by Noah Gordon
He lay for a brief unpleasantness with someone’s moist armpit on his face, but everyone quickly disentangled, cursing or laughing, according to their personalities. There were many bruises, but Eduardo soon established that there were no serious injuries.
What a strange pastime, Josep thought. But even as he did so, he recognized a new truth.
He had found something he was going to love to do.
On a warm Sunday morning Donat came to the village, and they sat on the bench near the vines and ate slightly stale bread and hard sausage.
Donat clearly thought that digging a cellar was a form of lunacy, but he was tremendously impressed by the fact that Josep had acquired their neighbor’s land. “Padre would not believe it,” he said.
“Yes…Well, but…I’m not going to make this quarter’s payment to you and Rosa,” Josep said carefully.
Donat looked at him with alarm.
“I am short of cash, but it will be just as we arranged in the contract. When I make the next payment, following the harvest, I’ll also give you this payment as well, plus ten percent.”
“Rosa will be upset,” Donat said nervously.
“You must explain to her that it’s to your advantage to wait for payment, since now you’ll receive the additional penalty.”
Donat became cold and distant. “You don’t understand. You are not married,” he said, and Josep couldn’t argue with him.
“Do you have more sausage?” Donat asked peevishly.
“No, but come and we’ll stop at Nivaldo’s and get you a nice piece of chorizo that you can eat on the way home,” Josep said and patted his brother on the shoulder.
45
Vines
That summer the weather was precisely what Josep would have ordered if it had been possible to do so, days of tolerable heat and cooler nights, and he spent long hours among the vines, wandering along the rows when his work was completed, haunting the old plants whose buds he had limited, inspecting everything as though his eyes could make the grapes grow better at every stage. The grapes on those vines came in very small. As soon as they darkened in color, he began to sample them, savoring flavors unripe but full of promise.
He did very little work in the cellar, intent on other projects. In July he emptied the stone cistern his great-grandfather had used to stomp his grapes, moving the things that had been stored in it—tools ands buckets and bags of lime—to Quim’s house, and then scrubbing out the tank and rinsing it with water hauled from the river and warmed and mixed with sulfur. The cistern still was very serviceable, but the petcock that would allow him to drain the juice of trodden grapes was in bad shape and he saw it would have to be replaced. For several Fridays he attended the market in Sitges, looking for a used spigot, but finally he gave in and bought a new one of shiny brass.
It was mid-August when Emilio and Juan came to the vineyard in the cooperage’s big wagon and Josep worked with them to unload two large vats made of new oak wood that smelled so good he couldn’t believe they were his. They were the only new vats he had ever seen, and set in place next to Quim’s house they looked even better than they smelled. He had paid Emilio for one of them, as they had agreed, and though that had left him with diminished cash and heavier debt, he was so excited that he took Maria del Mar aside and asked her to do him a favor. She hurried to Angel’s farm and bought eggs, potatoes, and onions, and while the coopers sat with Josep and drank bad wine, she made a fire and cooked a huge tortilla that soon they all shared with great relish.
Josep was grateful to Emilio and Juan and liked their company, but he was impatient for them to leave. When finally they drove their wagon away, he hurried back to the Torras piece and stood before his new tanks for a long time, just looking at them.
With each passing day he was more anxious and uneasy, acutely aware of the risks he had taken. He studied the sky a great deal, waiting for nature to torture him with hail or pounding rain or some other calamity, but rain fell only once, a gentle soaker, and the days continued to be warm and the nights progressively cooler.
Maria del Mar enjoyed the autumn tradition they had established and wished to cut the cards again to see whose crop should be harvested first, but he told her he wanted to take her grapes before his, because the fruit on the old vines wasn’t ripe enough. “We might as well wait until we can move onto my land and do my entire harvest,” he said, and she agreed.
As usual, he enjoyed working with her. She was a ferocious worker with amazing energy, and sometimes he had to struggle to keep up as they moved along the rows, rapidly harvesting grapes.
He found himself enjoying her proximity and comparing her to other women he had known. She was prettier than Teresa and far more interesting. He allowed himself to admit that she was more desirable than Juliana Lozano, or Renata, or Margit Fontaine, and so much easier to be with than any of those women, when she wasn’t giving him hell about something.
When they finished pressing her grapes, Josep and Maria del Mar moved onto his land and harvested the grapes whose juice would go to the vinegar works, hauling them to the village press in the usual way. Most of that harvesting was done on the Alvarez piece, and he filled his own vats with the juice that would go to the vinegar company. Though many of the old Garnacha and Cariñena vines he had pruned of buds were on his family land, the oldest Ull de Llebre vines were on the Torras piece, and Josep roamed among them, picking a grape here and there and chewing judiciously.
“They are ripe,” Maria del Mar told him.
But he shook his head.
“Not ripe enough,” he said.
The next day, his verdict was the same.
“You’re waiting too long. They will be overripe, Josep,” Maria del Mar said.
“Not yet,” he told her firmly.
Maria del Mar looked up at the sky. It was cloudless and blue, but they both knew how the weather could change, bringing a terrible rainstorm or a destroying wind. “It is as if you are daring God,” she said in frustration.
He didn’t know how to reply. Perhaps she was right, he thought, but “I think God will understand,” he said.
Early the next day when he put an Ull de Llebre in his mouth and his teeth broke the thick skin, the juice in the single small grape flooded his mouth with flavor, and he nodded.
“Now we pick,” he said.
He and Maria del Mar and Briel Taulé began to take the grapes in the first grey light, cutting bunches and spreading each basketful on a table in the shade and picking the individual berries, slow, fussy work. If the growth had been greener Josep would have asked them to destem everything, but the vines were so ripe he told them a bit of stem now and then would be a good thing. They carefully culled out any spoiled grape or bit of trash before pouring the beautiful dark treasure gently into the stone cistern.
They picked part of the crop in the coolness of early morning, and began to pick the rest in the late afternoon, working hard and fast throughout the early evening in order to beat the coming darkness. When all light failed just before ten o’clock Josep placed lanterns and torches around the stone cistern and Maria del Mar carried her sleeping son to a blanket Josep spread where she could see him.
They sat on the rim of the cistern and scrubbed their feet and legs and then they ventured into the tank. Josep had spent most of his life on this vineyard yet had never trod grapes until he had found his way to France. Now the wet feeling of the grapes popping under his naked feet was deliciously familiar, and he smiled to see the expression on Maria del Mar’s face.
“What should we do?” Briel asked.
“Just walk,” Josep said.
For an hour it was pleasant to stride in the tank in the cool air, back and forth, six paces the long way. The two men were shirtless, their trouser legs rolled high, and Maria del Mar’s hem was pinned to her waist. After a time, it grew more difficult, their legs tiring, each step marked by the sucking sound of the sweet-smelling must that seemed to release their feet almost reluctantly.
To keep from impeding one another, they walked in a line. Soon Briel began to sing a song about a thieving magpie that stole olives from a farmer’s wife. The rhythm of the music helped them walk, and when the youth’s song was done, Maria del Mar began to sing tunelessly about the new moon shining on a woman who yearns for her lover. She didn’t do the song well, but she was brazen and sang it through, several verses, and after that Briel sang again, another song about lovers, but not a romantic song as hers had been. He sang of a fat boy whose sexual excitement caused him to faint each time he prepared to make love. The beginning of the song was very funny, and the three of them were laughing, but Josep thought Briel was a fool and disrespectful to Maria del Mar.
“Enough singing, I think,” he said drily, and Briel fell silent.
When Josep reached the end of the tank and turned, he saw that Maria del Mar was smiling at him just a bit mockingly, as if she could read his mind.
It was early morning before Josep thought the grapes thoroughly crushed. In the first gray light, Maria del Mar lifted her sleeping son and carried him home, but Josep and Briel still had work. A pailful at a time, they moved the trodden must to one of the new high oak vats. Then they hitched the hinny to the wagon and brought water from the river and carefully sluiced out the treading tank.
When Josep fell into bed the sun was high and he had only a few hours of sleep before they had to begin to pick the Garnacha.
On the third day, when they harvested the Cariñena, they were exhausted and Briel had a painful stone bruise on the ball of his left foot; by the time they began to tread grapes in the tank the youth was in pain and limping badly, and Josep sent him home.
Worse, Francesc could not sleep and was running about in the dark. Maria del Mar sighed.
“My son must sleep in his own house tonight.”
Josep nodded readily. “There is less than half the volume of Cariñena grapes than we had of Ull de Llebre or Garnacha,” he said. “I can mash them by myself.”
Yet when she carried the little boy home, he faced the long night ahead with less than pleasure. The sky was moonless. It was very quiet; far away, a dog barked. The day had been slightly warmer but there was a cooling breeze that he welcomed, because he had been told that air movement carried natural yeasts into the tanks, helping the fermentation process turn the grape juice into wine.
Reaching down, he took a handful of the sweet mash and chewed as he began to plod. Overtired, he walked sullenly by himself in the satin darkness, his mind closing down so that he was barely conscious, his world diminished to six paces up, one pace across; six paces back, one pace across; six paces up…
A long time passed.
He wasn’t conscious of her approach, but Maria del Mar was there, stepping carefully into the mash.
“He is finally asleep.”
“You could have slept also,” he said, but she shrugged.
They walked together in silence until they collided while making a turn.
“Jesús,” he said. He reached out only to help but in a moment found himself kissing her.
“You taste like a grape,” she said.
They kissed again for a long time.
“Mirimar.”
His hand spoke to her and she gave a slight shudder.
“Not here in the must,” she told him. When he helped her out of the tank, he was no longer tired.
46
Small Sips
The next morning, after the juice and the must had been stored, they sat at her table. Josep knew just enough about coffee to recognize that her brew was bad, but nevertheless they drank several cups as they talked.
“After all, it is a natural need,” Maria del Mar said.
“Do you believe the need is the same for a woman as for a man?”
“The same?” She shrugged. “I am not a man, but…a woman has a great need also. Did you think otherwise?”
He smiled at her and shrugged. “You have no one at the moment, nor do I,” Josep said. “So…It’s good we are able to give one another comfort. As friends.”
“Only, not too often,” she said shyly. “Perhaps we should wait until the need builds very strongly, so when finally we are together…Well…You understand?”
He looked at her dubiously and sipped his coffee.
Maria del Mar went to the window and peered out.
“Francesc is climbing his trees,” she said.
They agreed it was an opportunity. Because, after all, it might be some time before it would happen again.
Now Josep allowed himself to become extremely nervous, because he had placed his livelihood in nature’s hands and had to wait for the mysterious process by which grape juice was transmuted into wine. There were several vital things he had to do to help things along. Everything in the must that wasn’t juice—the skins, the seeds, and the stems—were repeatedly buoyed up to the surface of the liquid to become a cap, and the cap soon dried. Every few hours Josep drained off liquid from the bottom of the tank and climbed a ladder so he could pour the juice over the floating solids, and now and again he would use a rake to push the cap down, mixing it with the body of the liquid.
He did these things over and over again, throughout the day, and sometimes when he awoke in the middle of the night, he would go to the tanks and perform the rituals in the dark, almost in his sleep.
The weather stayed cool, slowing what was happening to the grape juice, but when a week had passed, Josep began drawing a few ounces from each vat twice a day and tasting it.
He was moody and skittish, poor company, and Maria del Mar left him alone.
She had always lived with grapes, and no one needed explain to her that now timing was everything. If Josep should interrupt the process too soon, it would mar the coloration of the wine and its ability to age, and if he waited too long, it would become poor, flat stuff. So she hovered in the background and sternly kept Francesc in his own vineyard.
Josep waited, each day interminable, wetting the caps and punching them down, tasting samples again and again, the sips revealing to him the growing strengths in the juices and their differences.
When the pressings had been in the vats for two weeks, the sugars in the juice had become alcohol. If the weather had been hot the Ull de Llebre mash would have grown too strong, but cool temperatures had kept the alcohol moderate, and the sweetness that remained was fresh and appealing. The Ull de Llebre lacked acidity but his Garnacha was tart and lively, while the Cariñena had a green, almost bitter power that Josep knew was a necessary ingredient in any wine that could be expected to age well.
Fourteen days after he had placed the juice in the vats, he sat at his kitchen table early one morning with three filled bowls in front of him, and an empty bowl, a pitcher of water, a large glass, a very small glass, and a paper and pen.
He began by half-filling the small glass with Ull de Llebre and pouring it into the large glass, to which he added a similar measure of Cariñena and another of Garnacha, mixing them with a spoon. Then he took a sip, swished it around in his mouth at length, and spat it into the empty bowl. He sat reflectively for a moment before he rinsed his mouth with water and made a note of his reaction to the blend.
He forced himself to wait, to allow his mouth to lose the taste of the sampling, going outside and busying himself with small jobs, and then came back and blended and sampled another combination, this time mixing only Garnacha and Cariñena.
Every few hours he would taste another blending, reflect on it, and make a brief note, each time replacing the wine in the bowls so that overexposure to the air would not give him false information.
By the morning of the seventeenth day of fermentation, he knew the wines were ready and that he would place them in barrels that afternoon. Three sheets of paper on his table held his notes, but he knew many more combinations were possible. To begin the day he made a new mixture, sixty percent Ull de Llebre, thirty percent Garnacha, and ten percent Cariñena. He took a sip, swirled it i
n his mouth, and spat it out.
He sat for a moment, and then he made the same mixture and repeated the exercise.
He waited a bit longer before repeating exactly what he had just done twice, with a single exception—the third time he could not bring himself to spit.
Other mixtures had shown promise, but this wine seemed to fill his mouth. Josep closed his eyes, tasting the same flavors of berries and plums he had found in previous samples. But also black cherries, a lick of stoniness, a whiff of sage, a sniff of the wood of the vat. Scents he remembered, and tiny traces of sweetness and tartness that he was meeting for the first time. This mixture had a new wholeness, and he allowed it to play softly along the lining of his cheeks, slip under his tongue and slide over it, so that a little trickled down his throat and teased warmly.
When he swallowed, the drink bloomed fully as it went down, so that he sat and closely studied his rising pleasure. The taste played on and on in his mouth after the liquid was gone.
The scents rose into his nose and stayed, and Josep began to tremble as though something bad had happened, as though he were full of fear, as though he were not newly realizing that he had made wine.
He sat late at the table, just looking at the wine as if by studying it in the bowl he could learn secrets and wisdom. It was rich and dark, scarlet-red, the color gifted by the thick grape-skins that had soaked for two-and-a-half weeks in the fermenting juices.
He thought it beautiful.
And was tormented by an overwhelming need to show it to someone.
If only he could fill a bottle with this wine and present it to his father, he thought…Perhaps he should bring it to Nivaldo.
But he poured wine into his coffee-stained cup and carried it through the rows of vines to Maria del Mar’s threshold, where he tapped carefully, lest he waken the child.
