Dying on the Vine

“It what?”

Franco pursed his lips. Clearly, he knew he was being had, but he also knew that Pietro would trust his judgment in the end, as he always did when it came to things that didn’t engage his father’s interest—such as modern production methods and sophisticated equipment. “A rotary fermenter,” he said through only slightly clenched teeth, “will assure consistent contact between the must-cap and the juice, not only shortening the total fermentation time, but eliminating the labor-intensive—”

He was interrupted by Luca, the middle son. “Rotary fermenters,” he said disgustedly, “those cement-mixers you love so much—damn it, Franco, can’t you see they rob the grapes of their individual character, of everything that separates the soil of our vineyards from every other vineyard in the Val d’Arno? No, better to take a little longer and let the wine macerate naturally into what it was meant to be, not something some machine made it into.”

Pietro unconsciously nodded his head in agreement. When it came to wine—when it came to just about everything—the old ways were best. If they weren’t, would they still be around after all these centuries?

But Franco shook his head sadly. “Ah, Luca, you’re living in the past. Today, the manufacture of wine—”

“Manufacture of wine?” Luca’s eyebrows jumped up. “Did I hear that right? Since when do we manufacture wine? Are we the Villa Antica wine factory now? Do we produce our wines on an assembly line, producing a thousand bottles a day of perfectly uniform, identical wine . . .”

It was an old, ongoing argument between the two, and Pietro’s mind drifted. How different they were from each other, these sons of his. It wasn’t that Franco was without merit. He was smart, he was a hard worker, and he was single-mindedly dedicated to Villa Antica. Much of the winery’s growth had been due to his ingenuity and foresight. He knew everything there was to know—far more than Pietro did—about the science of winemaking.

But, and it was a big but . . . for Franco it was all science—all polymerization, micro-oxygenization, anthocyanin extraction. In evaluating a wine, Franco would trust his Brix hydrometers and his protein precipitation meters before he’d trust his own palate. He had the head of a winemaker, yes, but not the heart; there was no feeling in him for wine, no passion. For Pietro, wine was a wonderful gift from God, and to be privileged to devote one’s life to making it, nurturing it from vine to bottle, was an even greater gift.

Uncork a fine bottle of wine—a 2003 Villa Antica Sangiovese Riserva, for example—on a gray winter’s night with snow swirling outside, and your nose was immediately filled with the aromas of the rich loam from which the grapes had sprung and with the warm, dry air of early autumn. You could practically feel the sun on the back of your neck. And then the first taste, taken with the eyes closed . . .

But Franco? Did he even like wine? Once when they were tasting to decide if a bottling was ready for release, Franco was going on and on about acetate esters and phenols. Pietro, finally losing patience, had asked him whether he liked it or not.

Franco had looked at him with honest incomprehension. “What’s liking got to do with it?”

Pietro had just shaken his head and mouthed a silent mamma mia.

Luca was as different as different could be. Luca had for wine the same deep affection that Pietro did. More important, like Pietro he respected it for what is was. He understood the soil and the seasons and the life cycle of the grape itself. But, somewhere along the way, he had lost interest. Possibly, this was a result of frustration. Luca being the middle son, he’d had to take a back seat to Franco in winery matters. In Villa Antica’s unofficial hierarchy, Franco was the chief operating officer, Luca the head winemaker. (As for an “official hierarchy,” Pietro was the boss; that was about as official as it got.) It would have been better had Luca’s and Franco’s positions been reversed, Pietro knew, but what was a father to do, ignore the rightful claims to primacy of the first-born son? Not likely for most fathers, highly unlikely for Italian fathers, impossible for a Sardinian father. As a result, although he trusted Luca’s opinions more, he deferred to Franco’s whenever it was feasible.

Surely, that must have soured Luca’s attitude toward the winery, and the knowledge that it would be Franco, the eldest, who would eventually inherit it could not have helped either—but whatever the cause, Luca’s enthusiasms had swung away from wine and toward food. Already he and his unconventional, unpredictable American wife were talking about the restaurant in Arezzo that they would one day own.

Well, that was all right too, Pietro supposed. A chef, a real chef, was nothing to sneer at. A man could be proud of having a great chef for a son, especially a chef who truly knew something about wine. And he had no doubt that Luca would make a fine chef. Still, it wasn’t what he’d hoped for.

And Nico? Nico liked wine, all right—a little too much, in fact—but he had never been serious enough to learn and retain something about it. Nico had never been serious enough about anything. Even now, he took no interest in the argument between his brothers, but only sat there drumming his fingers and staring smilingly into his own thoughts. Of the three, only Nico’s role in the winery had nothing to do with the production of it. Nico was their connection to the industry and to the dealers. He spent half his time on the road, like a traveling salesman. And he was extremely good at it. This very afternoon he was off to a winemakers’ conference in Hong Kong. Whoever heard of a winemakers’ conference in Hong Kong? And yet, there was no doubt in Pietro’s mind that he would come back with a suitcase full of orders. A good kid: smart, handsome as a movie star, fast with the ladies, quick with words, a born salesman. But a businessman? No.

All these considerations had played into his decision to accept the offer from Humboldt-Schlager. He was left, as he saw it, with little choice. Tradition, of course, required that in his will, he leave the winery to Franco. But Franco was no different than anybody else; he would never change. (Chi nasce tondo non muore quadro. He who is born round does not die square.) With Franco at the helm, the Villa Antica that Pietro had poured so much of himself into would die with him. Once Pietro himself was gone, and without Luca’s tempering influence, Franco would turn it into something cold and passionless: a scientific laboratory, its wines perfectly uniform from bottle to bottle, made—“manufactured”—by the cold dictates of chemists and food scientists.

And so Pietro had concluded that if his own tradition of winemaking wasn’t going to survive him anyway, what was wrong with hurrying its demise along a little—and pocketing €5.5 million from it? About his sons he felt little guilt. Franco, Luca, and even Nico were grown men now, and it was time—past time—for them to strike out on their own. They were all mature, capable men now. Hadn’t he provided them with fine educations and years of highly marketable experience? Besides, as he’d told them, with the money from the beer maker he planned on giving each of them a generous stipend of €5,000 a month for the next five years, a total of €300,000 apiece. Yes, they would find it a shock when they learned that they would be out of jobs and their home, but if €300,000 wasn’t enough to make a place for themselves in the world, what was? He had started Villa Antica with less than a hundredth of that. With the advantages they had, the advantages he’d given them . . .

When he surfaced again, Luca and Franco were still going on about rotary fermenters. Nico had stopped drumming his fingers long enough to pour himself another glass of wine.

Pietro silenced the two older brothers with a weary wave. “Enough. Don’t order the damn thing; let it wait. It’s not the last whatever-you-call-it in the world.” Let Luca win one for a change. What difference did it make now? “Okay, I got to get going. Any minute, Nola, she gonna be here to drive me. So, if nobody got anything else—”

The mere mention of Nola, Pietro’s second wife, was enough to cause a stiffening around the table. The prickly, uncomfortable relations between stepmother and stepsons were, if anything, worse than they’d been twenty-five years earlier when she’d made her first appearance in their lives. For a while Pietro had tried to smooth things between them, but patience was not his strong suit, and eventually he’d given up. And the truth was that by now he had plenty of smoldering grievances of his own against her. Grievances, doubts, suspicions . . . he hardly knew what she was thinking anymore. He hardly knew her.

The shy, plump, young widow he had married back in Sardinia had been full of gratitude to him. She’d been a simple, dutiful wife, and for the first five hard years in Tuscany she had worked shoulder to shoulder with him, planting vines, building trellises, culling and harvesting grapes until their fingers bled. But things changed when a noted wine critic more or less accidentally visited Villa Antica in 2009 and tasted the 2001 Pio Pico, then raved about it in his blog: “elegant yet rustic, assertive yet balanced, subtle yet bold, this big-hearted wine . . .”

What made it truly astounding was that what the famous critic was blathering about wasn’t one of Franco’s fancy, meticulously engineered varietals, but the simple, down-to-earth wine Pietro made primarily for their own everyday drinking, the same blend of Carignane and Nebbiolo that his father and grandfather had made back on the