by Roman McClay
He sent one of his two guard-dog bots to invigilate the soil of the Cabernet and pull for him one root, as long as the bot could keep it intact and wrap it in a bird’s nest for him and bring it back in one piece. The bot did as he commanded and Jack watched as the loading list was filled, with OWC and mise-en-boutille, each were catalogued and loaded in the second truck. The first had gone away 10 minutes ago; off to the ferry, with Jacques Mouton and Blax like shepherds with their dromedaries and elephants, their bestiaries of trucks all drunk off wine, he thought, thus turning machines into men and animals, not one gap inside, undedicated to the load, like a mother fat and happy with her babe.
He thought of the Petit Verdot and had the bot grab another tendril from that acre of vineyard, a mere .02% of that year’s cuvee in the chai now. “The nuance of Latour is in the Petit Verdot ,” he said, and licked his lips in expectation of the glass that waited for him on the butcher block table in the workman’s unplumbed kitchen off the side of the chai . He had taken a bottle of the second wine, the Les Forts , 1966 -its first year and from the enclos itself- and stood it up on the butcher block. He unearthed a black mug from his BDU pocket that read, “Liberal Tears” and had a line up to which one was to fill. They -the mug and bottles- were on the block as he stood upon the hill; the vineyards ran in each direction.
He’d also grabbed one bottle of the 2009 premier cru itself; and an 1863, laid down in stack-rows like bowling pins, with coin-style stoppers made of glass tinged with green. He counted 73. Well, now they have 72, and they should be grateful to have even one , because Jack , he thought to himself with some haughty mischief, had taken every other vintage in toto. Well, he thought as his head moved a bit and he modified his braying by then thinking of the one bottle in the stacks that he had placed a hand-scribed note under. The note said, “are you like me, when you see that photo of Mansfield and Sophia Loren, in that all you can do is slap yourself in order to stop reflexively staring at the Latour in the middle of the frame?”
It was the kind of thing Blax would not like; but maybe Jack would crumple it up and discard it so nobody would read it before this whole thing had played out. He would think on it , he committed to that.
Château Latour -bucking convention- had refused to continue en primeur , back in 2011, Jack recalled and thus did not release a wine again until 2022, a full 10 years after the 2012 vintage had been harvested. It was a haughty move, and right, and true, Jack thought. The wines needed 10 years at least to soften and mature. And they had no need of the working capital that futures provided the other château , so they made a unilateral decision to piss off the negociants; the middle-men, the scourge of all artists and artisans. He had thought of taking some of the 2012 vintage but the OWC of that were down to just 40 units, so he left it and took the rest.
Goddamn, he thought, he was standing on the best acreage in all of Bordeaux, and that was the best in all of France, and that of the world ; the enclos was the best of the best of the best, and he had rocks from it weighing him down by .04lbs and elevating him -he thought- by 1,600 kilometers up into the air. He smiled and felt them again in his pockets. Most thieves focus on the money, and not the poetry of their place in the ecosystem of life. They were not thieves so much , he thought, as balancing acts, like man who strikes back at the aggressor 10 times as hard as he was hit; somehow creating parity even at 10 to ostensible 1 . Ah, for the 1 was not a 1, as assumed, but contained -and was contaminated by- all that unaccounted for cost . See, Jack thought, hidden costs must be accounted for and the Jacks were doing just that. The one was never mere one. The first strike was ten times what it seemed.
The bot returned just then with his two bird’s nests of coiled root, little bits of hummus and marl marred like stains and weathering. He placed them in a small box he had made of carboard from the cave under château . He handed it back to the bots to place in the truck as the final barrels from 2009 were being loaded.
He had seen the stainless-steel tanks in the chai ; he felt their water-cooled skins, been impressed with their size -164 hectoliters for malolactic fermentation- and their innate austerity. They lacked gild or garnish; nothing getting in the way of their essence. He liked modernity, but it would never be what ancient things were to him; it wasn’t either or, it was not a choice one had to make. The ancient world was, and always would be; it was modernity that came and went. People never understood that conceit, he thought. People thought the past was gone, when it was now that never stood a chance.
We still sit on chairs, and drink from cups, we lay in beds, we still fuck , he thought. 1% of what we use or do or have is new, and yet we still overvalue the new, we seem to think all our wealth is ahead of us; it’s not, rather, it’s in us and has been since birth. It’s inherited from 500 million years of evolution, our wealth is our perfectly working cerebellum and limbic systems, the way our hearts beat without permission; God, he thought, we don’t waste a drop, we conserve and conserve and conserve so much. This too will pass, this razing of the bordelaise, the French will lose their minds, but Blax and Isaiah will set it right. They’ll see. They, Jack felt, must take this opportunity to reflect .
A drone sent images from the D2 highway to the left of the vineyard; it was images of a truck with a scanner that triggered the RFID alarm that all the recon bots were set to. Jack canceled it and mused some more on the argile gonflante of the clay; so dense it can hold water on either side of it for days, for weeks, without any percolation, warming it, allowing minerals to settle, pressing hydrostatically on the water table below. What a conceit, the clay standing aside history and saying, “halt.” He imagined beds of clay, prison walls of clay, cubes of clay handed to gods and told of what to do.
He pulled a single page from his breast pocket and laughed at how much shit he had brought to this mission; like a sandwich to a Bar-B-Que , he rebuked himself. But, this page was from Montaigne , and it mentioned Latour , which he read silently, but then he came to a little line that he wanted orated, “if you make your pleasure depend on drinking good wine, you condemn yourself to the pain of sometimes drinking bad wine. ” With that he walked down to the little kitchen outside château and poured from the Les Forts , the second wine of the First Growth estate. He had already uncorked it and allowed it to breathe for some time. He poured the first draught into the black mug and uprighted the bottle on the block.
He sunk his nose into the bouquet and breathed in cassis de crème and mojocido of tannins; the lips and tongue next set under the wine like that marl-clay and it held in a pool there for a moment that felt as long as day. He breathed in again, with mouth full, then half full, of the ‘66, and tasted chamomile and forged bricks and the pride of the bordelaise . He imagined the cup as if made of clear glass and thus would reveal a brick edge at the fill line; he swallowed and let the sustaining laurels of a 70-year wine finish in its own time. It went on for 30 then 40 seconds before his own saliva returned like tinnitus, the quiet banished by the pitch lost; the taste only finally gone when the memory that would last forever supplanted it.
He smiled and downed the rest in one gulp from the mug and turned it over like a shot glass on the block; a ring of red was laid down that would be photographed and surrounded by French police for hours the next day, as if it were crucial evidence. Everyone would be furious when it refused to reveal any DNA.
He looked toward the horse stalls again and saw the head of the noire and gris draught horse 19 hands high; the one that had left the shoe prints the size of Nephilim -diadem in the rows, as Latour had used horse to plow the enlcos since they begun the transfer to biodynamics in 2008. They packed in 10,000 vines per hectare, so dense they seem like feathered nests, filled with little eggs, the rocks at edge he saw when he blinked. He gave the horse an au revoir cabeceo , which the pale beast eyed but ultimately ignored; and with that Jack turned to the truck.
He jumped into the cab with the 750ml bottle of the 2009 Latour under his arm, thinking of Montaingne’s citing Socrate
s , “to each according to his abilities,” and then thinking of what a bunch of scoundrels those Marxists were, to not even know from whence that idea came. And of course, it was Hagel who loved Margaux , as Jack One would surely have known, Jack thought, as he plundered and cursed that effete estate. “Ho, Ho, Ho,” Jack said -thinking of his dear Jack One and how surly he often was- as the truck fired up and the DXsF-3 repeated its coded key-in; a request for permission to begin the protocol.
“Yes, yes, you greedy little bastard, you arsonist at heart!” he said to the bot as he gave it permission to douse the acreage with its payload of black plumes and red dooms and a witches brew of low and wide cauldron fires .
“Light it up, and,” he said, and let the unfinished sentence hang, putting the truck in first gear and now driving quickly up château road to conjoin with the D2E6 and toward Lamange as the bots scrambled to catch up. They had been photographing the caves and grounds when Jack took off and were forced to cut across the vineyard as it ignited. The bots managed to adhere to the truck’s flank like Echeneidae , remora , attaching themselves as to the quinquereme of Mark Antony’s fleet as he fled the burning of Actium .
The last bots had retrieved the open bottle of les Fortes and the mug Jack had insouciantly left and they -in haste- sprayed the round brown stain to kill any DNA left. The last of the nanobots hurtled through the air, now around l’enclos and the outer vineyards, as the flames had rose and engulfed too much area for them to cut through.
Now, a single bottle, held awkwardly at 46 degrees by the bots, with some wine spilling out like deep red flames of liquid from a Molotov cocktail in a Bordeaux bottle, straight and shouldered like a man -unlike the bottom heavy Burgundy bottle that mapped onto many women’s unfortunate forms- and, like a side car to an old Liberator pan-head that rode these very Segur lands in WWII, it and the black cup -turned backward to deflect the air- were both flying a meter off the ground racing to catch up to the truck as Jack lit a cigar and shifted gears.
As he passed the Tower that supplanted the one original Saint-Maubert , and as he was hemmed in by the vineyards planted exactly to the edge of the unpaved road -itself only 3-meters wide- he hit 66 kmh and he shot out of the château . He felt like Moses as the Sea of Red held at either side as he and his tribe crossed; there was no slope or glide or cushion at all, it was vineyard edge-to-edge and it was all on goddamn fire.
On both sides of him were flames of the 1-million vines, flames that rose from one to two meters above the rows and up to his truck’s door-window height so he could still see over its amour fou . The red stretched on for a while; he thought it a bit like Aeneas’ ships lit in the bay of Eryx ; then he thought somehow of Proust and began speaking aloud his rechauffe , insisting that this behavior of theirs -of his- was “the only way to kill a feeling of love; and young enough and brave enough to undertake to do this, to inflict this wound on myself, the cruelest of all wounds, since it comes from one’s knowledge that it is bound to succeed.”
V. 2036 e.v.
Mouton was the baby of the family, admitted into the grand cru classification -first set out in 1855- only in 1973, and it had showed the flamboyancy of youth, no need to represent the staid family crest, the escutcheon of the First Growths. It figured it did that by the quality of the wine, and so what if its label was so ribald and scandalous in 1993 that it was banned for export?
It -that year- was a nude drawing of an underage girl.
Each year Mouton chose a different label, from artists’ renderings, and Blax had an ‘82 with John Huston’s work. This was the same Huston who directed a deracinated Moby Dick and The Misfits , and who shot large animals for fun; Blax’s bottle had seepage stain and rack wear. But it was an original that was over 50 years old, Jack Four thought as he moved along.
And the quality of Mouton was there, no one doubted that, but it was a quirky addition to the four châteaux ; the four older brothers who had maintained the appearance of an unchanging world year in and decade out and century in and Mouton out. Mouton was like a kid born after the grouped older siblings had all left home, left for life. The boy dressing up in new outfits each day; running wild into the cadastre mapped on Prussian blue rolls in Bordeaux rooms jammed with 1st , 2nd , 3rd , 4th and 5th growths. Acreages of the AOC and those outside, garagiste wines like La Pin and one-man operations that produce 12 cases annually, were all tracked by the Bordelaise .
Mouton was the garish one, but not shallow by any means, a powerful and elegant wine, iron-rich sands, and moody terroir made glamourous wines that charmed even its older brothers most vintages. Jack stared at the black and gold bottles, the baal in braided -raised- tuft of the 2000 vintage; he ran his hand over the scruff of the 6L bottles. He then stooped and leaned and looked down wind, at 100 original wood cases of jeroboam of the millennia wine from Château Mouton . He looked; he smiled; he breathed.
He tagged them all and one-by-one the bots picked them up, each so heavy that each required 500 bots, and they floated like coffins on pallbearing shoulders, filing out to the sepulchral Mouton façade ; the truck parked at the eastern end.
He moved toward the back-vintage bottle racks, and out of the cask and OWC rooms of these labyrinthine caves . He almost touched -but did not- each of the bottles as he scanned for the 1974. It was an unremarkable vintage, but it matched Blax’s year of birth and he wanted to drink from grapes that grew that year that he -their Captain- had too formed.
What potential hidden, Jack thought, by a woman, a yammering silly wife, a father absent on TDY, a country barely healed from a president exiled and his enemies -like Raoul Duke- still on the lawn of the White House as he lifted off in Marine-One. What a year . He thought of the 1850’s and the classification, and that the château at Mouton qualified to be among the first growths but did not receive the imprimatur due to being English owned at the time; or so it is rumored, asserted, believed.
Premier nu puis , the label had read until 1974, and Jack held that year’s bottle in his hand now; the brooding black of the Motherwell label still clean and un-impinged by the bin or rack. This bottle was in perfect shape and he ran his thumb lightly over the spatter of ink as if a wind could touch clouds and not wipe them away. 237,500 bottles of 750ml that year, and now in reserve -each vintage- 24 bottles of this size, 6 magnums and 3 jeroboams . He left one jeroboam of each -back to 1859- marking it all for the bots, taking the rest.
He looked at the old brown and web-white squares of the now-empty racks, denuded of all but the ancient tags and that one large circle of a 6L bottom of the jeroboam he left, and lastly, he knew -but did not see even with his augmented eyes- that there was a nanobot stowed away to do the reconnaissance as this commandeering was discovered the next day.
The same year The Origin of Species was published, was the first year contained in Mouton’s back-vintage library, a baton passing of some kind, Jack pondered as he watched the bots assemble and lift in the purposive low-light conditions of the reserve. He did not know that Blax was ruminating on similar things over at Lafite ; they too had back vintages to just one year before, likely when Darwin was finishing that tome.
He wondered if their next mission might have designs on Blax’s other obsession, the great book libraries of the world and their hidden and preserved first editions -first printing- of such books as the most famous from 1859. He looked it up -via his PGC- and just as he had suspected: a first edition of Darwin’s opus went for $488,000; last sold in 2029 of the era vugari . He smiled and figured he had his answer in the form of a number that could be pulled apart like thrown stalks of the I-Ching and made to form a nod in the affirmative .
The humidity was at 90% and each breath felt wet and old and infused with tannins escaping the bottles; he and they both fighting for oxygen as that element invigilated he and the wine. He turned about and stared down the hall of this library which contained -or had contained- over 100,000 bottles. The bottles slid out and down and out under the propulsion of the nanobots; the a
mber curved ceiling and stacked rows and columns of geometrics appeared as a beehive to him now.
The black and the light-honey colors, dark and unrefined, the bottles were easy to mistake as the combs and then as the fleeing eusocial bees themselves. The bots he heard now buzz as drones and the queen-to-be left behind in this ancient apiary. Each cell shadowed by its neighbor and passing half-light to its mate, some cells clogged with the ambrosia light thick, some cells occluded in black absence of lumens. This image would imprint on his mind like a brass-rubbing, an old daguerreotype of that lone silvered vapor as the Whale of his mind’s cathexis spouted and taunted and held it in the reflection of Fedallah’s tenebrous eyes.
He thought of the decalage between the upper chai rooms, modern and uniform like rows of base-pairs held in the quiet genome of the sleeping bear of winter; above ground and inert this time of year and the caves below; he willed himself away from this basement of château up to the Great Barrel hall guarded by the two golden caryatids.
As he entered he stopped to pull into his eyes and mind the repeating effect of the endless line of 988 barrels, warm-brown at center, riven by black strapping, that looked like flat stairs -if not to heaven then- to some anteroom of the lower gods’ abode. The walls and ceiling were white and uninterrupted by tape marks or fissures or seams. It was modern and perfect; he did not want to disturb it at all. He marked for removal two barrels from each end only and turned and began the walk to the vinification rooms, the black-beams like trussed-trees holding up the open rafters geometric with trusses themselves. All of it was bolted in massive sizes of 10” and 12” hewn square-lumber, all uninterrupted and as ponderous on the eye as the reserve below with its intersecting angles that repeat ad infinitum like an upright joke that God tells at each dinner party he throws for the saints.
