Page 25 of Sweet Escape

One by one, the rest of the table gets up, having already been mostly finished with their meals before I joined them, until it’s just me and Dad and Sarah left.

I glance at my dad briefly, then at my aunt. “Hey, can I get your opinion on something?” I ask her.

She nods. “Sure.”

My father taps the table lightly. “I’ll take that as my cue to head out. Have a good night.”

Irritation floods me at the fact my dad is bowing out at the first sign of work-related talk, but I push it aside.

“What’s up, honey?”

“I’ve been thinking about buying a printer and moving our labeling to an in-house process,” I say, then launch into the details that I tried to share with my father this morning.

Unlike my dad, my aunt gives me her full attention, asking insightful questions and providing her feedback in pros and cons.

“It seems like you’ve already thought of everything,” she says eventually. “My only real concern would be where you plan to actually set up this operation and how it will work in conjunction with the bottling.”

I lean forward, resting my elbows on the table. “Well, the printing could happen anywhere. In the office building conference room. The warehouse. In my office, even. It’s more about having the labels ready when the truck gets here.”

When most people think of a winery, they assume that bottling happens on the property. But equipment for a bottling line is crazy expensive, and our winery isn’t large enough to warrant owning machinery like that, especially when we only bottle a few days out of the year. So we do what a lot of medium-size wineries do since we’re too small to own the equipment and too large to bottle by hand. We hire a mobile bottling line to set up shop.

We provide the wine, the bottles, and the labels, and they provide the machine and a few people to keep it running. The bottles get boxed up as they’re pulled off the line, and the boxes get delivered to our warehouse or loaded straight onto trucks that head out for distribution.

It’s a cost I’ve been trying to figure out how to eliminate, since it cuts so much from our profit right off the top, but until I can find a better option, it is what it is.

The labels, however, are another story.Thatis a cost I can minimize.

“If you know how it’s all going to work, it sounds like you’re making a great decision.”

Something settles in my chest that I didn’t realize was tight.

“You think so?”

She grins at me and pats my hands, something she did often over the years when I was a child and still does now, even though I’m definitely not a kid anymore. “Ifyoubelieve it’s the right decision, I’m on board. Because I believe inyou.”

When I slip back into my office later that night, I think it all over again. And again, and again. I run the numbers. Again. I make accommodations for things going wrong, for messing up labels, for issues withthe printer we buy. I run it until I’ve gotten to a place where there is no doubt behind my decision.

Then I send off my final email to the sales rep I received the quote from, telling him I’m ready to move forward with the purchase.

But my conversation with Sarah is still a little thing flittering around in the back of my mind, even as I move on to the temp hand applications.

My aunt is a special woman, and I often look to her for advice. She’s been around for most of my life, my dad and my siblings and I having moved back to the vineyard when I was seven or so. It was nice to have a mothering figure around during those days, when the world felt so dark and nothing was right.

As I’ve gotten older, I’ve been looking to her more and more in relation to business things. Unlike my father, who left the vineyard when he was in his late teens, wanting nothing to do with it, my aunt loved everything about the family business. She stayed and worked the land and helped my grandfather run things for years.

Until my mother passed away and my father returned, three children in tow.

Then, he took back his place as the eldest son and started working with my grandfather. My aunt took a back seat, spending a lot of her time, especially during those early days, helping my grandmother with the three of us. I mean, we were so young, and we’d lost our mother. Micah was barely a few weeks old, but Murphy was five and had all these big emotions and wanted constant attention.

They had their work cut out with us.

When I was a teenager, I started working the fields with my dad and grandfather. But it was my aunt who truly understood the business. So it makes sense—at least to me—that I look to her now. As I try everything I can to keep us above water.

Sometimes I wonder ifsheshould have been the one in charge, if that would have made all the difference. Or whether this time of hardship was bound to hit us at some point, no matter what.

Chapter Six

Vivian

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