Ellen Crosby: The Bordeaux Betrayal

“If I was, I’d just lie there and think about how much it hurts. Anyway, I’m too restless, especially since we still have to bring in the Cab. Did you do the field tests yet?”

“I’m about to. Want to come along?”

“Sure.”

The only grapes left to harvest this year were Cabernet Sauvignon, the most celebrated red wine grape in the world. The best-known and most sought-after Cabs come from Bordeaux, a place God created on His best day, granting it a perfect climate, sun-drenched days, and the kind of rocky soil vines thrive on.

Unlike the French, Americans name wines by grape varietal rather than region, but a French Bordeaux, an American Cabernet Sauvignon, and what the English call “claret” are all the same wine. Most of these are blends of more than one grape—usually Merlot or Cabernet Franc, though sometimes a little Petit Verdot or Malbec is added as well. The trick, for a winemaker, is figuring out how much of which grape to add to get the perfect wine—though by law, the “other” grapes can’t be more than 25 percent of the blend, or it can’t be labeled Cabernet Sauvignon.

Quinn was a born fiddler and I knew he was already pondering our blend even though we hadn’t yet picked the grapes. We’d brought the Merlot in a few weeks ago, putting most of it in barrels, but keeping what we planned to blend with the Cab in stainless-steel tanks.

“Let’s buy some PV this year,” Quinn had said at the time. “A few tons. It’ll give the wine a nice garnet color.”

“We’re not buying someone else’s Petit Verdot. I don’t want a different terroir in our wine. You know we always use only our own grapes,” I’d said.

Terroir was the indefinable “X” factor in a wine—literally it meant “the taste of the land” and made each wine distinctive from the next. Changing the soil or the region meant changing the wine. Last spring we planted fifteen acres of new varietals, including a few acres of Petit Verdot—but it would be three years before we got a harvest from those grapes.

“Stop being such a purist,” he’d said. “I’m talking about five percent. It’ll make all the difference in the wine, but it will still be our terroir. You know I’m right. You’re just digging in your heels because that’s how your mother did it.”

It still hurt that he’d once called my plan to run the vineyard as my mother had done “professional suicide.” I was proud of what she and Jacques had accomplished—with little help from Leland—to build our reputation. Giving Quinn carte blanche to do as he liked meant he’d change everything—use shortcuts and take advantage of the tricks he could play with modern technology.

“The wines she and Jacques made were some of our best vintages,” I’d said, angry that he’d invoked my mother to make his point. “It’s thanks to them we’ve got such a good reputation today.”

“ Were some of the best vintages,” he’d said. “We’ll do better.”

I gave in, but I was adamant the grapes had to come from Virginia. I knew a few vineyards that bought grapes from California and, as a result, had to call their wine “American wine.” We made Virginia wine—I wasn’t ever giving ground on that.

“I’ve got the refractometer. If you get everything else, I’ll bring the Gator around to the crush pad,” he said to me now. “Pick you up in five.”

He pulled up in the Gator, an all-terrain vehicle that looked like a cross between a golf cart and a tractor, and I climbed into the passenger seat. The breeze felt like a warm caress against my sore body, the sky was a limitless blue, and the sunshine sharp and clear. In the distance the soft-shouldered Blue Ridge Mountains seemed to have fused with the sky so it was hard to tell where one stopped and the other began.

Quinn turned down the south service road. “Bonita called while you were out,” he said. “From Mexico.”

He’d been living with Hector’s daughter for the past few months until her father died. Hector and his wife Sera liked Quinn well enough, but they were traditional parents who didn’t approve of their twenty-one-year-old daughter living with a man nearly two decades older than she was. Especially one who didn’t plan to make an honest woman of her.

“Did they finally have Hector’s funeral?” I asked.

Though I’d offered Sera a plot in my family’s private cemetery with its view of the mountains he loved so much, she wanted to take him home to Mexico. Bonita made all the arrangements. They left two weeks ago.

I drove them to the airport and watched Sera, frail as a bird, strong-willed as a bull, and Bonita, all girly sensuousness and seduction, pass through the security checkpoint at Dulles Airport. When Bonita’s eyes met mine just before they disappeared into the passengers-only labyrinth, I knew I’d probably just said good-bye to both of them for good. I’d never told Quinn.

“Yeah, they had some big Catholic shindig with all the family.” He took a corner too sharply and I grabbed the edge of my seat. “I don’t think they’re coming back.”

We had reached the large apple orchard. The trees were full and heavy and the Virginia creeper, which twined around the split-rail fence, had already turned ruby-colored.

He could have been talking about the weather or he could have been talking about someone who just broke his heart. With Quinn it was hard to tell.

“Did she say they weren’t?” I asked.

“Nope. Didn’t say much of anything.”

“I don’t think they’re coming back, either,” I said. “You okay with that?”

“You mean, because of Bonita?”

“I don’t mean because of Sera. She was ready to skin you, boil you, and hang you out on the fence for the coyotes to dine on.”

“She was, wasn’t she?” He grinned. “I dunno. First Angie moves out on me, now Bonita. It wasn’t really working. You were right about it not being a good idea to get involved with someone you work with.”

I’d nearly forgotten about Angie, a former high school classmate of mine who worked as an exotic dancer at a local club. That relationship hadn’t lasted long, either.

He pulled up at the first marker for the Cabernet block and cut the ignition.

“Was I?”

Though the sunlight was behind him, he squinted at me like he was having a hard time focusing. But his eyes lingered on mine and I saw in them—as I know he saw in mine—the unspoken acknowledgment about the occasionally precarious state of our own relationship.

“Yes,” he said. “You were.” He climbed out of the Gator and said, “Let’s do this.”

He took the refractometer, the telescopelike instrument we used to measure Brix, out of his shirt pocket. I got the other things we needed—resealable plastic bag, small bucket, graduated cylinder. As we walked down the row of vines, he pulled out a switchblade and cut random grapes from clusters and dropped them in the bag I held open.

“Dammit.” He knelt by the bottom trellis wire. “The groundhogs are eating the lower clusters. I thought the guys knew they were supposed to cut them off.”

“Talk to Manolo,” I said. “Get him to remind the crew. They forget.”

He brushed away a soporific yellow jacket already drunk on fermenting juice.

“We’ve got enough for a sample,” he said, taking the bag and mashing the grapes. When it was full of juice, he emptied it into the cylinder. “Manolo’s head isn’t in his job the way it used to be.”

“He’s worked for us since he was a kid. Started practically the day he arrived here from Mexico. I’ll talk to him.” I poured a few drops of juice onto the measuring prism of the refractometer.

Quinn held the eyepiece up to the sunlight. “Twenty-one point two. It should be twenty-two by Monday since this Indian summer weather is supposed to hold. Here, see what you get.”