A Good Year

to do with it? Come on, my friend. You know as well as I do this isn’t wine for drinking; it’s for buying and selling. An investment. My other clients here would sell their mothers for this wine. Hold it for a year, two years. The way it’s going, you could double your money. No, I’m afraid that’s not possible. Just the two cases. The others are promised to Beijing and Seoul. Yes? Good. You won’t regret it.”

Chen put the phone down, blew a celebratory smoke ring, and crossed a name off the short list on his desk. Perhaps he should raise the price to $80,000. This was going to be an interesting couple of days. He put in a call to Beijing.

On the other side of the world, Roussel had, as usual, returned to his pink palace for lunch. He was a preoccupied man, picking at the salt pork and lentils of his favorite petit sale, saying little, hardly touching his wine. His wife, Ludivine, accustomed to seeing a clean plate and an empty glass at mealtimes, came to the natural conclusion.

“It’s your stomach, isn’t it?” she said, with the conviction of a wife long familiar with the vagaries of her husband’s digestive system. “Too much cheese last night. You need a purge.”

Roussel shook his head and pushed his plate away. “My stomach? No, that’s fine.”

“So what is it?” She reached across the table and patted his hand. “Come, Clo-Clo, tell me.”

He sighed, and let his body slump back in the chair. “It’s the vines. You know, the little patch.” Ludivine nodded. “Well, yesterday we had the oenologue from Bordeaux come to look at the property, un monsieur tres snob, someone arranged by Nathalie Auzet.”

“What did he say?”

“Oh, nothing much. Nothing good, anyway. I think that was the problem, because this morning Monsieur Max told me he was going to find someone else and get a second opinion. And you realize what that means?” Roussel traced circles on the table with his wineglass, his face the picture of dejection.

Ludivine did indeed realize what it meant, and had been half-expecting it for years. She came around the table and stood behind him, massaging his shoulders. “Cheri,” she said, “it was bound to end sooner or later. We’ve had some good years because of those vines-the house, the cars, more than we could have imagined when we first got married.” She bent to kiss the top of his head. “I hate to see you like this.” With a final squeeze of his shoulders, she cleared away the plates and was about to take them to the sink when she stopped, setting the plates back on the table with a rattle that made her husband start. She tapped a finger with considerable emphasis on the table. Her voice was equally emphatic. “You must tell him, Clo-Clo. You must.”

Roussel sat staring at her, chewing his lip and saying nothing.

She reached out for his hand, and her tone softened. “He seems very sympa, the young man. He’ll understand. Better that he should find out from you than from someone else, no?” She answered her own question by nodding vigorously. “Much better.”

The midafternoon air was still, and thick with heat. Max was on a ladder, wrestling with a tangle of wisteria that was trying to creep uninvited into the house through an upstairs window. Christie had gone off in search of an English-language newspaper, and Madame Passepartout, her cat crisis over, was hanging out the wash on a makeshift line she had strung up in a corner of the tennis court.

The calm of the moment was broken by the clatter of Roussel’s van coming to a stop in the courtyard. As was his invariable habit, Tonto was the first to get out, rushing across to bark at the ladder before sniffing it with great deliberation and cocking his leg against it. Roussel scolded him halfheartedly as he peered up at the figure perched above him, silhouetted against the sun-bleached pale blue of the sky.

“Monsieur Max, do I disturb you?”

Max came down the ladder, and the two men shook hands, Roussel tugging at one ear while he searched for words. “I must speak to you,” he said, “and there is something I must show you. It’s about the vines.” He jerked his head toward the van. “We can go together now, if you have the time.”

They drove without speaking in the direction of the village, and then turned off to follow a narrow track that ended in front of a long, windowless barn built into the side of a gentle fold in the land, its double doors barred and padlocked. “The cave,” said Roussel. “You haven’t seen it before.”

Max shook his head. “I thought you took the grapes straight down to the co- operative.”

“Not all of them,” said Roussel. “That’s what I want to talk to you about.”

He parked the van in front of the barn, and Max stood watching Tonto roll in the dust, squirming with pleasure as he rubbed his back on the grit while Roussel unlocked the barn doors and slid them open. He went into the gloom and turned on a light before beckoning Max to follow.

The temperature inside the cave was cool, almost chilly after the heat outside, and the air smelt slightly humid; tannic and musty. The floor was rough concrete, divided down the middle by a wine-stained drainage channel. On either side of the channel, raised up on plinths of concrete, were rows of barrels, marked in chalk with a scribbled code meaningless to anyone except the wine grower. Standing in one corner next to the door was a rickety tin table with a scattering of papers, a couple of dingy glasses, and a long glass syringe with a rubber bulb the size of a fist at one end. On the wall, hanging from a rusty nail, was a calendar illustrated with photographs of young women in the throes of some private ecstasy, draped over tractors.

Max looked around with interest, wondering if he was expected to say anything as Roussel wiped the glasses free of dust with a handkerchief and pulled two elderly wooden chairs up to the table. He gestured to Max to take a seat and half-closed one of the doors to lessen the glare. Finally, with a sigh, he took off his cap and sat down.

“Monsieur Max,” he began, “as you know, I have worked on the vines at Le Griffon for thirty years, ever since your uncle bought the house. Many times over the years, I asked him to replace the vines, which were old and tired even before he arrived.” He looked down at the table, twisting his cap in his hands. “But, for one reason or another, it was never the right moment: Next year, he used to say, we’ll do it next year.

“There was one parcel, the parcel beyond the wall, which I thought could produce good wine.” He paused to shake his head, correcting himself. “No, I was sure it could. It had the right stony soil, the right exposure, the right slope, not too big, perfect. I told your uncle-this was more than fifteen years ago-but he wasn’t interested, or he had no money left after repairing the roof; there was always something. In the end, I decided to take out the old vines and replant the land myself. Ludivine and me, we had a little money saved.” He looked at Max for a few moments in silence, his eyebrows raised, waiting for a reaction.

“I should think the old boy was delighted, wasn’t he?”

Roussel’s hands continued to strangle his cap. “Well, I never told him exactly what I’d done. He thought I had just used ordinary vine stock, but I wanted something better, something special. He had no idea I replanted with the best Cabernet Sauvignon and a little Merlot. Nobody did. These things are complicated in France. The regulations, the authorities from the agricultural ministry qui se melent a tout, who want you to declare every twig and fallen leaf.” He shrugged. “Impossible. It was easier to say nothing.”

Without warning, he got to his feet, picked up the syringe from the table, and walked over to the barrels. Max watched as he knocked out the bung from one of them, inserted the syringe, and drew off several inches of wine. Coming back to the table, he squeezed the bulb carefully and half-filled both glasses, holding one of them up to the light.

“Bon. Go ahead. Taste it. Remember that it’s still young.”

Max picked up the glass, conscious of Roussel’s intent stare and his own shortcomings as a wine connoisseur. But once the wine was in his mouth, sending powerful and delightful signals to his palate, even he could tell that it was a different drink altogether from ordinary Luberon wines. He wished he could remember some of Charlie’s ornate vocabulary, and was so impressed he forgot to spit.