Page 58 of Red Mountain Burning
“You didn’t do anything.” Remi looked at their guests. “She’s having a rough go at life right now, as you can see. Please forgive her.”
“We’ve all been there,” Jake admitted.
“Should I go talk to her?” Margot asked Remi.
“No, no. Let her cool down. Let’s enjoy your beautiful dinner. You’ve worked hard all day, and everything is absolutely wonderful.”
Right. Everything was absolutely wonderful.
* * *
A week into their lessons,Emilia rode with Brooks into Benton City to get lunch. “Can you really taste the difference between, you know, like factory wine and wine farmed consciously? How do you know it’s better?”
Her questions were getting more intelligent, and he knew the wine bug had bitten her. “Now that’s a good question, Em. The answer is, of course, complicated. If you blind tasted me on five wines, one of which was made in a less invasive style, I’d like to think I could pick out the right one.But, if the two wines were picked on the same day, grown on the same slope, I might be stumped.”
“Wait,” Emilia said. “So you really can’t tell which wine is better?”
“Now, hold on. I can tell which vineyard is healthier if I walk the vines. But the resulting wine…I could be fooled. That’s why blind tasting can be dangerous. It’s like shaking a person’s hand and trying to assess his integrity. Give me a chance to get to know the wine over the course of dinner, and I’ll have a much better chance of guessing. To me, poor farming leads to wines that lack depth. If you raise vines the right way, the wines change in the bottle and in the glass. They’re as alive as you and I are.”
Crossing the bridge over the Yakima River, Brooks said, “This is why context matters. Youknowthat it’s better. Or, sorry,betteris not the right word. Wine is subjective. Like any other art form, there is no better or worse. If you like it, you like it. There’s no set standard to judge by. The critics who like scores want you to think there’s a standard. For example, if a critic rates a wine one hundred points, then they are essentially saying the wine is perfect and all wines should be like that. But that’s their opinion, nothing more. No one can say a wine is better, but we can certainly argue that a wine is honest. Am I losing you?”
Brooks slowed to let a man on a black horse cross the road.
“I kind of get it,” Emilia admitted. “It’s a lot of extra work for something you might not be able to taste.”
“But you’ll know in your heart that the wine is true.”
Emilia stared out the windshield, pondering his words.
“Let’s take this to the art world.” Books said. “Think of the most perfect reproduction of a Van Gogh—one that fools both of us. Why doesn’t it have the same magic as the original?”
“Because it’s not the original?”
“It’s not the original,” Brooks repeated. “It doesn’t come from the hands of a man so emotionally charged that he cut off his own ear. It’s not the canvas that his hands touched. It’s not the paints a genius mixed. It’s a copy—a giclée. That’s context. I don’t want a fake on my wallorin my bottle. It doesn’t matter whether you can see or taste the differences. The greatness of art is in the context. I want the original.”
As they wound the curve and downtown Benton City came into view, he asked, “What would you like for lunch? Mexican or…Mexican?”
“If I have to choose, I’m thinking Mexican.” Returning to their discussion, she asked, “Do you have any books that talk about all these ideas?”
“I have a shelf full of them.”
“Can I borrow a couple?”
Brooks smiled to himself. “I thought you’d never ask. It’s cool to think about, right? This idea of capturingterroir.”
“Yeah, it’s more about philosophy than anything else.”
“And yet, it’s a vine—essentially a weed—that grows out of the ground.”
Emilia looked out the window. “I can see why people devote their lives to it.”
“Yeah,” Brooks said. “It is kind of cool, isn’t it?”
* * *
After returning to the winery,Brooks led her down toward her house to another block of syrah. “So I was thinking,” he said, “you need your own project for the summer.” He pointed. “These vines are yours. Starting here and twenty rows down, all the way to the tree. You’re in charge until you go back to school. How does that sound?”
“Are you serious?” She looked like he’d given her keys to a new car. “I get my own vines?”
