Page 127 of Red Mountain Burning
“You’re attending the Otis school of trial by fire. These are your grapes. I know it’s not easy, but I believe in you. This is your project.” He seemed to drift away for a moment. “And when you nail the timing, Em, it’s the best feeling in the world.”
She’d tasted the juice so many times that she was almost out of her sample. Leaving Brooks, she ran back down to her vines with a Ziploc bag and walked the rows, plucking a grape or two from every other vine. Once she’d bagged enough fruit for a good representation, she drove a Lacoda truck over to Otis’s winery. Maybe he’d help.
Standing in his lab off the main cellar, he crushed the grapes in a small container and poured the juice into two wine glasses. He tossed the contents into his mouth and made a chewing motion, before swallowing.
Once again, Emilia could see the little boy in Otis coming out, as his face filled with excitement. “It’s a lovely syrah.”
“Yeah, but is it ready? Have you picked any of your reds? Isn’t September too early? Especially for syrah?”
He seemed amused by her questions. “It’s absolutely too early. If it was last year. Or the year before. Don’t live in the past. What are the grapes telling you now?” He whispered, “Listen to the vines.”
“I appreciate the idea,” Emilia said, “but vines don’t really talk.”
Otis scoffed and put his finger to his ear. “Mine do.”
“Please just tell me if I’m crazy to pick today.”
Otis chuckled to himself and feigned zipping his mouth shut.
“You and Brooks are conspiring against me,” she said with a smile of embracing a challenge.
* * *
When she returnedto her babies, she sat in the dust and closed her eyes. She could hear tractors and footsteps from other rows and music coming up from her dad’s studio. To her ear, the vines were not talking.
She pressed up and plucked a grape from a cluster. Sitting cross-legged, she closed her eyes and stuck the berry into her mouth. As it burst in between her teeth, the juice hit her tongue in an eruption of flavor. Giving in to theterroir, she lowered down onto her back and put all her focus on the taste. She could feel the ground beneath her, almost like it was trembling.
Once she’d swallowed the juice, she chewed on the skin and gave in to the tannins as they gripped her mouth. Something kept telling her it wasn’t too early. She needn’t be scared. Spitting the seeds and skins to the ground, she lay there, still and listening.
The flavors of the Red Mountain syrah juice lingered for a long time, and she imagined the journey these grapes would take, all the way to the bottle. She imagined this exact flavor profile transforming during fermentation and then finding its way to a wine glass. That’s when it hit her.
Today was the day. She could suddenly taste exactly what the wine would taste like six months from now. It wasn’t bitter or too vegetal. Nor was it sappy and unbalanced. All the doubt and fear and anxiety that had clawed at her washed away.
She called Brooks, and within thirty minutes, they were picking her fruit. Four of them marched up and down the rows with clippers, filling small buckets and transferring them to two larger bins resting in the back of the truck. A little over two hours later, her vines were naked, and the bins were full.
Driving the truck back up to the winery, she parked near the crush pad. She pulled up one of the garage doors leading into the cellar, then climbed onto a forklift. As Brooks watched with crossed arms, she unloaded the two bins and set them down gently onto the crush pad.
Hopping off the forklift, he asked, “What’s next?”
“We stomp?”
“That we do.”
Brooks rolled down the truck windows and cranked up some vintage rock ’n’ roll. They removed their boots and rolled up their jeans. Emilia climbed into her bin first, and a burst of pleasure hit her as her feet sank into the pillow of grapes.
Brooks swung a leg over the wall of his bin. “Too late to turn back now.”
“Did I make the right call?” she asked, lifting her legs and walking in place. The grapes exploded under her feet, and she thought there might not be a better feeling in the world.
“There is no right or wrong. You know that.”
She sighed. “I mean, did I screw it up? I understand that the correct picking date is subjective.”
Brooks stopped stomping. “For what it’s worth, I’m picking the Angeline block later today.”
Emilia’s arms tingled. Her eyes watered. “Are you serious?”
“You did good, kid.”
She raised her hands in victory. There might not be a right or wrong day to pick, but she was proud to know she and Brooks were on the same page. With a feeling of immense satisfaction and fulfillment, Emilia went back to stomping the grapes of her first true vintage on Red Mountain.
