I threw on a dry sweatshirt and closed the door behind myself, heading down the back stairs to the winemaker’s cottage, to the only free place to sleep.
My father was up, drinking a glass of wine on the porch, looking over his incredible spreadsheet. His spreadsheet was the difference between him being a good winemaker and a great winemaker. It listed every grape, every clone, on the entire vineyard. It listed where they were fermenting in the cellar, how long he was going to let each ferment, the combinations that were going into the final product. The spreadsheet was his ultimate work in progress. He would make changes throughout the entire winter, based on the wine’s taste and its color. That was the part that made him a good winemaker, he would say. Not that he was willing to make the changes, but that, in the end, he was also willing to change it back.
He kept his eyes on his spreadsheet, marking it. “Avoiding everyone?” he said.
“Not you.”
He looked up and smiled. “Aren’t I lucky, then?”
He patted the bench beside him, and I sat down, tossing off my shoes, pulling my knees up. I took a first breath, lavender and chamomile and honey filling the vineyard air. It took me back, remembering how it used to calm me, a night just like this one. I’d stay up past bedtime, sitting beside my father while he worked on his spreadsheet, my father stopping occasionally to show me what he was doing.
He put the spreadsheet down and poured me a glass of wine. “Finn doing okay?”
I nodded, relaxing into the safety of this porch, the vineyard like a beautiful barricade, keeping everything wrong and unwanted away.
“Thank you for dropping him off,” he said.
It didn’t feel like a good time to tell him that I hadn’t.
He handed over the wine. “That’s the 2005.”
I took the unlabeled bottle, the glass shiny and blue. My father could have meant several wines from that vintage, but referring to it in that way, it was clear he meant the 2005 Block 14: the one wine on his spreadsheet that he never messed with. The first wine he’d ever made, an expression of a single site. Every year, those were the grapes he picked after the harvest party—everything else off the vine except for them. These were his most valuable grapes, juicy and rich from the extra time on the vine. He saved those grapes for last and fermented them as they were.
Some years Block 14 turned out well, some years not well. Biodynamics at its most pure. And, 2005, it turned out gorgeous. The fruit was present in every sip of the wine, a rich, dark berry explosion. It won my father two national awards, his distributor insisting he charge ninety dollars a bottle. He liked to joke that 2005 was the wine that paid for all the wines. Tonight, it was like drinking comfort. Ripe and simple.
“Not bad, huh?” he said.
I breathed into the wine, thick with chocolate and jamminess, the way only the best Pinot Noir was. “Beautiful.”
“Beautiful. I’ll take it.”
I motioned toward his spreadsheet. “How’s it looking?”
He smiled. “These last grapes came off lovely,” he said. “The whole southwest corner came off lovely. I’ll feel better when Block 14 is off the vines, but I’d like to give them a little longer to ripen fully.”
“Forecast clear?”
“Forecast clear, but they’ve been wrong before.”
He pointed to the last page of his spreadsheet, the weather services lining the top. He updated each of them daily, all five of them showing sunny skies.
“Jacob is getting into my head,” he said. “He thinks they should come down.”
“Why would you listen to him?”
He picked up his wine, considering the question. “He’s paying me plenty to.”
“Well, not enough, in my opinion.”
“Good thing it’s my opinion that matters.”
Then he tipped the glass in my direction, looking at me, and smiling a little sadly.
“Not that you asked, but it might help to separate out what’s going on with the vineyard and with our family from what’s going on for you and Ben. They are all separate things.”
It all felt like the same thing: the loss of the vineyard, the coming apart of our family. Finn and Bobby and Margaret. My parents. Ben and Maddie. Michelle. It all felt tied up, like the same thread was running through them. Where there had been trust—to keep each other safe, to make each other feel loved—there was none. Maybe it was tied up. Synchronized to come apart the moment my father turned his back on the vineyard and we were all too busy to stop him.