Bentley Little - Dominion

"I'll be there."

Kevin laughed. "I know you will."

Dion and Penelope walked slowly through the vineyard, the late summer sun streaming down on their heads. Penelope talked about grapes as they walked, about hybrids and planting techniques. Dion listened to what she had to say, looked at the examples she showed him. Close up, the vines looked different than he'd thought they would. The plants were not as leafy as he'd expected, and the stalks seemed dry and twisted, strangely grizzled. Even the grapes did not match the image in his mind. The bunches were full and plentiful, outnumbering the leaves on some of the vines, but the grapes themselves were much smaller than ordinary table grapes.

They continued to walk. The picking had stopped for a few days, until some of the remaining grapes had ripened, and they had the field entirely to themselves. They strode side by side as they moved farther away from the drive. The ground here was rough, furrowed, and it was impossible to step in a straight line. More than once the backs of their hands accidentally brushed, and Dion felt tingles of anticipatory excitement pass through him. He wanted desperately to breach the inches between them and hold her hand. It seemed natural, right, and though he thought he sensed a similar desire on her part, he was not experienced enough at these things to know for sure. He might be misreading the signs, and he did not have the courage to act on his instincts. He needed more than a hint, more than a promise; he needed assurance that she felt the same way he did before he attempted to make a move.

They stopped for a moment at the end of a row. Dion leaned his foot against a long, wheeled pipe sprinkler and wiped the sweat from his forehead as he looked around. "What's there?" he asked. "Behind the wall?" He pointed toward the stone fence which ran the length of the field, disappearing in back of the house and winery buildings.

"I don't know," she said quickly.

"You don't know?"

She shook her head.

"Come on, you can tell me." He grinned mischievously. "I won't sell your family secrets."

Penelope did not smile. "I'm forbidden to go back there."

"Forbidden? Why?"

She turned toward him. "Do you want to see how it's done?" she asked.

"Do you want to see how we make the wine?"

"Uh, sure," he said, frowning.

"Let's go, then." Without waiting for an answer, she began hiking back down the row the way they'd come, her arms swinging in a carefree manner that was too studied and too perfect to be real.

He looked toward the fence and wondered what it was about the forbidden area, behind it that had triggered this reaction. She was obviously afraid of the place and didn't want to talk about it, but her unexpectedly strong response had intensified what had before been only idle curiosity. He would definitely have to ask her about. the place sometime when he knew her a little better, when she wasn't so freaked.

She stopped, turned around, motioned him forward. "Come on!"

He hurried down the row toward her, and she began to run. Laughing, they raced over the rough ground all the way to the drive. Dion stopped first. "I give up," he said, breathing heavily. He bent down, putting his hands on his knees. "Whoo!"

"I take it you're not used to exercising?"

"I walk to school and back."

"A whole three blocks!"

"More like six."

Penelope laughed. "Another Arnold Schwartzenegger."

Dion stood, straightened, catching his breath. He smiled at her, acknowledging the joke, but he couldn't help feeling a little hurt by it. She hadn't meant it to be insulting--her tone of voice was light and completely innocent--but he vowed nonetheless to start exercising.

She looked toward him. "Ready?" she asked.

He nodded.

"Let's go, then."

They walked together up the drive and entered the main building through a tinted glass side door. Dion had expected the inside of the winery to be dark and rustic, filled with floor to ceiling oak casks, dimly lit by bare bulbs, the Hollywood conception of a winery. But the long room outside the small glass-walled office into which they'd entered was antiseptically white, with a checkerboard tile floor and a row of gleaming stainless steel tanks along the north wall. He could see a curled hose lying next to one of the tanks, and a drain in the center of the floor.

Penelope nodded to a middle-aged woman sitting at a computer terminal.

"I'm just showing my friend around," she explained.

The woman smiled. "Go right ahead."

The two of them walked through the open doorway. "We're kind of taking the backward tour," Penelope said. "Or the sideways tour." She pointed at the row of tanks. "These are used for fermenting. Wineries used to do all of their fermenting in wooden casks, but that's not really an efficient method these days. What we do is allow the wine to ferment here, and then for certain blends we move it into the wooden barrels for final aging."

"Why?" Dion asked.

"Because the wood actually adds flavor to the wine. Redwood will add a slight, barely detectable flavor; oak has a fairly strong effect. So what we do depends on the type and vintage. Whites and roses we ferment and age completely in here. Certain reds we age in the oak barrels."

He shook his head. "It's weird hearing someone my age talk about wines like this. I mean, you're not even old enough to drink, and you act like an expert."

"What do you expect? I grew up here."

"I guess," He looked around the room. "Do you ever help out?"

"Not really. I hang around sometimes, but they never wanted me to actually do any of the work. I never wanted to either."

"Does your mother ever let you try any of the wines? In France, even little kids drink it. They have it with every meal. Do you guys do that?"

"No," Penelope said simply. "I don't drink."

Dion was glad of that.

"Come on, let's go into the pressing room."

Their tennis shoes sounded loud and absurdly squeaky on the silent tile.

Penelope led the way down the row of tanks and pushed open the white door at the far end. They passed through another, identical room filled with large, closed metal tanks, where Penelope nodded to two workers, then into the pressing room.

The pressing room was just as modern but not nearly as antiseptic and was the size of a small grocery store. The air here smelled of grape, and there were purple stains on the raised wood-slatted floor. Machines of various shapes and sizes were grouped according to type. Along the opposite wall were what looked like two electrical generators.

"As you can see, we don't all stand barefoot in a big barrel and stomp around to press the grapes. These are different types of presses. The women of the combine bought several kinds in order to experiment with different techniques. They all still work, and we usually end up using most of them at the height of the season, but we usually stick to these." She tapped a long metal cylinder suspended in a sturdy frame.

"Air-pressure presses. They squeeze from the inside out instead of the other way around like the rest of these do. For our purposes, it makes a much better must."

"Must?"

"The grape juice that we make into wine."

"Oh."

He followed her around the large room as she opened each press type and explained its workings. After that she led the way into a huge, damp, cavelike room in which hundreds of wooden barrels were stacked almost to the ceiling. This was what he'd though a winery would look like.

"This is just where we age the wines. After this the product is bottled and shipped out. I'd show you our bottling apparatus, but it's in another building, and it's closed up right now. The casks you're looking at now are arranged by year. We have wines in this room going back four, five, six years. My ... aunt Sheila does the testing to determine when the wines are ready."