Aaron Elkins - Dying on the Vine

Franco Cubbiddu could sometimes demonstrate a dry wit, but he didn’t do “jocular” very well and was wise enough not to try it too often. A year older than Luca, he had an obvious familial resemblance to his earthy, outgoing younger brother, but he was an attenuated Luca, long and thin, with sharper features—his nose, his eyebrows, his mouth were all straight lines—and an air altogether more arid and contained. Still, as Gideon approached, Franco tried a smile—his smiles were painful to watch, seeming to overstretch dry lips that weren’t meant for the job. Then an easy wave, indicating the one empty chair. That single, magisterial gesture made it crystal clear that he was the man in charge now that Pietro was gone. This, of course, had been expected by everyone who knew them. In the Barbagia, primogeniture ruled, and in his heart of hearts, Pietro had never stopped being a Barbagian. Of course he would leave the winery in Franco’s charge (unless he’d decided to sell it, of course, which he hadn’t lived to do).

In the two remaining chairs were Luca, Nico, and a large, portly man in his late fifties with a self-satisfied, jowly face and a natural “don’t-you-try-to-pull-anything-with-me” expression on it. This was Severo Quadrelli, not a Cubbiddu relative in the technical sense of the term, but one of the family in every other. It took him a moment to place Gideon, but when he did, he nodded soberly at him without getting up. In his tightly knotted dark tie, his three-piece suit of herringbone tweed (much too heavy for a Tuscan September, Gideon would have thought), and his thumbs hooked in the armholes of his waistcoat, he looked more like an actor playing a successful lawyer—a 1930s lawyer—than a real one. His hair, elegantly graying at the temples, was neatly parted an inch to the left of the center line. And he was the first man Gideon had met in decades who wore a vest-pocket watch on a chain. A pair of pince-nez on a string would have provided the perfect finish to the image, but maybe it was too outré, even for Quadrelli. Instead, he’d opted for the nearest thing in eyewear: a pair of round spectacles with steel rims that were so thin they were almost invisible.

He’d been Pietro’s oldest friend, an upcoming young Florentine attorney when they’d met a quarter of a century ago. At that time, being fresh off the ferry from Sardinia, Pietro was trying to buy the decrepit old convent/winery that was to become Villa Antica. Quadrelli had been representing the absentee owner, a signor Cocozza, but he’d been an honest broker. When the scurrilous Cocozza tried to put over a fast one on the trusting greenhorn (Pietro, accustomed to handshakes, not contracts, had no lawyer of his own), Quadrelli had refused to go along. That had gotten him fired, and in righteous indignation he’d switched sides to energetically represent Pietro’s interests with no more than a promise of payment sometime in the future.

The promise had been fulfilled within two years. They’d become fast friends, and Severo had come to serve as Pietro’s trusted counselor, formal and informal, not only in legal matters, but in all things mainland-Italian. In time Villa Antica had prospered to the extent that Severo had given up his position with a Florence firm and taken a generous yearly retainer to concentrate solely on the winery and the Cubbiddu family as their attorney and financial manager. Julie and Gideon had met him on their visit of the previous year. At that time he had just been coaxed by Pietro into finally moving into one of the guest apartments in the villa’s residential wing, living among the Cubbiddus and taking his meals with them. One of the family, indeed.

“Ah, Linda, she tell me you come,” he said in his mellow, authoritative bass. “Is good to see you again. Welcome, welcome here.”

Interestingly, while it was Severo who had reputedly convinced Pietro that fluency in English was a must for the sons, he himself, a cosmopolitan and well-educated man, sounded like a fresh-off-the-boat Italian in an old vaudeville skit. Leenda, she tell-a me you come-a. . . .

Not for the first time, Gideon wondered if his own Italian might not be quite as smooth as he imagined.

“Thank you, signor Quadrelli,” he answered. “It’s good to be here, and I’m glad to see you again.” He spoke in English. To a self-regarding and somewhat pompous man like Severo, doing otherwise would have been perceived as a slur on his linguistic abilities.

There was a bit of friendly chatting, and then Franco, showing himself to be a busy man with many responsibilities, rapped on the table to bring them back to business. On the table were two partially emptied bottles of red wine and one full one, uncorked, along with a dishwasher rack half full of stemmed, ballooned wineglasses, a pile of cloth napkins, a pitcher of water, a basket of broken-up bread sticks, and a metal bowl with a little spat-out wine in the bottom. Eight used wineglasses stood in a clump a little away from the other things.

Franco now spoke in Italian. “ Nico, si prega di versare il vino .” He gestured at the full bottle, making a pouring motion.

As Nico poured portions into each glass, Luca caught his arm to get a look at the label. “The 2010 Sangiovese grosso? What are we tasting this one for?”

Nico answered. “I’m off to the Wine Retailers Expo in Basel in a few days, and I need to know what to tell them about it. Will we be releasing it this year or not? Should I bring a couple of cases with me, or shouldn’t I?”

“I can give you the answer right now,” Luca responded. “No. It’ll need another year at least. The tannin will still be too high. It’ll be rough.”

“You’re wrong, Luca,” Franco said. “I tasted it myself this morning. In my opinion it’s ready.”

Luca raised an eyebrow. “So what are you asking us for?”

“Because I am sincerely interested in your opinions.”

“Fine, I just gave it. Not ready.”

“I suggest you taste it first, Luca. You’re forgetting something. This was the first of our wines to undergo maceration and extraction by means of the new rotary fermenter.”

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.