The specific history of the Picard vineyard began during the Napoleonic Wars of the 1800s. Henri Picard, a captain in Napoleon’s navy, purchased the land in the small village of La Barre, in the eastern French region of Bourgogne-Franche-Comté. The gently rolling hills and sleepy way of life appealed to a man who had spent his life at sea; it was a great tragedy that he never got to enjoy it. The purchase was made shortly before his death in 1805 commanding the French ship Saturne at the Battle of Trafalgar.1
His brother, Louis, decided to plant pinot noir grapes on about a half-acre of the 20-acre parcel. The winery took years to produce that first vintage of Chateau Picard, 1815; then it was a very low-yielding vineyard, producing a paltry four hundred bottles. Over time more acreage was planted and the winemaking improved so that by the end of the 20th century each acre of grapes produced six thousand bottles of wine.
In that pre-industrial age of the first vintages, the winemaking methods were determined by the limited technology; grapes were harvested and pressed either by hand or primitive machines. For better or worse, these crude methods became tradition. My family ignored advances in winemaking technology, and, as a result, Chateau Picard has been made the same way for the last five hundred years. This would end up being an unforeseen advantage during the World War in the 22nd century. When John Ericsson, the genetically engineered ruler of Europe, invaded France, he destroyed the country’s technological base. So, even during this dark period of the world’s history, Chateau Picard survived.2
This first refusal of technology became dismissiveness, and eventually disdain. By the time my father, Maurice, was born in 2270, it had seeped into the bones of our familial culture. Father grew up in a home that reveled in the primitive. We worked our vineyard, food was cooked by hand. His leisure time, what there was of it, was spent reading. He developed a love of Shakespeare, which he passed on to his sons, as well as a fondness for Earl Grey tea.3
Modern society changed how people consumed and produced wine, the invention of the replicator radically altering the economics of food production. By the 23rd century, anyone manufacturing wine was doing it for the art of it, and my paternal grandparents, François and Genevieve, were experts. They produced some of our most memorable vintages, including the renowned 2247. My father reveled in this reputation, and threw himself into this life, taking over as the winery’s cellarmaster at the relatively young age of 29, even though my grandfather was still alive and living at the vineyard.
“He was single-minded,” my mother once told me. “Even François [his father] recognized Maurice’s passion and determination to make great wine surpassed his own.” I suppose if I inherited a character trait from my father it was his single-mindedness, his drive to do something, or create something, great and memorable. In one conversation with my mother she admitted to me that she felt my father lacked some imagination; he not only never physically left La Barre, his mind never did either. He decided to only imagine himself running the family winery. “Of course,” she said with a wry smile, “some found this dedication and single-mindedness attractive.”
My mother, born Yvette Gessard in 2274, was also from La Barre. She met my father in secondary school, where they began a romance. When she left for university (at the renowned École Polytechnique), he had already proposed marriage, and she had accepted. She was interested in the sciences, but she tailored her education to give her a place on our family vineyard.
“My professors were quite frustrated with my desire to become an enologist,” she said. “They felt I was wasting my potential.” An enologist is a scientist whose background includes chemistry, microbiology, geology, meteorology, and soil science. Of course, the enologist’s only concern with these varied subjects is their intersection with regard to grapes, wine, and especially fermentation. Whether or not my mother agreed with her professors or had any regrets about this decision she never revealed. She always gave the impression of being very content with her life, which consisted of her husband, children, and the work of the family vineyard.
My brother Robert was born in 2299. By the time I was born on July 13, 2305, he was already a dedicated assistant to my parents. Growing up, I became keenly aware of a stifling dynamic; Robert did everything he could to seek my father’s approval by imitation. There was no way for me to compete. Robert had six years of wine education and experience ahead of mine. But that wasn’t the chief resource he used to dominate me.
“Idiot, you’re doing it wrong,” he said as I tried to help tie vines, or, “You’re as dumb as the moon,” as I struggled at using pruning shears to cut stems. It was a cascade of abuse whispered in my ear or shouted aloud at every opportunity, to the point that I grew to disdain our family occupation. It reached a pinnacle one July afternoon. We were standing among the vines as my father gave us one of his many lectures on how to tell when the grapes were ready to be harvested. I asked why we didn’t use a computer, which would tell us exactly when they were ready.
“A computer cannot taste a grape,” he said, “or tell if the skins are about to burst, or if the heat has eaten the acidity in them.” From my little knowledge of computers (I was only eight) I imagined that a computer could probably do all those things. Instead, I decided on a less mature argument.
“Wine is boring,” I said.
My father showed no visible reaction, but from the look on my brother’s face it appeared as if I’d committed murder.
“Go inside then,” my father said. “Robert and I have work to do.”
As I turned away, I expected to see pleasure on Robert’s face, but instead I saw contempt and judgment. I suppose he was emoting in my father’s stead.
I went inside. It may sound like an exaggeration, but this was one of the most important moments of my life. I’d just declared my independence. I wasn’t fully conscious of the ramifications, the rift I’d cemented with my father and brother, and the implied decision I’d made about my future—that I wouldn’t stay at the vineyard. But the fear and exhilaration made clear to my young self that I was at a crossroads, and that I’d broken free of what felt like a trap. Even at eight, I knew the vineyard and winery would someday be Robert’s. He’d guaranteed that path for himself long before I was even born. And the fact was I had no passion for making wine. It seemed so trivial to me. I knew I was on the road to somewhere else, I just didn’t know where.
I needed to do something. Our computer time was strictly limited to schoolwork. I supposed I could sneak off to my friend Louis’s house; his family was not nearly as technology adverse as mine was, and there was an assortment of modern entertainments for children’s play. But I sensed from my father that I was being punished, and one rebellion per day seemed enough. Reading was out, I was too restless, so I wandered the house. I eventually found myself in the basement.
This was no longer a forbidden zone. Since my invasion of a year before, my father decided to make use of it. With a natural inclination to take the fun out of everything, he began our rigorous education of the family. We had to learn, by rote, all our ancestors and their achievements. This schooling in our family history had a subtle effect on me. We had a complete family history—a handwritten tome charting every blood relative on the tree and where they lived and what they did—but the forebears in the gallery were all people of great accomplishment: scientists, great writers, explorers. To my young mind it was these people I needed to emulate.
As I strolled through the hall of portraits, I realized I had to do something to distinguish myself, to guarantee my place in this gallery of the skilled and gifted.
I got to the photo of Louise Picard. She was in a spacesuit, standing with several other people on the surface of Mars. They were settlers, jovially holding shovels, as if they would literally be breaking ground on what would be the first human Martian city. Louise was the only photo on the wall of an ancestor who’d gone to space, and though there were others, Louise was the first. As I looked at the picture, I went through in my head my relativ
es who’d left Earth. There weren’t that many… and then a thought occurred to me.
I ran upstairs to our library, and went to the small dais where my father kept the handwritten family history. I scoured the passages of the generations who came of age during space travel, and after a few minutes was able to confirm the hunch I’d had in the basement.
No Picard had ever left the solar system, had ever gone to the stars.
I was eight years old, and I’d found my path.
* * *
I began work immediately. However, since I was a child and had limited understanding of what that work should actually be, my goal “to leave the solar system” was as vague as it was grand. I didn’t want to ask my parents for guidance for fear of giving away my plan to escape the vineyard. So I devoured whatever books I could find on the technology of space travel and the history of the Galaxy. There were few of these in our home, so most of that reading took place either at school or my friend Louis’s house, much to his chagrin (Louis, like most boys our age, wasn’t in love with reading). I already had a keen interest in the ancient Age of Sail, when men explored the world in wooden ships, and my study of space travel was a natural extension. I also began building and collecting model spaceships and attempted to become an expert on each one.
My mother indulged this interest, helping me acquire an extensive model collection, and for my ninth birthday we took a trip to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, North America. I was in awe at the many spaceships on display, including Zefram Cochrane’s faster-than-light Phoenix, and the first starship Enterprise. It was on that day that I acquired a model of that ship, and when we got home I immediately set about its construction. One of the reasons I was interested specifically in the NX-01: my brother Robert had a model of it when I was little, which he never let me play with. He had long since dispensed with such toys, but it had stayed in my memory.
When it was finished, I showed it to my mother, who asked me what I knew about it.
“First ship to go warp 5,” I said. “Its helmsman was Travis Mayweather.” Like most boys at that age, the most important thing about a ship was how fast it went and who drove it.
“Is that who you want to be?” my mother said. “The helmsman?”
“Yes,” I said, “he’s the one who flies the ship.”
“But he takes orders from the captain, who is the true pilot.”
I had never thought about it before. “How do you get to be the captain?”
“You have to go to Starfleet Academy,” she said, “and do very well.” She left me to a new fantasy. I had of course heard of Starfleet Academy, but this was really the first time I considered that it would be a place that I might go. As I stared at my collection of spaceship models, a different fantasy of the future began to emerge.
That night at dinner, I announced my intention to go to Starfleet Academy. I was met with a derisive laugh from Robert.
“They’ll never accept you,” he said. “They don’t want idiots.” He was as predictable as a damp, cold wind in November, yet in my childlike naïveté I still wandered into every interaction with my brother hoping for some wisp of friendship, or at least politeness.
“Robert…” At my mother’s warning, Robert withheld his next taunt. Whatever it was, I was certain I would hear it later.
“I’ll get in,” I said. “I’m not stupid.”
“You’re not,” Mother said. “But it will take a lot of work.”
“I’m going to do it,” I said.
“Waste of time.” This was my father. He was into his second bottle of wine, and had settled into one of his occasional dark moods.
“Well, I think he will,” Mother said.
“What do you know about it?” My father snapped this at my mother.
“Obviously,” she said, “I couldn’t hope to know as much as you. Eat your dinner.” Her condescension trumped his, and we sat in silence and finished our meal, though I was just about bursting with plans and determination.
The next day I came home from school. The night before, I’d been dying to research more about the academy, but I had to wait for my free periods in school to gather up all the information I could. There was more than my nine-year-old brain could comprehend, but I was on my way. I had taken copious notes, and was so anxious to go over them that I almost didn’t notice the tragedy that was waiting for me.
My new NX-01 model was broken on the floor. At first I thought it had just fallen off the table, but on closer inspection I saw a bit of mud on the broken engine. Someone had stepped on it. Probably a year before I would’ve burst into tears, but not on this day. I got angry.
I stormed downstairs, the pieces of my new favorite model in my hand, and pushed the front door open. On my way back from school, I’d seen Robert in the vineyard tying off a vine, and made a beeline for him. He didn’t see me coming, and just as he turned I got one good shove in. He lost his balance and fell to the ground. He was shocked, but up on his feet and on top of me before I could react.
“You piddly piece of trash,” he said. He was enraged that I’d gotten the upper hand on him, even for just a second. He punched me repeatedly, and it was only the sound of my father’s voice that put a stop to it.
“What the hell is this?”
My father stood over us, glaring. He pulled Robert off of me.
“He knocked me down,” Robert said.
“Because he broke my spaceship!” I said it as I held out the broken pieces as incontrovertible proof of Robert’s crime.
“I did no such thing!”
“You’re lying!” I lunged at Robert again, but this time my father grabbed me. He took the pieces of the spaceship out of my hand and threw them in the dirt.
“Why did you do that…”
“Get in the house, Jean-Luc! I don’t have time for your childish nonsense. There’s work to be done.”
I had no idea what to say. I had a childhood sense of justice, and I expected my father to enforce it, but he didn’t. Tears in my eyes, I gathered up the broken pieces and went back to the house. I was even more determined to escape these bullies who dominated my world.
* * *
From that day forward, I took a much more serious attitude to my schoolwork. Acceptance into Starfleet Academy was extremely competitive; less than two percent of applicants were admitted so I was determined to win high marks. I also focused on sports, including track and field, boxing, and fencing. Though I was driven by a desire to both make my mark on the universe and escape the vineyard, the attention I got from my successes was like a drug. My mother was openly delighted by each of my academic achievements. Even my father was impressed, giving me a crisp “very good” for each triumph. Of course, each accomplishment brought a scowl from Robert, which at the time gave me nothing but pleasure. I let myself believe that though he was older and stronger, he wasn’t as smart as I was. This was of course not true; he focused his efforts on the winery, and as a result his studies suffered. But feeling the victim of his oppression, I reveled in the pain I was causing him. Looking back, I regret this youthful arrogance, as it cost me a relationship with perhaps the one person who knew me best, and a person I would not fully understand until I was an adult, when it was too late. At the time, however, we were engaged in a battle of wills, and though I gave him no explicit explanation of my escape plans, he seemed to intuit them. From my perspective, he did everything he could to get in the way.
I remember once, I was eleven, in my room, reading a book. It was one of the many biographies of Starfleet Captain James T. Kirk. As I’d begun to study the history of Starfleet, his name kept coming up. He was a swashbuckling hero of a simpler time, and his adventures captured my imagination at that age.
“Father wants you to mix the grapes,” Robert said. Lost in the outer space exploits of the book, I hadn’t noticed my brother standing in my doorway until he spoke.
I looked up at him. I couldn’t be sure that Robert was being truthful. It was quite po
ssible my father had sent him. But the only way to find out would require questioning my father, and I knew that even if he hadn’t sent Robert, he’d be annoyed that I would be trying to get out of work, so I’d have to do it anyway.
I put my book away and trudged outside to the barn where we kept our fermentation tanks. This is where the grapes, after they were picked and had their stems removed, would spend about a week fermenting. During this process, the skins separated from the grape, and formed a cap or crust at the top. It was necessary to regularly punch down on that crust, extracting more juice from the skins. To do this, one had to stand above the tank, using a paddle. It was one of many laborious chores that took me away from my new passions.
That day, I climbed up onto the eight-foot-tall tanks, and stood on the gangplank which crossed over it. I grabbed my paddle and began pressing down on the grapes, but my mind was still caught up in the adventure I’d been reading: Captain Kirk, disguised as an enemy Romulan, sneaking aboard their vessel to steal a cloaking device right out from under them… Anxious to get back to my book, I began pressing too hard and fast on the crust, hoping to move my task along quickly. The paddle wouldn’t move at the speed I wanted it to, and I slipped.
I fell off the gangplank and landed with a splat and splash into the fermenting wine. The smell, unpleasant enough when standing above it, was truly overpowering. I tried to find my footing, but couldn’t touch the bottom; I was around five feet tall, and the fermenting grapes rose to a level higher than that. I stretched for the gangplank, but it was out of reach; I couldn’t get high enough to grab it. I tried to move to the side of the tank; the mix of liquid and grape pulp had a consistency closer to quicksand than water. I sank. I took liquid into my mouth; the mixture of juice, alcohol and yeast burned my throat and stung my eyes. I tried to scream, which only made me gulp more of the vile liquid. Every effort I made failed, and panic took over.
STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JEAN-LUC PICARD Page 2
