Bitter Roots, page 1
Contents
Cover
Also by Ellen Crosby
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Map
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Acknowledgments
Read on for an extract of Multiple Exposure
Also by Ellen Crosby
The Wine Country mysteries
THE MERLOT MURDERS
THE CHARDONNAY CHARADE
THE BORDEAUX BETRAYAL
THE RIESLING RETRIBUTION
THE VIOGNIER VENDETTA
THE SAUVIGNON SECRET
THE CHAMPAGNE CONSPIRACY
THE VINEYARD VICTIMS
HARVEST OF SECRETS
THE ANGELS’ SHARE
THE FRENCH PARADOX *
The Sophie Medina mysteries
MULTIPLE EXPOSURE
GHOST IMAGE
Other titles
MOSCOW NIGHTS
* available from Severn House
BITTER ROOTS
Ellen Crosby
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First world edition published in Great Britain and the USA in 2022
by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE.
Trade paperback edition first published in Great Britain and the USA in 2022
by Severn House, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.
This eBook edition first published in 2022 by Severn House,
an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd.
severnhouse.com
Copyright © Ellen Crosby, 2022
Extract from Winegrowing in Eastern America is reproduced by kind permission of Lucie Morton.
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. The right of Ellen Crosby to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-9102-0 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0807-1 (trade paper)
ISBN-13: 978-1-4483-0806-4 (e-book)
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is purely coincidental.
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To Lucie Morton, with grateful thanks for sharing your knowledge, expertise and, especially, your friendship.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
– The Serenity Prayer, Reinhold Niebuhr
Wine is the most inspiring and mysterious agricultural commodity on earth. Such a religious and romantic aura surrounds wine that it has always occupied a place apart from other farm products. Indeed, tractors and hoes rarely come to mind when we think of wine. Rather, we have visions of good food, friends, and happy times.
– Winegrowing in Eastern America, Lucie Morton
ONE
Julia Child once said that every woman should have a blowtorch in the kitchen. To that I would add: and a chain saw in the garden. Or the vineyard, should you own one. Blowtorches and chain saws say you’re a woman who means business. They say don’t mess with me.
‘These vines are going to die. They’re not going to get any bigger.’ I was stunned, but I was also angrier than I’d been in a long time. These vines had also been fine, just fine, for the first two years after we planted them.
The technical name for what my fiancé Quinn Santori and I were looking at said everything and explained nothing: Failure to thrive. What it meant was: I have no clue what happened.
‘I know, Lucie.’ Quinn sounded as upset as I was, but also weary. ‘I know that.’
For three back-breaking years he and I had nurtured these vines, cared for them. Loved them like children. After lavishing money on their growth and development without making a dime off them so far, it was their turn to kick in and pay rent and expenses. This year these Cabernet Franc grapes should finally have been producing their first proper harvest so we could make wine from them. It was a grape that did well in Virginia soil and our wineries were known for making good wine from Cab Franc. So, when we planted these vines, we thought – no, we knew – we were backing a winner. Instead here we were standing in a field of stunted, sick-looking grapevines.
I scraped at the dirt at the base of the withering brown trunk with the tip of the cane I’ve needed ever since a car accident ten years ago. Was something in the soil causing this? Was it the rootstock itself? A parasite? What was it?
‘I can’t handle looking at this,’ I said to Quinn. ‘I’m ready to rip ’em all out right now.’
‘Come on, not so fast, baby. We still don’t know what caused them not to grow. And why this – disease or whatever – stops all of a sudden and the other vines are fine. We have to at least figure that out.’
‘Nobody knows what’s wrong,’ I said. ‘And it’s not from lack of asking people to come out and take a look for themselves.’
It had been like throwing darts at a dartboard while wearing a blindfold. Everyone who came by to give us their considered opinion – and that included agents from the County Ag Extension Service as well as an expert in grapevine diseases from Virginia Tech – shook their heads and delivered the same verdict: ‘Your guess is as good as mine.’
What were we supposed to do with that?
Truth be told, I knew Quinn was even more upset about what was happening than I was – and that’s saying something – because he’s our winemaker. It’s part of the job – worrying all the time, second-guessing yourself when something goes wrong, figuring it’s your fault. Convinced you could have prevented what happened. Should have prevented it, if only you’d known what to do or seen it coming. Or as Quinn – whose childhood home had a small altar in the linen closet where his devout Spanish mother prayed daily – told me, it was like Catholic guilt on steroids.
This time, though, I knew he was factoring in the other big event in our lives that was making me especially emotional and volatile: our upcoming wedding eight days from now. A wedding that would take place here at the vineyard where this blotch of ugly, shriveled vines among so much green stood out like the worst kind of eyesore.
We climbed back into the dark-green Gator, Quinn at the wheel, me taking pictures with my phone as we drove up and down aisles of what should have been lush, leafy vines. In mid-May, now that bud break had taken place and the other vines were flowering, you should already be able to see the promise of what was to come over the next few months until it was time for harvest. Instead we found only shrunken, wizened vines with anemic-looking leaves that barely reached the first trellis wire.
Elsewhere, though, the vineyard, with thousands of tiny white flowers just beginning to show under new spring leaves, looked spectacular. Vineyard bloom, as it’s called, usually lasted a week, maybe two at most, and, regular as clockwork, it was something we never had to worry about occurring, because grapes are hermaphroditic, or asexual. They pollinate themselves, so there’s no waiting for the birds and the bees or the wind to get the job done – or hope it happened. This year, fingers crossed, bloom would still be going on during our wedding. The fleeting, elusive scent – a sweet floral note with an underlying earthy tone – would be a faint, tantalizing grace note in the air. Some guests would recognize it, but others would swear they smelled something, or thought they did, if only they could put their finger on it.
‘We need to get Josie up here,’ Quinn said as we rounded a corner where an apricot- and peach-colored Sweet Fragrance rose bush marked the beginning of the Cab Franc block. ‘Let her take a look before we rip everything out, see if she can diagnose what’s wrong.’
Josie Wilde was the premier vineyard consultant on the East Coast. Let me amend that: she was the premier vineyard consultant in the United States, period. And because she’d studied winemaking and grape growing at the Université de Montpellier in France and spoke fluent French, she was also on speed dial at a number of prominent French vineyards. I had wanted to hire her to help us at Montgomery Estate Vineyard and advise us in the barrel room where we made our wine because – well, who wouldn’t? Strictly speaking, you didn’t hire Josie. She agreed to take you on if she thought you would be a worthy client. That you were serious about upping your game, that you would do the work, put in the time.
I convinced her we were, and we would.
In 1976, California moved out of France’s shadow on a nothing-happening day in August when the British owner of a Parisian wine shop decided to do a blind tasting of French versus California wines because business and the city itself were about as dead as your proverbial doornail. An American reporter from Time magazine wrote about the little wine shop competition because, see above, nothing else was going on. To everyone’s astonishment – Zut alors! Ce n’est pas possible! – the California wines won, the story ended up in Time, and you would have thought the Californians changed the laws of gravity without telling the French. So I didn’t see why history couldn’t repeat itself and Virginia could emerge from under California’s behemoth dominance and the breezy taken-for-granted assumptions that any wine made east of the Sierra Nevada couldn’t possibly be that good. Instead we found ourselves backpedaling as we dealt with more and more problems with the grapes and vines that seemed to be the inexorable consequence of climate change.
Josie lived about two hours south of us in Charlottesville, where she had a sweet little laboratory behind her Craftsman bungalow. The first time I visited, it reminded me of a child’s playhouse until I went inside and saw the state-of-the-art computer software she used and all her high-tech toys and equipment – including a drone for taking aerial photos of the vineyards and a badass power saw for cutting through thick grapevines to see what was inside. She had also rigged a trellis system in her postage-stamp backyard that looked like a life-sized game of cat’s cradle where she grew and experimented with dozens of varietals of grapes.
To be honest I was surprised that Quinn was the one to suggest asking Josie to drive up here and survey the diseased grapevines. He hadn’t been as gung-ho as I was to hire her – the alpha male thing about ceding some of his authority and being told what to do – but maybe he was coming around.
‘I know Josie needs to see this,’ I said. Next he’d be saying that Eve Kerr should get over here and take a look as well.
‘Eve should probably come by, too,’ he said in a bland tone. ‘Since she’s the one who sold us these vines.’
Eve Kerr could sell ice to Eskimos, especially if the Eskimo was male. She’d moved here from California three years ago, excited about the promise of Virginia evolving into a major player in the wine world after so many years of heartache and outright failure. Make that centuries of heartache and failure: we’d been trying to grow grapes and make wine in the Old Dominion since 1619 when the Virginia House of Burgesses passed a law that made it compulsory for every household to plant and maintain ten grapevines imported from Europe. A nice idea in theory, but a complete nonstarter in reality since everyone’s vines ended up dying in the intolerant, pest-ridden climate of the New World. Then California blew past us in the 1800s and we chewed the dust of their lush vineyards. By the end of World War II, when American palates grew more sophisticated and we started drinking more wine, nearly everyone – even folks overseas – assumed that California wine was a tautology for American wine.
By the 1980s we tried again – Virginians are nothing if not stubborn – when we were done licking our wounds from the devastation of Prohibition. And before that, it had been the ruined farms and trampled landscapes of Civil War damage. But this time, finally, we started getting it right. Gaining a reputation, getting noticed on a national stage as a ‘wine destination.’ Becoming known as a place where you could experiment – grow Russian Rkatsiteli next to Italian Barbera next to southern French Tannat next to Portuguese Touriga next to you-name-it. In Virginia you could make your mark. Stand out. Get noticed.
Eve Kerr got noticed all right. She was stunning. When the Beach Boys wished they all could be California girls, they were channeling Eve. Long-legged, fit, toned, tawny blonde hair, cornflower blue eyes, perfect smile, a beach and surfer girl who went to UC-Davis and double-majored in viticulture and enology. Now she wanted to ride the wave that was Virginia’s future, so she took a job with Landau’s Trees & Vines, a family-owned business that had been around for sixty-five years. When Jackson Landau took over what had been a small but profitable mom-and-pop farm from his parents twenty-five years ago, he turned it into the largest commercial nursery, not just in Virginia, but on the entire East Coast. Conveniently, the farm was about twenty minutes away in Delaplane, which made it a local business for us.
So, yes, Eve Kerr – Jackson’s right hand – was a knockout, but she was also smart, funny, and she knew her stuff. Plus she had that laidback California vibe that made her so easy to deal with. Or had been easy to deal with until recently, when more than one vineyard began complaining about problems like ours: grapevines that had been doing fine for a couple of years. Until they weren’t fine. Until they suddenly started showing symptoms of disease and dying. And people started asking questions about the grower who had sold them to us: Landau’s Trees & Vines. Maybe those vines had been diseased from day one and the problems were just now showing up.
Eve began pushing back, defending her boss, who, she said, would never do something like that. Landau’s stood on their sixty-five-year reputation as a family business and guaranteed their products; there was no way in hell they’d sell anything that they believed was diseased or damaged to long-time clients, people they knew like family.
‘You know what Eve’s going to say when we call her,’ I told Quinn, although I also knew he was probably going to say that he’d talk to Eve. One Californian to another, two UC-Davis grads, no less, who could communicate in fluent California-speak, a dialect that somehow eluded the rest of the country. ‘She’s going to say “After three years in your care, those vines are your responsibility. There are too many factors that we couldn’t possibly control after all this time. I’m sorry they’re not doing well, but it’s not our fault.”’
‘Maybe so, but we still need to talk to her,’ he said. ‘I can handle her.’
As predicted.
‘She’s not going to budge.’
These days it felt like there was less paperwork involved to adopt a child than there was to buy grapevines from a nursery. First you sign a contract. Then there’s a licensing fee. And a registry fee. Plus a whole heap of other little add-ons. By the time you’re done being nickeled and dimed with all the extra charges tacked on like ornaments on an over-decorated Christmas tree, you’ve bought a two dollar and fifty cent grapevine for four bucks. Multiply that by a couple of thousand grapevines and you’re talking about some serious money. Just how much money, you wonder? For an acre and a half of Cabernet Franc?
Thirty thousand, easily. And that’s just to buy the vines. Then you have to hire folks to plant them. You also have to fertilize those tender new vines and spray them, so they’ll grow and thrive, and you pay more folks to do those tasks. There’s pruning and thinning, all work done by hand, so the canopy lets in enough sunlight for the grapes to ripen perfectly, or at least that’s the plan. So you hire people to do that. All the while you sweet talk these vines, cajole them, love them. They owe you for three years of being coddled and nurtured while you worked your butt off for them.
Instead they don’t do anything they’re supposed to do – you know how teenagers can be – and even though you keep trying, one day you throw up your hands and face the harsh reality that you’re out about a hundred and eighty thousand dollars, all told. You have the Come-to-Jesus talk with the recalcitrant vines that Quinn and I were having right now and, let me tell you, it’s not pleasant.
And if you replace these wretched vines that let you down so badly, you know what?
You start the process all over again. If you have another hundred and eighty thousand to burn, that is.
