Page 40 of Before We Say Goodbye
Could she not see the truth? That she was still trying to make up for running away.
Otis did his best to support her, but he was no good at it. When she simply needed him to listen, he’d always jump in with solutions,and that never went well. Maybe the best role he could play was as the target, someone to bear the brunt of her inner turmoil.
Not that Otis was trying to eschew all the blame. Hewasworking too much. How nice it would be to ease his workload and make more time for Bec and Cam, but he simply had to keep his eyes on their dream. She understood more than anyone what it was like to be broke. The only way they could ever pay back their school debt and eventually build up some kind of financial cushion was if he relentlessly pursued the growth of Lost Souls and eventually found a way to purchase their own land.
Even as he thought it, he could hear his father cheering on his demise, ready to say “I told you so” at the finish line of his failure.
After dinner, Otis took a bottle to Carmine, and they cracked it open. Puccini played loudly on the record player. “It’s coming around,” Carmine said. “And the label’s nice. I’d consider washing my feet with such a wine. Maybe even give it to the dogs.”
Otis melted into the earth.
Carmine smacked his back. “Oh, lighten up. It’s far better than what I made with my second vintage. You and your wines are growing on me.” A long beat of contemplation ensued. “Come back Monday and I’ll put you to work.”
Otis looked at him dumbly.
“You asked for a job, didn’t you?”
The next morning Otis shipped a case of his wine to his parents and then went to visit Paul to tell him that Carmine had offered him a job. “I get it, Otis. Work here when you can, but go learn from that guy. Maybe share some of his secrets with me. In the meantime, that block is still yours. I can’t get enough of Lost Souls.”
Otis wasn’t a hugger, but he stepped forward and pulled Paul in. “I’ll pay you for the fruit.”
“Nah, just give me a few bottles every now and then. A man like you needs to have his own vines to farm.”
Carmine threw Otis right into the mix, first pruning with two other guys who’d worked there for twenty years. Every day was a master class on organic vine, pest, and weed management, using only holistic treatments. So much of the talk centered on energizing the soil and the ecosystem.
He learned that cover crops attracted beneficial insects—pollinators, ladybugs, wasps, and spiders—as well as prevented erosion. Cover crops also made the vines compete for water and nutrients, forcing them to struggle, which made them focus on reproduction, which meant activating their own antioxidant-rich, stress-resilient pathways that would energize the fruit.
No matter what, Carmine did not allow synthetic chemicals on the property. “Chemicals permeate the vine, poison the berries, and kill their potential. Then the toxins end up in your wine! Do people think that the process of fermenting can kill chemicals? No, it can’t.”
More than once, Carmine would dig into the earth with a shovel and show Otis the health of his soil. “You see the earthworms, the life. My soil is a living thing with bacteria and fungi, an environment ready to thrust its sexual energy into the vines.” He winked to inject some humor, but he was deadly serious.
“A balanced vine means a balanced wine,” Carmine would often say.
Every week they would move the black Hebridean sheep from block to block so that the animals would mow the tall grass, softly agitate the topsoil with their hooves, and leave their manure as fertilizer.
Carmine had a way with those sheep. They’d come running to him like a dog might. He could clap his hands, and they’d follow him into the next fenced-in area, where the tall grass waited. They’d even eat out of his hands. Carmine was the one who ignited Otis’s own love of animals.
When they weren’t tending to the awakening vines and the animals, they scrubbed clean the cellar, sterilized pumps, topped off and cleaned barrels, racked the wines, and monitored them through tasting andtesting. It was a never-ending cycle of work that repeated itself year after year.
Carmine also taught him the art of taking notes. For a guy whose outward appearance exhibited disarray, he wrote downeverything.A notebook for each vintage offered meticulous information on each cellar task and monthly tasting notes of each lot and their chemistries. Even at his age and his level of mastery, he always strived to make the next vintage better.
Experiencing the truth of what made a good wine, Otis fell in love all over again.
In early April, Otis’s father sent a letter that included a newspaper article fromThe New York Times. Addison wrote:
Thanks again for your bottle of wine. I’m including a clipping of a writer I’ve come to admire, a Sam Ledbetter. Not sure if you’ve heard his name, but he has a column in theTimescalled Vine Matters. Might be interesting to send him a bottle, see what he thinks. I expect he could give you some tips.
In the article, under a black-and-white drawing of the man’s face, Ledbetter reviewed several wines of the last year, featuring particular favorites from André Tchelistcheff’s latest efforts at Beaulieu.
Otis knew his father meant to help, but he felt a dent in his pride. Even when his parents had called to thank him for the wine he’d sent, Addison hadn’t exactly praised him. He certainly hadn’t acknowledged what a feat it had been to farm a block of vines and create a passable wine.
In the morning, as they compared wines from Hungarian and French barrels, Otis asked Carmine, “Do you know of Sam Ledbetter?”
“Oh, sure, that old curmudgeon. He makes me look like a happy guy.”
“He’s tasted your wines?”
“Sure, he’s tasted everyone’s wines. He comes out every year to meet with folks.”
