Page 114 of Blush
“Well, as much as I’d love to ‘just chill,’ I wanted to make this suggestion while we’re all together. Since it seems that we’re in sort of uncharted territory here, I was wondering, Dad, if you’d let me host the Harvest Circle this year. I have some people I’d like to invite—just for the fun of it.”
“What people?” Leonard said. “The whole point of the Harvest Circle is that our employees who spend the fall harvesting the wine are included in a ceremonial way. It gets them emotionally invested. That’s the purpose.”
Exactly, Leah thought.So why not offer it to the people who will potentially be buying the wine?She wanted to reach out to every group of women who had visited the winery over the summer and invite them to bring something from their home or garden to contribute to thestarter yeast for their first vintage of Hollander rosé. The wine would be for them, and in this small way, also by them. It would be truly theirs—something they might even care enough about to preorder. It was something businesspeople called “proof of concept,” and it might be just enough to convince her father not to give up. But that wasn’t something she could explain to him. It was something she just had to make happen.
“Look, I’m asking if I can run with it this year. It’s something I always dreamed of, and this is probably my last chance. It would mean a lot to me.”
“Are you including the employees?”
“I want it to be only women,” she said. “So no. Unless Peternelle wants to join in.” The employees might be upset to miss out on what might be the final Harvest Circle. But this was what she needed to do to make sure itwasn’tthe last.
“This is crazy talk, Leah. The Harvest Circle isn’t for entertainment,” Leonard said.
“Leonard, with all due respect, she’s never asked you for anything since the day she left this winery. Can you just consider this?” Steven said.
This seemed to give Leonard pause. He turned to her. “Just a few friends?”
“Absolutely,” Leah said. “Just a few friends.”
Fifty-seven
Leah converted the estate’s unused stables into a makeshift office—a sort of war room for outreach and planning for the Harvest Circle. It was the one space that was large enough for the assembled team to get some work done while being out of the way enough that Leonard wasn’t likely to intrude.
Steven helped her move a large folding table and chairs from the barn and bought portable chargers for their phones and laptops. She ordered a whiteboard, put it on a stand, and moved a bunch of fans from the house. At noon, heat was battling the whirring standing fans and winning.
The invite list was close to one hundred women, and Leah considered that number just the beginning. The more people who attended the event, the greater their chance of presales.
It was a lot to mobilize in a short amount of time. Still, calling Sadie to come help had been impulsive. Realistically, they could manage without her. Leah had just wanted her there for emotional reasons, but that wasn’t a good enough reason to pull her away from school.
“I’m sorry—you really don’t have to come,” she’d said in another phone call, this one directly after the dinner when her father okayed the plan. But it was too late: Sadie was all in.
Now she was busy helping Steven sort out the Hollander Estates mailing list and the reservation log from the past few months.
“Any luck with that book club from Virginia?”
“I left a voicemail,” Sadie said.
“So we have our book groups here.” Leah made a circle on the whiteboard. “Our cheese class list, our email list from the guestbook they keep in the tasting room, and the emails from the newsletter list. When is the e-vite going to be ready to go out?”
“I’m almost finished with it,” Bridget said from her corner. She was hunched over a laptop working in a graphic design application.
Leah still didn’t have the full story of the reconciliation between her brother and Bridget, but she could see that Asher finally believed what Bridget had told Leah the day she was crying in the oak room: She didn’t care about Asher’s money. She didn’t care about leaving the winery. She only cared about him.
“We’re still missing a bunch of emails,” Sadie said. “I’m working on the customers that only gave us phone numbers.”
Hollander’s weakness in maintaining a reliable mailing list was showing. Leah needed to act quickly; with just a few weeks to go before harvest, they had to give people enough time to plan if they wanted to attend the event. She and Steven had talked about how it was all very much a numbers game: realistically, only a fraction of the women they invited would actually show up, and only a fraction ofthemwould preorder the rosé. So the more they started out with, the greater the odds of that final fraction generating enough sales to make an impact.
A flash of green entered Leah’s field of vision.
“What’s going on here?” Vivian strode into the stable, dressed in head-to-toe emerald: green blouse, green skirt, and a green straw hat.
“Gran, what’s going on withyou?” Sadie said. “That’s a serious monochrome color commitment.”
“This is camouflage,” Vivian said. “I had to follow Steven here, slinking around the grounds like a criminal on my own property, since I’ve been excluded from... well, from whatever this is.”
Leah sighed. “Mom, I was going to loop you in. But we wanted to get things started.”
“Get what started?” She lifted her sunglasses and squinted at the whiteboard.
