pale walls of flawless, satiny birchwood, and abstract copper sculptures. The slick, faux-marble tasting counter was thirty feet long, and behind it was a softly backlit, twelve-level wine rack that ran its full length. There were eight or ten small, round tables, and every one of them had people sitting at it, sipping wine and wearing astute, judicious wine-evaluation faces.
“Wow, it’s beautiful,” Julie had breathed. “And obviously, it’s doing very well.”
There was no arguing with that, but Gideon hadn’t been happy with it all the same. “I suppose so, but it doesn’t feel . . . I don’t know,
“Feels real to me.”
“You know what I mean,” he’d grumbled. “It’s too smooth, too
“Well, where else would you be?” She’d waved a hand at the counter, the bottles, the people drinking.
“Frankly, it feels more like I’m in some yuppie bar in Rome. On the Via del Corso, maybe.”
Julie laughed. “And where would you prefer to be, in some dank, dark cellar? Maybe somewhere that looks like a setting for ‘The Cask of Amontillado’?”
Gideon had thought about that for a moment. “Well . . . yeah,” he’d said.
• • •
JULIE decided to go to their apartment and put her feet up for a while, but Gideon was still in the mood for wandering. He went down a set of stone steps to the barrel room, off-limits to the public except on organized tours, which were given only a peek at it from one end. He was hopeful that Franco wouldn’t have worked his heavy-handed, modish wizardry there, and he was right. The barrel room—the old crypt—was beautiful; just as it had been in Pietro’s day. Running the full length of the church above, well over a hundred feet, it was stone-walled, windowless, and dimly lit by dangling, unshaded bulbs. Four long rows of oak barrels ran almost from one end of the room to the other, the barrels set on their sides on adze-cut wooden trestles. The place looked the way an ancient wine cellar should: dank, spooky, moldy, and cobwebby. And it smelled terrific, a wine-lover’s idea of paradise. It had been one of Pietro’s favorite places in the villa, Gideon remembered, and at the far end a beat- up, wine-stained table and a few rickety chairs in the corner had served as a sort of family tasting room, where father and sons would meet to sample and judge the progress of their products.
To his surprise, it was in use. When he heard the drone of echoing voices coming from that direction, he looked down the corridor between the two right-hand rows of barrels, and there were Nico and Franco and some others he couldn’t make out, gathered at the old table. On the table he could see several open bottles of wine. Franco, facing in his direction, spotted him right away.
“Well, well, can that be the famous Skeleton Detective himself?” he called in English, peering down the long aisle, one hand across his forehead as if to shield his eyes from the near nonexistent light. “Come join us.” He used the hand to wave Gideon over. “We are in grave need of an educated palate and an unbiased mind, but we’ll settle for you instead.”
Franco Cubbiddu could sometimes demonstrate a dry wit, but he didn’t do “jocular” very well and was wise enough not to try it too often. A year older than Luca, he had an obvious familial resemblance to his earthy, outgoing younger brother, but he was an attenuated Luca, long and thin, with sharper features—his nose, his eyebrows, his mouth were all straight lines—and an air altogether more arid and contained. Still, as Gideon approached, Franco tried a smile—his smiles were painful to watch, seeming to overstretch dry lips that weren’t meant for the job. Then an easy wave, indicating the one empty chair. That single, magisterial gesture made it crystal clear that he was the man in charge now that Pietro was gone. This, of course, had been expected by everyone who knew them. In the Barbagia, primogeniture ruled, and in his heart of hearts, Pietro had never stopped being a Barbagian. Of course he would leave the winery in Franco’s charge (unless he’d decided to sell it, of course, which he hadn’t lived to do).
In the two remaining chairs were Luca, Nico, and a large, portly man in his late fifties with a self-satisfied, jowly face and a natural “don’t-you-try-to-pull-anything-with-me” expression on it. This was Severo Quadrelli, not a Cubbiddu relative in the technical sense of the term, but one of the family in every other. It took him a moment to place Gideon, but when he did, he nodded soberly at him without getting up. In his tightly knotted dark tie, his three-piece suit of herringbone tweed (much too heavy for a Tuscan September, Gideon would have thought), and his thumbs hooked in the armholes of his waistcoat, he looked more like an actor playing a successful lawyer—a 1930s lawyer—than a real one. His hair, elegantly graying at the temples, was neatly parted an inch to the left of the center line. And he was the first man Gideon had met in decades who wore a vest-pocket watch on a chain. A pair of pince-nez on a string would have provided the perfect finish to the image, but maybe it was too outre, even for Quadrelli. Instead, he’d opted for the nearest thing in eyewear: a pair of round spectacles with steel rims that were so thin they were almost invisible.
He’d been Pietro’s oldest friend, an upcoming young Florentine attorney when they’d met a quarter of a century ago. At that time, being fresh off the ferry from Sardinia, Pietro was trying to buy the decrepit old convent/winery that was to become Villa Antica. Quadrelli had been representing the absentee owner, a signor Cocozza, but he’d been an honest broker. When the scurrilous Cocozza tried to put over a fast one on the trusting greenhorn (Pietro, accustomed to handshakes, not contracts, had no lawyer of his own), Quadrelli had refused to go along. That had gotten him fired, and in righteous indignation he’d switched sides to energetically represent Pietro’s interests with no more than a promise of payment sometime in the future.
The promise had been fulfilled within two years. They’d become fast friends, and Severo had come to serve as Pietro’s trusted counselor, formal and informal, not only in legal matters, but in all things mainland-Italian. In time Villa Antica had prospered to the extent that Severo had given up his position with a Florence firm and taken a generous yearly retainer to concentrate solely on the winery and the Cubbiddu family as their attorney and financial manager. Julie and Gideon had met him on their visit of the previous year. At that time he had just been coaxed by Pietro into finally moving into one of the guest apartments in the villa’s residential wing, living among the Cubbiddus and taking his meals with them. One of the family, indeed.
“Ah, Linda, she tell me you come,” he said in his mellow, authoritative bass. “Is good to see you again. Welcome, welcome here.”
Interestingly, while it was Severo who had reputedly convinced Pietro that fluency in English was a must for the sons, he himself, a cosmopolitan and well-educated man, sounded like a fresh-off-the-boat Italian in an old vaudeville skit.
Not for the first time, Gideon wondered if his own Italian might not be quite as smooth as he imagined.
“Thank you, signor Quadrelli,” he answered. “It’s good to be here, and I’m glad to see you again.” He spoke in English. To a self-regarding and somewhat pompous man like Severo, doing otherwise would have been perceived as a slur on his linguistic abilities.
There was a bit of friendly chatting, and then Franco, showing himself to be a busy man with many responsibilities, rapped on the table to bring them back to business. On the table were two partially emptied bottles of red wine and one full one, uncorked, along with a dishwasher rack half full of stemmed, ballooned wineglasses, a pile of cloth napkins, a pitcher of water, a basket of broken-up bread sticks, and a metal bowl with a little spat-out wine in the bottom. Eight used wineglasses stood in a clump a little away from the other things.
Franco now spoke in Italian. “
As Nico poured portions into each glass, Luca caught his arm to get a look at the label. “The 2010 Sangiovese grosso? What are we tasting this one for?”
Nico answered. “I’m off to the Wine Retailers Expo in Basel in a few days, and I need to know what to tell them about it. Will we be releasing it this year or not? Should I bring a couple of cases with me, or shouldn’t I?”
“I can give you the answer right now,” Luca responded. “No. It’ll need another year at least. The tannin will still be too high. It’ll be rough.”
“You’re wrong, Luca,” Franco said. “I tasted it myself this morning. In my opinion it’s ready.”
Luca raised an eyebrow. “So what are you asking us for?”
“Because I am sincerely interested in your opinions.”
“Fine, I just gave it. Not ready.”
“I suggest you taste it first, Luca. You’re forgetting something. This was the first of our wines to undergo maceration and extraction by means of the new rotary fermenter.”
