Ellen Crosby - The Chardonnay Charade

After Mom’s death it was as if something came unmoored inside my sister or she lost any compass she’d once possessed, because she seemed dead set on taking the swiftest passage down the road to hell, without the good intentions. She had always possessed the stunning good looks and the waiflike fragility of a runway model and, as a little girl, her gossamer hair and angelic features had turned heads. Sometime during her short life, though, she’d managed to acquire the sulky, jaded apathy of an old soul who has seen it all before. It was that bored vulnerability that attracted her to the wrong people, and vice versa. The guys she dated ran the bad boy gamut from A to Z. They always had cars that were hot and fast—and that about summed up the boyfriends, too.

“You better be careful,” I said.

“Butt out of my business.”

The grooves of our arguments were so deeply etched over the years they had become ruts we could no longer climb out of, even if we wanted to. It would end as it always did, with her storming out of the room after we shouted at each other. If there was any way to reach her or change things, I no longer knew what it was.

“Look,” I said, more quietly, “I did the same thing when I was your age, so it’s not that. But I’m worried about you. Don’t get into binge drinking. That’s really bad news. Plus if you get caught trying to buy stuff—”

“I won’t get caught. Nobody else is underage. Abby’s twenty-one already, so it’s perfectly legal for her to buy booze.”

“Abby?”

“Lang.”

“You’re hanging around drinking with Senator Lang’s daughter?”

“Where’ve you been, Lucie? We’re in the same sorority. We live in the same house. Don’t you listen to anything I say?”

“I do. I just forgot.”

“I gotta go.” She dumped her coffee in the sink. “Abby’s coming for me.”

“Where are you going?”

“I don’t know. Brad and them are deciding.” She scooped up the pack of cigarettes and a book of matches. “We’ll figure it out.”

I watched her slide the matches inside the plastic wrapping. “Who’s ‘Brad and them’?”

She stood in front of me, her long tanned legs crossed over each other, arms folded, looking remote and unreachable as a stranger. “Abby’s boyfriend. And some friend of his.”

“Promise me you’ll watch it. Don’t get drunk again.”

“Lucie,” she said, “leave me alone. I know what I’m doing. I’ll see you sometime.”

“Are you coming home tonight?”

“I don’t know.” She fiddled with a strand of hair, twirling it around one finger. “I might sleep at Abby’s. I don’t like sleeping here ever since Georgia—” She didn’t finish the sentence.

“Whoever killed Georgia probably knew her, Mia,” I said. “There’s not some killer on the loose stalking women in their homes.”

“How can you be sure? How do you know it wasn’t, like, random or something?”

“The police don’t think it was. Look, call me and let me know what you’re doing later. Just so I know you’re all right.”

“Let’s just leave it that no news is good news, okay? I’ll call you if there’s a problem. Otherwise, you should figure that everything’s fine.”

She left the room and I sat down again at the pine table. At least this time we hadn’t ended the conversation shouting at each other, but everything was a long way from fine.

Siri Randstad phoned while I was fixing bacon and eggs. “Can I ask a favor, Lucie?”

“Anything.”

“I’m driving to Dulles this afternoon to pick up a friend of Ross’s who’s coming in for the…uh, for Georgia’s funeral. Could you come over and stay here while I’m at the airport?”

“Sure,” I said, surprised. “Are you worried about Ross being alone?”

“Good Lord! I don’t think he’s suicidal, if that’s what you mean. He’s just so bereft that I think it would be best if he had company.”

“I’ll come,” I said. “What time?”

“Mick’s plane gets in from Miami around four-thirty,” she said. “So I’ll probably leave here at three-thirty.”

“You’ll be stuck in rush-hour traffic on the way back. You won’t get to Middleburg until well past six. What if I pick up a few things and fix dinner for everyone?”

She sounded relieved. “That would be great. The past two nights we got Chinese takeout. I’m up to here with moo goo gai pan.”

“I’ll see you when you get back from the airport.”

Before I went to the grocery store, I stopped off at the winery to check in with Quinn. The design for the compound, which was based around an ivy-covered villa, had come from a sketch my mother had done. She’d hired an architect who added the semi-underground barrel room, connecting the two buildings by a horseshoe-shaped courtyard with a porticoed loggia and graceful arched stone entrance. A large tasting room and our offices were located in the villa; we made and stored wine in the barrel room. The place still looked much as it had when my mother was alive, except the trees and bushes she’d planted twenty years ago were now fully mature and the ivy that branched gracefully over the windows was full and thick. I parked my car in the gravel parking lot alongside Quinn’s El Camino.

Even after all these years, I still sensed my mother’s spirit every time I opened the front door to the villa. Across the room, late afternoon sunshine streamed in through four large sets of French doors that opened onto a cantilevered deck and a view of braided hills covered in vines. The sunlight made gold stripes on the tile floor and picked out some of the colored stones in the grapevine mosaic on the front of the bar so they glowed like jewels. Someone had left a pretty bouquet of red roses on the carved oak table we used for wine tastings. Sera, no doubt. She must have cut the flowers from her garden to keep them from freezing.

Quinn and I had our offices off a small wine library that adjoined the tasting room. The wrought-iron door that led to the library had been one of my mother’s treasured finds from an architectural salvage shop. The library itself had evolved from our previous winemaker’s interest in Virginia’s four-hundred-year effort to develop a wine industry, dating from the Jamestown settlement. At first Jacques left the books he’d read scattered throughout the villa so visitors could read or borrow them. But when the piles grew too high, my practical mother had bookshelves built in the alcove, adding two leather barrel chairs and a reading lamp on an old wine cask.

Beyond the library, a short photo-lined corridor led to the offices and a back door to a small kitchenette. I walked by the vineyard’s lone award—the Governor’s Cup, won twelve years ago by my mother and Jacques. If Quinn and I agreed on anything, it was our determination that one day this wall would be covered from floor to ceiling with awards.

I found him bouncing a tennis ball off a wall in his office.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “Besides making scuff marks on that wall.” When it had been Jacques’s office, the room had looked like a small museum. Now it reminded me of a locker room.

“I’m not making scuff marks. I’m thinking.”

“About what?”

“The Chardonnay. It’s driving me nuts. I’m going back to the lab to do some more blending. Want to come?”

“ More blending? There won’t be anything left to bottle if you keep experimenting. I thought we agreed on that sample last week.”

He made a face. “Nah. Too fruity. I’ve got some new ideas.”

Last year at harvest we put some of our Chardonnay into oak barrels and left the rest in stainless-steel tanks. Barrel-fermented wine gains an added complexity from the taste of the oak—like adding spice to a sauce—though too much oak will overwhelm, or even dominate, the flavor. On the other hand, wine fermented in refrigerated steel tanks tastes fruitier and brighter. What he was trying to do now was figure out the ratio of oak and steel that would produce a wine we both liked. From this point on—now that the fermentation process had ended—everything we did was about taste and aroma. And the only way to get the perfect blend that suited us was to experiment, tasting the results.