Page 24 of Before We Say Goodbye
Rebecca looked up to Sparrow, loving the life she lived: entertaining guests, tending to her garden, selling her fruits and vegetables in the tasting room. The two of them would disappear for an hour or two, and Rebecca would always come back glowing, as if she’d put another piece of life’s puzzle into place.
On those long, wonderful nights, the group would often do blind tastings and discuss geography and taste profiles. Coupled with his reading at home, Otis was becoming more proficient. He could name the crus in Beaujolais and the classified growths in Bordeaux. With a quick whiff of the bouquet, he could often tell if a wine came from the Côte d’Or or the Côte Chalonnaise. When they were lucky, Lloyd Bramhall would drive up from San Francisco with a bag full of wines that the rest of them couldn’t afford with a month’s salary. He was a generous guy like that, always willing to share his wealth. He was also the kind of guy who pronounced chardonnaysha-do-nay, as if he were requesting a glass from his butler, and his privilege irked Otis, especially when he’d find Lloyd staring at Rebecca.
One particularly warm Saturday afternoon in June, Lloyd brought a case of Bordeaux wines that he happily uncorked and put in brown bags. “By this time tomorrow, we’ll all be experts on Right versus Left Bank Bordeaux. Remember, the Right Bank is predominantly merlot.” He spoke with an exquisite accent of colorful origins. Though he was born in San Francisco, he’d spent part of his childhood in London and Paris as his father expanded the family’s textile fortune.
Otis pondered how this cherub of a man had become so lucky. Paul had told him about his jet-setting life, how he dabbled in the wine business for fun as he bounced around the world with various gorgeous women, staying in the most exquisite of hotels and mingling with the most elite of high society. When he wasn’t traveling, he returned to his monster of a home in Pacific Heights with a garage full of fast cars and a cellar overstuffed with the world’s finest wines. All that and he was only twenty-five years old. What in the world did he lack? Turned out Otis would find out soon enough.
They discussed the merits of each Bordeaux, calling out the acidity, the balance, the structure, swirling and studying their color, sniffing the nose, gurgling the liquid on their tongues.
“That has to be merlot, no?” Rebecca said with a smile that glowed in her eyes. “It’s so much softer.”
“Right you are, my dear,” Lloyd proclaimed, pulling down the brown bag to expose the label.
She glowed with delight, and Otis was thrilled that her love of wine was growing parallel to his own. He was not, however, as thrilled by the length of eye contact Rebecca and Lloyd shared.
“I’ve got one more to taste,” Lloyd said, setting a brown bag in front of him. He had his own glow about him. He loved being the center of attention, the benefactor of them all. Despite his eye for Rebecca and his confident-bordering-on-cocky demeanor, though, he was a hard man to dislike.
“Another Bordeaux?” Sparrow asked.
Lloyd ran two fingers across his mouth. “Mum’s the word.” Carefully concealing the top of the bottle as to not give away any hints, he poured a healthy taste into each person’s glass.
Like the rest of them, Otis let go of his surroundings and put his focus on the ruby-red wine. Everything else around him, the people, the vineyard beyond, even the table, fell away. He wrapped his fingers around the crystal stem and turned it a few times, looking for browning on the edges, an indicator of age. There was none to speak of, so it waslikely made in the last few years. He brought it to his nose, expecting either the voluptuous blueberry silkiness he’d come to know as merlot or the classic vegetal notes that crept into every cab he’d tried.
He smelled nothing of the sort. The wine in his glass wafted off scents that his virgin nasal passage had never known. Sure, he detected fruit: berries and even stone fruit. Then a pleasant brininess. Was that possible? Sure it was, if the vines had grown close enough to the ocean. It was the balance, though. It had enough tannins to create girth but not so much as to zap his mouth of its saliva. The fruit sprang from the glass like a silk scarf rising up and wrapping gently around him.
With this particular wine, the alcohol wasn’t evident, simply an element of the structure, a vertebra in the backbone of an extraordinary effort.
He hadn’t even tasted it yet. He let the wine splash into his mouth and rest on his tongue, then held it there to see what it had to say. It wasn’t Bordeaux, it couldn’t be. It was altogether a different region.
Pleasure painted Bec’s face as she spun her own glass and made her own discoveries. Though he wasn’t necessarily the competitive type, he did want to get this right. He wanted to show everyone at the table that he had promise. Oh, the hell with it. He wanted everyone at this table to know that he had the nose of a basset hound and the potential to be an extraordinary winemaker. The desire resonated in his chest. To make a wine, to have his own label, to be called a winemaker, it was a dream in a bottle.
Otis let the wine fall down his throat, and he enjoyed the slight burn, but even more, the cool silkiness, that scarf now touching his insides. As it settled in his belly, he could taste it in his toes.
There was something else, though. Something far beyond the fruit and savory characteristics, or even the structure. There was a tang of authenticity. There was ... his vocabulary lacked the words. It was like shaking a man’s hand and looking into his eyes and seeing his soul. This wine ... it came from the very essence of the earth.
Otis grinned into his glass and then leaned over to kiss Bec, tasting the wine on her lips too. This was a hell of a thing to do, sitting around with loved ones and friends, dissecting the terroir of the world.
Terroirwas a funny word that Otis had never spent much time thinking about until lately. Ultimately, a wine’s job was to taste like the place it came from, itsterroir.The beauty of that was every piece of land on earth could create a unique wine.
“Who’s ready to make a guess?” Lloyd asked, pacing alongside the table.
“I think I got it,” Rebecca replied.
“Vintage first.”
“I’m going late sixties.”
“Okay. Country.”
She looked around. “Has to be France. Not Bordeaux, though. There’s something old world about it. This is Gandalf the Grey in a glass. Tons of wisdom.”
Otis chuckled at that. She was his girl.
“I’m going Loire Valley cab franc. Nineteen sixty-eight.”
Everyone at the table let out a collectiveah. Lloyd went round the table, finally landing on Otis. “Okay, Brit Boy. What say you?”
Otis tried not to let the nickname bother him, but it did. It certainly did. “It’s a tad bit older than ’68. I’m going ’61 or ’62. There’s a sophistication that can only come from bottle time. And I’m going out on a limb here. This is not a European wine. There’s something about home in it, the marine influence. You can taste the whisper of the fog, the way it carries the ocean. It’s kind of ... dirty. Not dirty, but earthy. A scoop of our clay. I don’t know who could have made it, but I get the feeling its origins are dangerously close.”
