Finn pulled in front of The Tasting Room, waving at Bill and Sadie Nelson, who were walking toward the entrance. Bill and Sadie were winemakers from Healdsburg, and old friends of my parents’， my father’s first recruits to Sebastopol.
He pointed at me, and they smiled, waving big.
Finn got out of the truck. “Let’s go, slowpokes.”
“Give us just a second,” my father said.
“I’ll send out some of the guys to get that barrel,” he said.
My father nodded. “Great,” he said.
Finn disappeared inside, Bill and Sadie holding the door for him.
“So Ben has a kid?”
I was still watching Bill and Sadie walk inside and thought I heard him wrong. I turned toward him, shocked.
He reached into the back pocket of his jeans, pulled out a series of index cards.
“What a world,” he said.
“You know?”
“Of course I know.” He nodded. “Your mother tells me everything,” he said.
“Why didn’t you come out and say it?”
He looked up and met my eyes. “Because I didn’t want you to miss my point, the way you’re about to do, and jump to asking my opinion on what you should do about the fact that the person you trusted most in the world lied to you.”
“Which is?”
“My opinion?”
He put his notes in his front pocket.
“If you want to get married, then you should. If you don’t, you shouldn’t.”
“That solves it!”
“I do what I can.” He laughed. “Thing is, either way we cut it, we shouldn’t test the people we love,” he said. “We do, but it’s shitty and ultimately, regardless of what they did or didn’t do, we’re the ones who feel like we failed.”
Then, as if that closed the case, he kissed me on the cheek and headed into The Tasting Room.
The Wine Thief
Two times a year, my father did a tour of The Last Straw Vineyard for locals and wine club members, once at the start of the harvest and once the day of the harvest party. The rest of the year, the only place to taste my father’s wines was at The Tasting Room.
My father wasn’t unique in handing over the wine tasting responsibilities to Gary and Louise. Many people associated Napa Valley with going to a tasting room at a vineyard and drinking a bunch of wines for ten dollars or the price of a bottle of wine. But that type of stop-by tasting was usually only done by the big wineries—like Murray Grant—factory wineries, existing on the side of Highway 29, that were eager to take advantage of drunk tourists who didn’t know better, who didn’t care if they were drinking anything good, who only cared that they were drinking.
But most of the small vineyards in Sonoma County didn’t have tasting rooms at their vineyards. They gave their wines to Gary and Louise to sell, Gary pouring the wine to folks who were serious about drinking it, pouring different wine for the folks who weren’t and stumbled into his tasting room. If that sounded like snobbery, it wasn’t. The measure wasn’t people who could spend a lot of money on wine. Gary and Louise regularly lost money. The measure was appreciation.
Today, The Tasting Room was open only to winemakers. And the only wine on tap was ours.
There was no way to adequately describe The Tasting Room and make it sound as cool as it was. On the surface, it was a ’50s-style diner. The soda counter had been converted to a wine bar. The fluorescent lights had been replaced with hanging lanterns and candles and wooden sconces. The tiled floors were washed and polished twice a week. Cork-filled vases lined the small tables.
When I walked in, I felt happy to be there, surrounded by this group of winemakers, who got together every year for the harvest. They had nicknamed themselves the Cork Dorks. The Cork Dorks: a play on the fact that so many of them were scientists. Some migrated to Sebastopol at my father’s urging. Some came in the rush of the ’90s, when Pinot Noir really hit the map.
There was Brian Queen, a former colleague of my father’s from San Francisco State, who was one of the only Grenache producers in the region. Terry and his wife, Sarah, produced Sauvignon Blanc in upper Russian River. Lynn and Masters （her Robert Redford look-alike boyfriend） had recently gone over to the dark side, Napa Valley, where they were making a Cabernet Sauvignon that the New York Times had named as one of the best ten wines coming out of California.
And then there were Gary and Louise, The Tasting Room owners, who grew grapes in the backyard, grapes that led to arguably the most scrumptious sparkling wine you’ve ever tasted—inarguably, if you asked either of them. No one did. They just drank.