The Prodigal Son Returns (3)
He thought of the cool, silent underground cellar at Domaine Leroy. Then he turned his gaze toward the vineyard beyond the winery walls.
“Did you find a way?”
Daniel gave Armando a slight nod and looked back up at the tank.
“Do you have a ladle?”
“Sure we do. Hang on a second.”
Daniel took the stainless-steel ladle Armando handed him and climbed the catwalk up the side of the tank. At the top of the five-meter vessel he drew a careful breath, held it, and opened the hatch.
When the fermenting carbon dioxide surged out he turned his head slightly, then peered inside. A thick cap of violet foam and grape skins had formed a dense layer across the surface.
With extreme care, Daniel scooped a ladleful of that purple foam from a specific zone near the top of the tank, transferred it into a small flask he had prepared, closed the hatch, and climbed back down.
“What’s that?”
“You’re Brian’s friend, so you go to UC Davis, right?”
“Of course. Brian’s in Viticulture & Enology; I’m in Agricultural and Resource Economics. Same college.”
“So the basic courses are the same, but…”
At Armando’s faintly puzzled look, he hurried on.
“I’ve been taking the viticulture and enology classes too, and my grades aren’t bad.”
Only then did Daniel’s expression soften.
“In that case… You know that primary alcoholic fermentation is the process where yeast eats sugar and produces alcohol and carbon dioxide?”
“That’s basic.”
“Right. Near the end of fermentation the alcohol inside the tank climbs to thirteen, maybe fifteen percent. At that point most of the fragile yeasts die from the alcohol they themselves created. But among them there are always survivors—yeasts that are genetically tough or perfectly adapted to the local environment.”
“So what’s in that flask is…?”
“Exactly. Have you learned about the cap?”
Armando finally understood what Daniel was driving at.
“I know. It’s the mass of grape skins, seeds, stems, and yeast colonies that get pushed up by the carbon dioxide and float like an island on top of the fermenting must. Ah—so the survivor yeasts are in that cap? Makes sense. That layer is right up against the oxygen, so it’s the best place for them to multiply.”
Daniel nodded, looking pleased.
“Wild yeast selected this way carries the character of the region better than anything else. Now we have to give these little guys the right temperature and oxygen so they can really work. This is the weapon I’m going to show Brian. But…”
He laid a hand on the tank and his face hardened at once.
“This place makes vinegar, so the systems are a complete mess. The temperature control isn’t even working properly…”
“When we took over the winery we were supposed to fix the cooling system, but since we were only making vinegar we never did.”
Vinegar could ferment at much higher temperatures—around thirty to forty degrees Celsius—so Armando, who had never had spare capital, had seen no reason to invest in a precise glycol cooling system.
“I see. At least it hasn’t gone into secondary malolactic fermentation yet, which is something…”
“Why?”
“From the feel of it the temperature’s already too high. It’ll climb further in a day or two, and without a glycol chiller we’re in a tight spot.”
“But Brian told me you used to work at Domaine Leroy. Did they have temperature control? I thought places in France didn’t use any of that.”
Domaine Leroy’s reputation as an extreme traditionalist winery was well known in the trade, so Armando’s question was hardly strange.
“Come on—not every French house rejects modern technology. Domaine Leroy was different, though. At the place I worked we used the natural cold of the underground cellar instead of glycol, and when that wasn’t enough we simply ran cold water down the outside of the tanks.”
Armando’s mouth fell open.
“That’s practically medieval winemaking.”
“Madame Lalou Bize-Leroy is… special. She’s famous for her fanatical biodynamic farming and her total rejection of modern enology.”
“How far does she take it?”
Daniel summoned the memories of France and gave a wry smile.
“Madame Lalou is extraordinary. Beyond ordinary organic practice, she sets pruning, harvest, and bottling dates according to the lunar cycle and the position of the constellations.”
“Wow… that’s almost—”
Armando didn’t finish the word, but Daniel knew exactly what he had been about to say. He laughed and shrugged.
“That’s not even the half of it. No pesticides, no chemical fertilizers, and she severely restricts even the sulfur dioxide that every modern winery uses. Instead she buries cow horns filled with manure and digs them up later to use as preparations.”
“……”
“Scientific knowledge never mattered much to her, and neither did economics. The house philosophy put perfection ahead of money, so they would leave only enough fruit on each vine for one or two glasses of wine and cut the rest away—concentrating every ounce of the vine’s energy into those few berries.”
“She’s something else. Most people would never even think of working that way.”
“She is. Anyway, since these tanks have no cooling gear, we’ll have to go primitive. First open the manual valves. And can you get me some dry ice?”
Armando understood that opening the valves meant running cold well water over the outside of the tanks, but the dry ice request puzzled him.
“What are you going to do with that?”
“Pour it in.”
Daniel pointed at the top of the tank—meaning he intended to open the hatch and dump dry ice straight inside.
“Is that… actually okay?”
“We do it as an emergency measure sometimes. If you don’t trust me, ask your friend.”
That settled Armando’s doubts.
“All right then. I’ll take care of it.”
While Armando opened the manual valves, pumped up the groundwater, and raced around ordering dry ice, Daniel stood staring up at the tank and murmured under his breath.
“Cabernet or Pinot Noir—they’re just grapes. Nothing to be afraid of.”
Hard resolve shone in his eyes.
The Deer Ridge Country Club enclave in Brentwood, California, where Fredrick’s mansion stood, was a symbol of wealth for the region’s elite. From one of the houses overlooking the cool green of the golf course, the fragrant scent of cherries drifted out.
On the terrace of that mansion the key figures of the Brentwood Cherry Growers Cooperative had gathered. In their hands were not ordinary glasses of Cabernet Sauvignon but a ruby-red brandy: Ruby Quartz.
“Good Lord, Fredrick. How on earth did you get hold of this? I couldn’t find a single bottle.”
Thomas Cromwell emptied his glass and let out a sigh of admiration. He was one of the cooperative’s core members and owned more acreage than Fredrick himself—one of the so-called “Cherry Godfathers.”
“Thomas is right. They’re going crazy trying to find this stuff in L.A. and San Francisco. People say getting more than one bottle is like plucking a star from the sky. How many cases do you have? Two?”
Samuel Reed, another grower, chimed in. He produced premium cherries under the Reed Family Farm label, yet even he had to surrender to the perfume in his glass.
Fredrick, thoroughly pleased with himself, shrugged and took a slow sip of Ruby Quartz. As the alcohol rose warmly through him, the pride he had long felt for his daughter Chloe’s boyfriend and business partner, Brian, burst its banks.
“Hahaha! Haven’t any of you watched the news? You know which winery Warren Winiarski works at these days? Redwood—my daughter Chloe’s boyfriend Brian’s place. And the distillery that makes this Ruby Quartz belongs to one of Brian’s friends. So snagging a couple of cases was nothing. Come on, drink up!”
Fredrick’s booming laughter made him look every bit the proud father who had already claimed Brian as a son-in-law.
In truth, Astra Vale—the wine credited with raising Redwood’s value tenfold—was said to be unobtainable even for the very rich, so by pure demand it still outranked Ruby Quartz. Yet the brandy possessed its own powerful allure, and the fact that Fredrick had two whole cases of something so scarce made every spirits lover in the room green with envy. Word was he also had a case of Astra Vale tucked away. The cooperative members gazed at him with undisguised longing.
In a quiet corner of the terrace, William Hartford slowly turned his glass. As president of the Brentwood cooperative and owner of the oldest estate in the district—Hartford Estate—he sampled the explosive aroma of Ruby Quartz without smiling.
By rights the gathering’s center of attention should always have been him, the natural leader. Lately, however, every eye had begun to fix on Fredrick, and the resentment had been building.
“These cherries in the brandy—they came from your orchard?”
“Hahaha! That’s right. Our cherries go to Redwood, and from there the juice goes to the distillery. Brian is fanatical about cherry quality. Every time a field bin arrives he checks them one by one.”
The members murmured that Brian must be extraordinarily exacting, praising him. William Hartford’s brow twitched; he pressed on.
“Come to think of it, starting the year before last the fruit leaving your place has been… unusual. Size well above grade, sugar so high I almost thought the Brix meter was broken.”
His tone was kindly enough, yet Fredrick clearly felt the cold edge of jealousy underneath.
The previous year California had been hammered by abnormal heat and drought; most orchards had suffered sharp drops in both yield and quality. Only Fredrick’s place had continued to pour out top-grade cherries, so curiosity was natural.
“What’s the secret, Fredrick? We’re all friends here. Some new specialty fertilizer from Israel? A soil amendment?”
Samuel Reed edged closer, eyes bright. Fredrick simply swirled the on-the-rocks glass of Ruby Quartz and laughed it off.
“Hahaha. You won’t believe me, but I honestly don’t know the exact details myself.”
“What kind of answer is that? If you don’t want to say, just say so. Don’t claim you don’t know.”
William Hartford’s face hardened at once.
“I’m serious. I signed a strategic partnership with Chloe’s boyfriend, Brian.”
The repeated emphasis on “Chloe’s boyfriend” grated, but William let it pass for the moment.
“Strategic partnership? Meaning what?”
“He boosts our production and sales; in return he takes a cut of the revenue. I wasn’t sure at first, but the very next year the quality of the cherries started changing.”
Something clicked in William’s memory.
“That… pizza business, right?”
“Hahaha! Exactly. The whole ‘are you going to sell pizza across California?’ thing. That was Brian working on the orchard. So I know the land changed—I just don’t know the precise science behind it.”
Thomas Cromwell cut in.
“You’ve been keeping your distance from the cherry side lately… so that’s why?”
“Yes. My daughter manages the cherry orchard completely. She and her boyfriend run the pear orchard together too, and they work like demons… hahaha!”
“Then what about you?”
“Didn’t I mention it? I’ve been focusing on the almond orchard.”
In another context it would have been major news, but these men had spent decades in cherries and routinely grew secondary crops; no one pressed the point. Their minds were elsewhere.
“Strategic partnership…”
William Hartford murmured the words under his breath. Watching him, Fredrick allowed himself a private, bitter smile. Brian would never offer the same partnership to any other cherry grower, and that knowledge only heightened Fredrick’s sense of triumph.
The cherry orchard that held a strategic partnership with Redwood—the hottest name in Napa Valley. That title alone would drive the value of his fruit still higher. Of that, Fredrick was certain.