Sour Grapes, page 21
I eyeballed the bird, uneasy by its relative proximity. My brain reminded me it was a serious predator, but for now it appeared sedate beside its handler.
I sat down in an empty chair, careful to position Marisol between myself and Malachi. “How does a person get into falconry?” I wondered.
Marisol claimed one of the two wine glasses for herself. “I’m from a long family of falconers,” she described. “Even Malachi’s blood line has been with my family for generations.”
She took her first sip of wine and smacked her lips in appreciation. “It’s amazing that such a miserable person can make such exciting wines.”
Her word choice had me recoiling. “Lucia isn’t miserable.”
“No?” she considered. “I suppose I don’t know her like you do, but she’s always in a bad mood when I’m around.”
I twisted my wine stem and kept my private thoughts to myself. Marisol could probably tell that Lucia wasn’t her number one fan; I didn’t need to vocalize that obvious fact.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
It was a warm July night when Lucia followed up on her promise to set up a vertical tasting for me. The windows and doors to the tasting barn had been left open, allowing a light breeze to ruffle at anything that wasn’t tied down. A checkered tablecloth had been draped over the table where Rolando and the others drank their morning coffee. Eight wine glasses—two rows of four—were lined up on the staff picnic table. Each was filled with a few ounces of red wine. Two glasses of water and a small silver bucket joined the wine glasses on the table.
The rest of the open space was remarkably clean. The table that typically hosted the modest coffee bar had been stashed out of sight, and any tools that typically cluttered the production section of the barn had similarly been put away. It wasn’t an over-the-top transformation, but it was obvious that Lucia had put in some effort to get ready for the night. It made me feel better about my decision to clean up after work and trade my t-shirt and jeans for a sundress and light denim jacket.
I hovered by the picnic table and touched my fingers to the table cloth. “This looks nice,” I observed.
I wanted to tell her that she looked nice, too, but the compliment got stuck in my throat. Her dark, glossy hair was pulled back in its usual braid, but her skinny jeans, ankle boots, and slim-fit flannel shirt were about as feminine of an outfit as I’d seen her in.
She shrugged off my approval. “I wanted to be sure we did your first vertical tasting the right way.”
“How does a vertical tasting differ from a typical tasting?” I asked.
“You’re technically trying the same kind of wine over and over again in a vertical tasting,” she described, “but they’re from different vintages.”
“Different harvest years,” I recalled.
“Uh huh,” she confirmed. She gestured to the glassware on the table. “These are all cabernets grown right on the property. The goal is to get a sense of how one vintage differs from another.”
“Is there going to be a test at the end?” I asked, only partially joking.
“No written exam, but there may be some oral.”
It was a good thing we hadn’t started drinking yet, or I would have spit out my wine.
“I can’t believe you just said that,” I choked out.
Lucia looked pleased with herself and my flabbergasted reaction. “It was too good to pass up.”
“After you give the vertical tasting,” I posed, “do you offer a horizontal tasting?”
“Wow.” Lucia blinked and looked a little impressed. “Did you just think of that?”
I shrugged. “I’m kind of mad at myself for not coming up with it earlier, but anyway,” I deflected, raising my voice, “where do we start?”
All of this talk about ‘tasting’ and ‘oral exams’ threatened to bring a blush to my cheeks, but Lucia looked perfectly comfortable throwing the words around.
“We’ll go youngest to oldest.”
“Are the oldest the best?” I asked.
Lucia shook her head. “Not necessarily. It really all comes down to vintage. Some years are just better than others.”
“Why?”
“Different growing seasons,” she answered. “Sometimes the weather is too rainy and the grapes don’t get the opportunity to let their sugars develop in the sun. Sometimes bud break is delayed by a few weeks or a summer is too hot and the growing season isn’t long enough for a high grape yield. It’s really just like growing any other crop.”
“Except this crop can make you drunk,” I quipped.
Lucia offered me a half smile. “But not tonight. We’re tasting, not doing keg stands.”
I stuck out my lower lip in a slight pout. “Okay, profesora.” I settled down at the picnic table in front of the two neat rows of wine glasses. “Teach me about wine.”
“Okay,” she began, touching the base of the glass closest to her, “this first cab isn’t ready to be bottled yet. The grapes are from last year’s harvest, so it’s still figuring out who it wants to be.”
“But we can drink it?” I asked.
Lucia nodded. “It’s drinkable, but it’s very dry and bitter.”
I gave the first glass a quick sniff and then took a small sip. “Oh wow,” I said, smacking my lips. Even just a small amount of the liquid had produced a dry, almost gritty sensation in my mouth. “I thought it would be more like grape juice, but that’s almost like cranberry?”
“It’s from the tannins,” Lucia noted. “It’s naturally occurring in the seeds and skins and wooden barrels. They stabilize the wine and buffer it against oxidation, but it makes your lips stick to your teeth. Wines have highest tannin when they’re young.”
She picked up the second wine glass from the line. “Young cabs are good—more fruit forward with herbaceous flavors.” She took a quick sniff inside her glass. “But most cabs should be left to age at least three years.”
“That’s a big time commitment,” I observed. “Harvesting all of those grapes, but not being able to share the resulting product until much later? It’s almost the antithesis of modern life.”
Lucia swirled around the liquid in her glass and looked thoughtfully at the centrifugal motion. “The average person doesn’t appreciate the labor and love that goes into a bottle of wine. But once you taste a well-aged cab, you’ll never be the same. The flavors soften; they become more silky, more elegant.” Her eyes swept from the wine glass to me. “Just like a woman.”
With anyone else, I would have rolled my eyes at the obvious line. But Lucia wasn’t usually a tease or a flirt, especially when it came to the business of wine. If anything, it was her intensity and passion for the industry that made my knees buckle.
“You don’t need a big nose or a special number of tastebuds to appreciate good wine,” Lucia continued before I could really linger on her words. “All you need is a four-step tasting method. Look. Smell. Taste. Think,” she recited.
She held the glass up to the overhead lights. “You’re looking for three things here: hue, intensity of color, and viscosity.”
“Those are three different things?” I posed, only half kidding.
“Hold your glass by the stem,” she instructed. “You don’t want fingerprints on the bowl of glassware. Plus, the heat from your hands can warm up the wine.”
I followed her lead and picked up the next glass in my row. I was careful to only hold the glass by its skinny stem to avoid clouding up the rest of the glassware with my fingerprints.
She tipped the wine glass to one side, but not enough to spill any liquid. “Look towards the edge of the wine to see the hue. Look towards to center to see how opaque the color is. A red-colored tint indicates higher acidity; more purple or blue means lower acidity. A deeply colored, opaque red wine is typically youthful with higher tannin. Red wines tend to become more pale and tawny as they age.”
“Just like a woman,” I couldn’t help joking.
Lucia shared a quick smile with me, but returned to the task at hand. “Viscosity is related to a wine’s sugar and alcohol content. The higher the viscosity, the higher the sugar and alcohol.”
“And you can tell that just by looking at the wine?” I wondered.
Lucia nodded. “This is why you see people swirling their wine—well, the ones who actually know what they’re doing,” she qualified. She swirled the wine, almost violently, while holding onto the base of the glass. “These streaks,” she said, pointing to the lines of wine that clung to the inside of the glass, “are called legs or tears. It’s caused by fluid surface tension created by evaporating alcohol. Typically, the longer the legs, the higher the alcohol content.”
“I’m fresh out of jokes about leggy women,” I quipped, “but give me enough time, and I’m sure I’ll come up with something.”
Lucia smiled mildly. It was clear it was going to take more than a weak comedic routine to distract her from this tasting.
“You’re going to smell the wine next,” she told me. “The goal here is to create a profile of aromas before tasting it—maybe two or three fruit or herbal flavors, plus any oak or earth flavors.”
I picked up the second glass of wine in my row. “So I just smell it and tell you what it reminds me of?”
“Hold the glass under your nose and take a small sniff to prime your senses,” she instructed. “Then, swirl your wine and take slow, delicate whiffs. The top rim of the glass will be floral; the lower rim has richer aromas.”
I dipped my nose in the bell of the glass and took an experimental sniff. “I’m not sure,” I admitted. I worried that the right answer was obvious and I would get it wrong.
“Pick a fruit aroma, and then pick an adjective,” she suggested. “Like, strawberry,” she offered as an example. “Fresh, ripe, stewed, or dried.”
I returned my nose to the glass, acutely aware of Lucia’s eyes on me. I wanted to do a good job. I wanted to impress her—to prove I wasn’t a lost cause. I closed my eyes and focused. The aroma of the wine was sweet, almost like ice cream.
I opened my eyes. “Black cherry?” I guessed. “Is that a thing?”
Lucia’s smile was small, but obviously pleased. “Maybe.”
I stuck my nose a little deeper into the glass. “Black cherry,” I said again, this time with more conviction. “Ripe. But there’s also something earthy.” I searched for the right description. “Like rocks. Minerals.”
Her silent smile broadened, and I felt encouraged. ”You can drink now,” she allowed.
I felt some of the tension leave my body as if I’d earned a passing grade on an important exam. “You and Natalie sure make me work for my wine,” I wryly observed.
“Anything worth having should take effort,” Lucia countered. “You wouldn’t enjoy it as much otherwise.”
I chewed on my lip as I considered the truth to her words. Over the past few months, she had certainly made me work for every smile, every word of praise.
Lucia held her second glass by its stem. “Okay, I want you to take a sizeable sip and pass the wine all over your palate. But don’t swallow until I tell you to.”
I took a medium-sized sip. I swirled the wine around in my mouth, not quite like mouthwash, but definitely different than how I typically drank any other liquid.
My eyes followed Lucia’s form as she came to sit beside me on the picnic bench.
“Chew it,” she directed. She leaned a little closer. “Allow it to touch every nook and cranny inside of your mouth.”
I did as she told me. My eyes didn’t leave her face. She inspected my reaction to the wine with a barely contained intensity that normally would have made me self-conscious. I watched her lick her lips.
“Now swallow.”
I obediently gulped down the liquid.
Lucia shifted on the bench and seemed to sit even closer with the movement. Her voice took on a lower, almost melodic, tone. “Take a slow breath through your mouth and exhale through your nose.”
I would have cracked a joke about her being a good yoga instructor, but I was afraid to interrupt the moment with a comedic defense mechanism. Instead, I asked the question nibbling at my brain.
“How many women have you given a private tasting to?”
Lucia pulled back and sat a little straighter. “That’s-that’s … what do you mean?” she dodged.
I stared pointedly at her, waiting for an answer.
She turned her face away and sighed. Even her breath sounded annoyed. “Just you.”
I arched an eyebrow, not really believing her words.
“This might surprise you, but I don’t like many people.”
“Really? You?” I said in mock surprise.
“I’m not—I don’t know,” she huffed. “... friendly? I get impatient and irritated too easily.” She fiddled with the stem of one of the wine glasses. “No one has stuck around long enough for me to teach them about wine.”
Her vulnerability was unexpected. A flood of complicated emotions washed over me. I tucked my lower lip into my mouth to steady myself. “Thank you.”
Lucia looked up at my words. “For what?”
“For putting up with me long enough that we could do this.”
My gratitude made her look awkward and nearly embarrassed. She rubbed at the back of her neck. “Sure thing. No problem.”
“This wine is good,” I observed. “The tannins aren’t as intense as the first one.” I could have lingered in her discomfort, but I returned our conversation to the wine tasting.
Lucia continued to look grim despite the topical reprieve. “Napa’s volcanic soils give the wine a distinctly dusty and mineral character. Wines from the valley floor, like ours, tend to offer more black cherry and lush tannins. Hillside wines produce more acidity, blackberry notes, and rustic tannins.”
She recited the details as if giving me a vineyard tour.
The mood in the barn had shifted. The tasting seemed secondary to whatever was currently transgressing.
I fiddled with the stem of my wine glass. I focused on my fidgety fingers. “You must have been really mad about the Mitchells selling this place to have come back early.”
“I was pissed,” she admitted. She stared straight ahead instead of in my direction. “I thought they’d at least offer my dad the opportunity to make an offer. He deserves it after all the blood, sweat, and tears he’s put into this property.”
“And instead they sold to two women who couldn’t tell a pinot noir from a pinot grigio,” I solemnly observed. The corner of my mouth twitched. “Are you still mad?”
“Not at you, no.”
“No?” My voice lilted on the question.
Lucia pressed her lips together. “It’s getting late. I should probably clean this up.”
I blinked, feeling a little blindsided by the abrupt dismissal. “Oh, okay. Do you need any help?”
Lucia stood from the table. “No, I’ve got it.”
I slowly came to my feet and lingered in the space. Lucia was busy clearing glassware from the table. She didn’t look in my direction.
I wrung my hands in front of me and twisted my fingers. “Thank you for tonight.”
Lucia still refused to look at me. “Sure thing, Jefa.”
I took my time walking back to the farmhouse. The night sky was clear and dotted with thousands of twinkling stars. I shoved my hands into the pockets of my denim jacket and slowly strolled away from the barn, one foot in front of the other. The evening had left me more puzzled than before. Even though Lucia had shown flashes of flirtatiousness, she’d been mostly serious during the tasting, as if I was an employee that needed training. I did need more wine education, but when Lucia had suggested the vertical tasting, I hadn’t expected it to better resemble a work seminar.
After the evening-that-almost-was, my anxiety around Lucia had only elevated. If she hadn’t passed out in my bed, we would have had sex. But instead of that information putting me more at ease or making me feel comfortable around her, I felt more awkward than ever. There was something between us—unfinished business—but I didn’t know how, or even if, I should bring it up. Could I ask for a do-over? A second dinner and sleepover? Or had the moment passed and I would be forced to endure this uncomfortable tension between us for the rest of my life?
She’d been vulnerable, however, about her limited dating experiences and even how her attitude toward me as the vineyard owner was starting to change. But that alone didn’t reveal much about how she felt about me in general. Every time I tried to approach the topic, she seemed to shut down and shut me out.
I worried my lower lip as I considered our situation. With the exception of an isolated evening when we’d kissed and had slept in the same bed, nothing similarly intimate had occurred. In fact, the more time that passed, we seemed to be returning to a relationship of employer and employee. I wanted access to her thoughts and emotions, but despite my best efforts, Lucia Santiago remained an enigma.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I heard a quiet knock on the open office door. I didn’t spend too much time in the connected office during the workday, but since it was still the only place on the property connected to the internet, sometimes I had no choice. Updates to our social media accounts, updating our website, and responding to requests for private tours and tastings kept me busy when I wasn’t needed out in the grapevines.
“Give me a second,” I said, not looking away from the computer monitor, “I just have to finish this email.”
Between concentrating on spelling and grammar and the sound of my fingertips striking against the old keyboard, I barely registered the sound of the office door closing.
“Did I blow it?”
I looked away from the computer screen and my unsent email. I looked up at Lucia over my blue light glasses. I had perfect 20/20 vision, but Alex had insisted I get a pair since I spent so much time on a computer for work.
“Huh?”
She hollowed out her cheeks. The action made her look more grim than usual. “I didn’t mean to pass out the other night.”
