Dying on the Vine

Gideon was pleased to see he could follow the conversation with ease. As he’d learned, technical terms were often practically interchangeable (macerazione, estrazione, rotofermenter).

Luca shook his head. “Rotary fermenter. God.”

Except for a downturn of his mouth, Franco ignored the comment. “To begin, perhaps we should all have a little bread to clear our palates.” It was hard for Gideon to tell whether it was a suggestion or an order, but they all followed it, including him. He plucked a breadstick from the basket, chewed away, and swallowed. They looked to Franco for further commands. Franco obliged.

“Nico, you begin. And if you’re not going to be serious, then just stay out of it.”

“Franco, there’s no need to offend me. All right, let’s see what we have here.” He lifted his glass and went through as thorough a tasting routine as Gideon had ever seen. The glass was slowly rotated a couple of feet in front of his eyes, and then raised higher to study the wine’s clarity and color against an overhead bulb. “Ah.” He lowered the glass, swirled the wine, and stuck his nose as far into the glass as it would go. This was followed by an appreciative nod: so far, so good. At last, his lips were parted to admit half an ounce or so of the Sangiovese. The wine was held in his mouth while air was noisily and wetly slurped through it, then rolled around, from cheek to cheek, Finally, the metal bowl was lifted to his mouth and the wine spat into it. He gazed into the middle distance, down the long racks of barrels, sucking in his cheeks, then expanding them, then sucking them in again.

“This wine,” he began, “it’s—”

“Serious,” Franco warned again, but Gideon could tell that Nico had a performance in mind, probably for his, Gideon’s, benefit.

“. . . it’s elegant and yet . . . rustic . . . subtle yet . . . assertive . . .”

Franco sighed. “I should have known better,” he mumbled to the walls.

“. . . a big-hearted wine with overtones of leather and tobacco . . .” He was barreling along now, waving the glass around as he spoke. “. . . on a matrix of mushroom and meat—no, eggplant. But eggplant layered with—yes, cinnamon!”

They had all surely heard this kind of tomfoolery from him before, but their responses were very different. Severo sighed and looked the other way, but Luca was practically doubled over with laughter. Like old Pietro, he was easily amused, and when he was, he responded with gusto.

Not Franco. “I said that’s enough,” he said with more force. And to Gideon, with a stiff smile: “Why do I never learn?” Then he turned to Luca. “Luca?”

“No, seriously,” Nico said, laughing, “it’s all right, Franco, it’s fine. I think I should take some with me. In fact, I would say that its eloquence is matched only by the subtlety of its—”

Franco waved him down with a disgusted gesture. “Just shut up, Nico.”

Nico shrugged and poured himself a little more. “It’s really hard not being appreciated.”

“Luca?” Franco said again.

Like the others, Luca had already tried the wine, but now he poured a little more, took a piece of bread, dipped it into the glass, tossed the saturated chunk into his mouth, and slowly—very slowly—masticated.

Franco shook his long, bony head. “How you can tell what the wine tastes like with your mouth full of food . . .”

“I can do it because I’m not that interested in what it tastes like without food, Franco. For me—”

“Yes, Luca, yes, Luca,” Franco said, making it clear that he’d heard from Luca on this subject more times than he cared to. “Can we just have your opinion on the wine, please.”

Luca shrugged. “Not as bad as I expected.”

“Would you mind trying to restrain your enthusiasm?” Franco said dryly.

“No, I mean just what I said. It’s not a bad wine. You’re right, it’s not as tannic as I expected. It’s even, in its way, a fairly good wine. But I’ll be sorry to see it come out under our label, this year or any other year.”

“I don’t agree,” said Severo. “What’s wrong with it? I thought it was fine.”

“Fine? Maybe, but also impossible to tell from a hundred other Sangioveses. If I put two glasses in front of you, could you tell the difference between this and a reserve from Carrucci? Or Castello Rugate?”

“Hmm,” rumbled Quadrelli. “Well, now, I’d have to—”

“It’s those damned cement mixers. They—”

Franco’s eyes rolled ceilingward. “Not the cement-mixer speech again. We’re in the twenty-first century now, Luca, and we’re not running a little neighborhood family cantina. I have to worry about things you never have to think about: profits and losses and expenses. Efficiency. Effectiveness. Like it or not, those ‘cement mixers’ make it possible to produce our wines on a predictable, consistent schedule instead of waiting around twiddling our thumbs while nature takes its course—slow this year, quick next year. Those devices you hate so much have allowed us to speed up our production by thirty percent, do you realize that? Thirty percent! I wonder if you really understand—”

Luca put his glass on he table and made a grumpy display of shoving it as far away from him as it could go. “Fine, fine, you do what you want, signor padrone, you’re the boss, only . . . ah, Franco, I would have thought if there was one thing babbo taught us, it was to trust nature to take its course, to help the fruit become what’s in its essential character to be, not to hurry into a false maturity before its time.”

“You’re scaring me, Luca,” Nico said. “You’re really starting to sound like babbo. Are you channeling him or something?”

“And for his time, babbo was right,” Franco said, “but he was from another century—the nineteenth, really, even more than the twentieth. I would think you’d understand that, Luca. With the proper application of modern scientific principles, we can force the grapes to—”

That brought an incredulous laugh from Luca. “Force the grape! How do we force the grape to do what it doesn’t want to do?”

“We could always try using techniques of enhanced interrogation,” Nico said, pouring himself a little more of the wine.

“Now, Luca,” Severo put in, sounding like a chuckly, wise old owl of an uncle. “When Franco says ‘force,’ he doesn’t mean literally—”

“I don’t need you to interpret what I mean, signor lawyer,” Franco snapped, upon which Severo’s jaws clamped shut so hard that his teeth clacked and his jowls jiggled. His neck shrank into his shoulders (very owl-like, but no longer very avuncular) and he stared fixedly at the table, his ears slowly reddening. Apparently, thought Gideon, he wasn’t quite so much one of the family after all, not quite so much the trusted and respected consigliere he’d been under Pietro’s rule. And he still hadn’t gotten used to the new state of affairs.

“I most certainly do mean ‘force’ in its literal sense,” Franco went on. “With today’s methods we can get more from the grape than it started with. Cross-flow filtraters, rotary—”

Luca made a disgusted motion. “Look, Franco, why are we wasting our time with this anyway? You know we’re going to release it—you already said you liked it—so what are we even discussing it for? Just go ahead. It’s your show now, isn’t it?”

Gideon was getting uncomfortable. The atmosphere in the Cubbiddu household was another thing that wasn’t quite the same as it had been in Pietro’s day either. Oh, he’d seen a couple of wine and winemaking arguments among the family that were louder and livelier than this one, but the chill in the air, the edginess—that was something new.

“I’ll let that pass, Luca,” Franco said in his flattest monotone. “And now I’d be interested in hearing from our American colleague. Gideon, what do you think of the wine?”

“Ah. Well—”

He was saved by Luca, who exploded out of his chair and into English. “Jesus Christ, it’s after seven! The reception! They’re waiting for us out on the terrace! Franco, let’s go!

“Hey, don’t worry about it,” Nico said. “Linda and Maria have everything in hand, and the caterers have already set everything up. Your people are very happy, believe me. They’ve got good wine, they’ve got good food, life is good. I don’t think they’re feeling too neglected.”

But Luca and Franco were already halfway to the staircase, and Quadrelli got up too, more slowly. “I believe I’ll drop in on that myself.”