The Sauvignon Secret

“That’s what this has been about? You think Brooke and I—”

“What was I supposed to think when I called and you were right there while she was getting dressed?”

He put his hands on my shoulders. “Listen to me,” he said. “Brooke is like a daughter to me. That’s it. There is nothing—and I mean that—going on between us. I slept on her couch so I wouldn’t have to drive back to Sausalito.”

“Why are you here?”

“Because you’re so damn stubborn, that’s why. We could have sorted this out sooner and a whole lot cheaper,” he said, “than a oneway plane ticket.”

My heart skipped a few beats. “One-way?”

“I heard you’re looking for a winemaker and I’d like to know why, when you’ve already got one.”

“Do I?”

He nodded. “Unless you’re firing me.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not.”

“Good. Glad that’s settled. Though I would like to make a few changes about the way we do things.”

“Oh God, you want a raise. I should have figured.”

“A raise would be good,” he said, “but I was thinking more along the lines of a change of accommodations. Maybe we could try living together. You know, I could leave a few things at your place, see if it works. That is, if you’d be willing?”

I felt suspended, breathless. “I suppose you could do that. Eli and Hope are living with me now, too.”

“I know,” he said. “You’d be okay with me being part of your family?”

“Yes,” I said. “I would.”

“Me, too,” he said. “Because you’re part of mine.”

I took a deep breath. “Then if we’re family, you need to move in completely. No half measures, Quinn. It has to be all the way.”

He grinned and kissed me. “All right,” he said. “That’s how we’ll do it. All the way.”

The Silverado Squatters

“The wine is bottled poetry,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in The Silverado Squatters, describing the Napa Valley wines the Scottish author and poet drank on his two-month honeymoon in an abandoned shack on Mount St. Helena in 1880. Today Robert Louis Stevenson State Park encompasses the region where Stevenson, his new wife, Fanny, and her son Lloyd Osbourne stayed in a three-story bunkhouse located in Silverado, a defunct mining town in the Mayacamas Mountains a few miles north of Calistoga. In August 2010, the California State Senate named a stretch of Route 29, the main north-south route through the Napa Valley, in honor of Stevenson, who wrote such well-known classics as Treasure Island, Kidnapped, A Child’s Garden of Verses, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850 and, as a child, developed a series of medical problems from the damp Scottish weather that would plague him for the rest of his life. By the time he was an adult, he began traveling to warmer climates— particularly the south of France—for health reasons. On an 1876 canoe trip through Belgium and France, he met Fanny Van de Grift Osbourne, a married American woman more than ten years his senior. Though there were apparently no sparks between them at this first meeting, the following year they became lovers in Paris where Fanny had moved with her children to study art and escape a philandering husband who resided in San Francisco.

In 1878, Fanny left Europe and returned to California to settle matters with her husband; the following year Stevenson journeyed to America to join her. He took a second-class passage on a steamship that arrived in New York, and from there traveled by train to California, writing about his experience in The Amateur Emigrant. Penniless by the time he arrived in Monterey where Fanny was now staying with the children, the trip all but destroyed his fragile health. Later he moved to San Francisco where Fanny had gone to finalize her divorce, but poor health and great poverty continued to plague him.

In April 1880, Stevenson got word from Scotland that his family, which had been set against his proposed marriage to an American divorcée, had relented and now planned to send him an annual allowance. In May, Stevenson and Fanny Osbourne were finally married in San Francisco.

Determined to get her new husband away from the damp and fog of that city, Fanny decided the family should travel to Napa to stay at the home of an old friend. When the plans fell through, they moved instead to a cottage on the grounds of the Hot Springs Hotel in Calistoga. Unable to afford the ten-dollars-a-week rent, a local storekeeper directed them to the abandoned, run-down house in Silverado. After cleaning and fixing up the somewhat open-air place, they spent an unconventional honeymoon two thousand feet above Calistoga, which commanded breathtaking views of the valley. There, in the fresh air and warm sunshine, a contented Stevenson recuperated and regained his health.

During his stay in Silverado, he kept a meticulous diary, describing his adventures, mishaps, and encounters with the colorful local inhabitants; the memoir later became The Silverado Squatters, written in 1883 after he returned to England. Stevenson also used his notes about the beautiful and somewhat primitive scenery as the model for Spyglass Hill in Treasure Island.

In addition to Robert Louis Stevenson State Park, where a trail leads to the place the poet and his family once camped—the site is marked by a memorial in the form of an open book—visitors can learn more about Stevenson’s life and works at the Silverado Museum located in the St. Helena Public Library.

Acknowledgments

I had bicoastal help with this book, and there are many people to thank. The usual rule applies: It’s not their fault if it’s wrong; that’s on me.

In Virginia, thanks to Rick Tagg, winemaker at Barrel Oak Winery in Delaplane; Brian Roeder, owner of Barrel Oak Winery (and native Santa Cruzan); Christine Ilich of Heirloom Kitchen in Front Royal; Dr. Christopher Burns, associate professor of medical education, Department of Microbiology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville; Detective Jim Smith, Crime Scene Section, Fairfax County Police Department; and Terri Cofer Beirne, eastern counsel, the Wine Institute.

In California, thanks to my family for their hospitality, support, endless driving, and patient fact-checking: especially Larry and Balen Crosby in Cupertino and Matt and Kristin de Nesnera in Santa Cruz. Annie Bones, state relations coordinator at the Wine Institute in San Francisco, answered questions and set up meetings for me in Napa. Thanks to my friend and fellow author Katherine Neville for introducing me to Michael and Jacque Martini of the legendary Louis M. Martini Winery. Jacque and Michael (he is the third generation of Martini winemakers) not only gave me the best insider tour of Napa Valley anyone could ask for but also graciously took in total strangers, offering me and my family their charming guest cottage as a place to stay. Thanks especially to Jacque (and Larkin), for the driving, the tea, the restaurants, and for introducing me to their good friends Ed Sbragia of Sbragia Family Vineyards in Geyserville (Ed was formerly head winemaker at Beringer Vineyards) and Laura Zahtila, owner of Zahtila Vineyards in Calistoga. My favorite part, of course, was drinking truly amazing wine made by some of Napa’s top winemakers; it isn’t every day you get to drink a vintage from the year you were born.

Thanks for advice, comments, and reading drafts of the manuscript to Donna Andrews, Glen Gage, John Gilstrap, Catherine Reid Kennedy, John Lamb, André de Nesnera, Peter de Nesnera, Alan Orloff, and Art Taylor.

At Scribner, thanks to my wonderful editor Anna deVries, as well as to Fiona Brown, Rex Bonomelli, Katie Rizzo, and everyone else who does so much behind the scenes. Thank you to Cynthia Merman for copyediting.

Finally thanks and love to Dominick Abel, who makes it all happen.