ll do as a silent auction. It’ll take me about ninety minutes to dispense with forty lots. After that, the natives get restless and you don’t get as much bang for the buck.”
Above his head, my mother’s cross-stitched sampler hung over one of the archways leading to the recessed bays. She’d stitched one of her favorite quotes from Plato—“No thing more excellent nor more valuable than wine was ever granted mankind by God.”
I stared at the sampler and nodded. Ryan had brought up things that never would have occurred to me. Thank God he’d agreed to help, fee or no fee.
“How much longer should we keep accepting contributions?” I asked.
“Cut them off soon. I still have to do the write-ups and figure out which ones to do live. Then we’ve got to get the catalog to the printer.”
“Sunny Greenfield will handle the printer,” I said. “We’re using one of my mother’s paintings of the vineyard on the cover.”
“Nice. I always liked her art.” He looked around. “Hey, bartender, any chance of a drink? This is going to take a while.”
I decided against the Pinot and got a bottle of Cab. For the next two hours he checked bottles against the list I’d made, writing about each one in his notebook.
At last he threw down his pen and sat back in the chair, rubbing his eyes with the palms of his hands. “Can
