Aaron Elkins - Dying on the Vine

But the greater part of the winery’s property extended well beyond this enclave, on the other side of the wall. Go through a truck-sized passage that had been cut through the wall’s five-foot-thick, buttressed base, and you were at the foot of row upon row of trellised vineyards that marched in gracefully arching ranks up and over and around the nearby low hills. If he remembered correctly, there were something like four hundred acres of them: mostly Sangiovese, merlot, and cabernet, but a couple of smaller areas of whites as well.

The villa building itself consisted of a large central section and two attached smaller wings that enclosed the two sides of the garden. The three wings were connected by a long, porticoed terrace that ran along the back of the central building and constituted the garden’s front border. The central building now held the winery. The north wing contained the kitchen, the laundry, and the onetime refectory, which was essentially unchanged and still used for formal tastings and occasional dinners, mostly for members of the wine club that Linda had started. The larger south wing, once the sisters’ living quarters, was now the Cubbiddus’ residence. What had originally been thirty-five airless and austere cubicles were now five spacious, splendid apartments for the family and two smaller but almost equally handsome guest suites, all with canopied platform beds; twelve-foot ceilings; eighteenth-century furniture; nameless, noseless Roman busts on marble pedestals; and age-darkened old oil paintings. The Laus were being put up in one of the guest suites, the Olivers in Cesare’s old apartment, as before.

Gideon and Julie had arrived a little after five, two hours before the reception, and with John having not yet shown up, they were on their own, and they spent the time wandering over the property on both sides of the city wall. Linda had said that nothing had changed, but something had, and in their opinion, Villa Antica was the poorer for it.

Despite Pietro’s two decades on the mainland, the old patriarch had never felt himself to be in anything but an alien culture. To ease his longing for home, he’d created a little piece of rural Barbagia right there in the heart of worldly, trendy Tuscany. The last time they’d been here, there had been a fire pit and a kiln-shaped clay oven wedged into the niche created where a buttress jutted out from the wall. The goat or lamb or hare that had been served every day at lunch had spent the preceding morning roasting there. And just outside the wall through a second passageway, this one human-size, had been a muddy, wire-fence enclosure that held six or seven primitive wooden pens. In them had been the living lambs and goats, along with chickens, rabbits, pigs, and even a couple of full-grown, small dairy cattle.

It was Pietro Cubbiddu’s homesick approximation of the Sardinian fattoria in which he’d grown up; a primitive family homestead, basic but self-sustaining. But Franco was neither a sentimentalist nor a lover of old Sardinia. The pens, like the oven, were no longer to be seen. In their place were a couple of hundred square yards of asphalt that served as a private parking area for the family and an overflow lot to use when the one in front of the villa was filled by wine-tasting visitors.

To Gideon the animals, the primitive oven, the rich farmyard stink, had all been wonderful; hands-on connections to a past not very long gone but never to return, at least not to Tuscany, and he missed finding them there. A year ago, Villa Antica had been a one of a kind, like no other winery they’d ever seen. Now there were probably ten others right there in the valley that might easily be confused with it. Gideon wondered if the same was true of its wines.

They’d walked back to the winery wing of the villa to look around there as well. The old tasting room had changed quite a bit too. For one thing, it wasn’t there any more. In Pietro’s day, it had been in one of the old chapels, a cramped little windowless place that had a claptrap trestle table as its counter—a slab of old plywood nailed to some sawhorses—with a few bottles set out for that day’s tasting. Five or six stools. No room for tables. If there were any decorative touches, Gideon couldn’t remember what they might have been. But whatever else it was, the place hadn’t been bogus funky, it was genuinely funky, a very different thing. Sans pretensions , as the French would say; nothing if not nondescript.

Under Franco, however, the chapel had been converted to a storeroom for equipment replacement parts. The new tasting room, sunlit and spacious, was housed where the old choir had been. A couple of the old stained-glass windows were still in place, but otherwise it had been completely—and expensively—redone. It was all clean lines, 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, real .”

“Feels real to me.”

“You know what I mean,” he’d grumbled. “It’s too smooth, too gleaming. I don’t feel as if I’m in a winery.”

“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.

• • •

JULIEdecided 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.”