The Lost Vintage

by Ann Mah

  “Um, no?”

  “Good. Probably best to keep it on the down-low.”

  I shot her a confused look, but she was absorbed in piling boiled potatoes on the platter.

  “Yeah, my beau-père threw cold water on all my ideas,” she continued. “He didn’t want to hire any more staff, didn’t want Nico overstretched. And then I got pregnant with Thibault and I’ve been exhausted ever since.” She smiled briefly, pragmatic. But then she heaved a little sigh that was almost undetectable.

  “This place”—I ran a hand across the scratched wooden mantel—“it could be so beautiful.”

  “I know. So much potential, right?”

  “They don’t see it? This could be a gold mine.”

  “I do wonder sometimes . . .” She pinched coarse grey salt from a ramekin, sprinkling it over the meat. “I wonder if something happened. A long time ago. He’s so reserved, Papi, so adamant that we keep our heads down, not draw attention to the family. On the other hand”—she looked up with a laugh—“I suppose he’s just being incredibly French.”

  I thought of my mother, and the way she veiled her emotions. “Keep the curtains drawn.”

  “Exactly.” She lifted one of the platters of meat. “You’ll bring the other?” she asked, and headed outside without waiting for a reply.

  I glanced around the kitchen again. I’d mentioned the bed-and-breakfast idea on impulse, without really thinking about the renovation involved, but the house wouldn’t even need that much work—a lick of fresh paint, refinished floors, a couple of new bathrooms . . . Okay, it probably needed quite a bit of work. I pictured the shutters repainted a cerulean blue, the window frames touched with glossy white. At the other end of the kitchen, a breakfast nook with a table long enough to seat eight. Petits déjeuners, simple but delicious: fresh coffee, oeufs en cocotte, croissants, vineyard honey.

  The other night I’d taken a break from studying and found Heather in the living room, absorbed in a knitting pattern and a tangle of yarn; Nico sat beside her, puzzling over a Sudoku. Was this, I had wondered, what it was like to have hobbies? It had been less than a month since I worked my final shift at Courgette, but already I missed it more than my last boyfriend. I missed my colleagues and having a routine. I missed the relationships I’d built at the restaurant, the continuous dialogue with diners, producers, and distributors. I missed the thimble of dry sherry that I poured for myself after a long day of work and night of study, when I’d finally push my books away, turn on some music, and sip the wine, suffused with the glow of self-discipline.

  During these past few weeks in Burgundy, I had found myself contemplating France, America, and their differing philosophies toward work and life. Here in France, the stately, unhurried pace alternately charmed and frustrated me. Many businesses closed for a two-hour lunch break, Sundays were reserved for family not shopping, and several weeks of summer were earmarked for vacation. Most French people I knew nurtured several hobbies, tending chickens and vegetable gardens, taking photography classes or dance lessons, participating in amateur soccer leagues—even Uncle Philippe indulged his inner historian, embarking on an annual pilgrimage to various Roman colosseums.

  But though the pursuit of pleasure was encouraged, ambition was considered unseemly. Hard work had to be hidden, and success needed to appear effortless, even accidental. It was, my mother always said, the thing about France she disliked the most—and the reason she had left.

  Over the past few weeks, I had admired Nico’s and Heather’s dedication to each other, their children, and their pastimes. I thought they were happy maintaining the status quo, content to raise their family and shepherd the domaine until they passed it to the next generation. But now my conversation with Heather made me wonder if their devotion wasn’t really a salve for stifled ambition. Did they, too, yearn for something greater?

  15 DÉCEMBRE 1939

  Cher journal,

  Today was the last day of school before the Christmas holiday, which meant our teachers spent the final ten minutes of each class reading the student rankings aloud. My results were better than I expected in history, and worse than I hoped in English. But it was chemistry that found me shaking in my seat, holding my breath from the minute Madame Grenoble began reading the names, starting at the bottom and going to the top.

  I could tell Madame G. was enjoying herself because every time she announced a name, she paused to make eye contact with its owner. She gave Odette Lefebvre a disappointed shake of the head, with which I privately agreed—the silly goose should have spent more time memorizing the periodic table and less time mooning over Paul Moreau.

  “Numéro trois . . .” Madame G. paused, relishing our attention. I clasped my hands to keep myself from biting my nails. “Leroy.”

  From the back of the room, I saw Madeleine Leroy’s shoulders sag with disappointment. Poor Madeleine. She tries so hard, but she always manages to miss the key concept.

  “Numéro deux!” Madame G.’s eye fell upon me and I squeezed my hands until the joints cracked. But then she was saying “Reinach,” and after that I couldn’t hear a word because the blood was rushing through my ears. For if Rose was number two, that could only mean one thing: I was number one. Me! I felt light-headed with joy and relief.

  “Félicitations, Hélène,” Rose said, when she approached my desk after class. I was gathering books into my satchel, my hands still a little shaky.

  “It was just luck,” I said with a modest smile.

  Rose’s dark eyes narrowed a fraction, but she gave a careless shrug. “Never mind,” she said. “I’ll get you next time.”

  “We’ll see!” I replied sweetly, through gritted teeth.

  Why did she have to ruin the moment? Why did she have to remind me that she’s always there, right beside me, clever as a fox? Ever since primary school we have been competing for the same prizes, dividing them almost exactly between us. But now we both want the biggest prize of all: a spot at Sèvres. Our lycée has never sent a single girl to university, let alone two from the same class. Madame Grenoble assures me that we both have a chance, but in my heart, I know only one of us will win admission. It seems so unfair that it could be Rose, with her pretty clothes and loving parents—she would be perfectly happy staying in Beaune near her family for the rest of her life! Whereas I—with my glasses, and horrible height, and my stepmother dressing me in gaudy offcuts of chintz—what other means do I have to escape?

  I must not allow Rose to thwart my chances. It must be me. It has to be me. Cher journal, I am determined it will be me.

  Chapter

  4

  The grape presses woke me just after dawn, their steady, pumping drone echoing through the cuverie and courtyard, reaching the furthest corners of the house. By the time I had dressed, scarfed a buttered tartine, and gulped a mug of tea, the morning’s first load of fruit had been crushed.

  It was the thirteenth day of la cueillette, the picking. Or was it the fourteenth? The days had sifted into a similar pattern: misty mornings, humid afternoons, and evenings of complete exhaustion. By now, I had learned to dress in layers, shucking off my waterproof coat and fleece jacket as the sun burned away the clouds. I had learned to bring my own bottle of water to the fields, as everyone else quenched their thirst with wine. I had learned that the sticky, black stains on my fingernails were grape tannins—and that no amount of scouring would remove them. And I had learned that hours of labor, though physically taxing, left my mind free to drift through a tangle of memories I had hoped to forget.

  Everywhere were reminders of the last time I had been in France. The smell of the laundry detergent. The little tune announcing the weather interval on the radio. The color of the toilet paper, shocking pink. Even the shape of the plastic cups recalled picnics on the Champ de Mars, a blanket spread under the Eiffel Tower, everyone basking in the mild existential angst that is the right of all French people.

  One day in particular still haunted me. A perfect day, a spring day—A
pril in Paris—and the city had unfurled in the persistent warmth of true sunshine. A picnic lunch of baguette slathered with triple-cream cheese, white wine that tasted of gooseberries and river stones. Our legs stretched upon the grass, my head on Jean-Luc’s chest. When he eventually spoke, the catch in his voice was so slight that I wouldn’t have noticed it, except for what followed: “I was thinking,” he had said, “that I could come to the California next year. For an internship in the Napa Valley. It is not too far from Berkeley, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Really?” I propped myself up on my elbows. “You’d want to do that?” We hadn’t really talked about the future. Even when I was alone, I avoided thinking about my return to California at the end of the summer. I still had more than four months—still enough time to ignore it.

  “Oui, I would want to do that because, Kat”—his voice was quiet but it jolted straight through me—“je t’aime.”

  Without warning, tears rose in my eyes, but the words, when they emerged, came without effort, as natural as breathing. “Je t’aime, aussi.”

  “And anyway”—he grinned—“I do think there is a lot we can learn from the California wine.”

  “Wow, if you’re saying that, it really must be love.” I leaned over and kissed his scratchy cheek.

  Afterward, I would never forgive myself for not spending the night with him. I would never forgive myself for kissing him goodbye as the sky darkened, and heading home to cram for an art history exam the next morning. Because that was why I wasn’t by his side when the call came in the middle of the night. The next day, I found him at our usual spot in the Jardin du Luxembourg, huddled into a metal lounge chair, arms pressed across his narrow frame, his face ashen against a backdrop of vibrant flower beds.

  “What happened?” A bag of sandwiches swung from my hand.

  “Mon père,” he whispered.

  It was a heart attack, sudden and swift and fatal. Jean-Luc didn’t cry until I hugged him, and even then his tears were silent, polite, as if he didn’t want to trouble the other people in the park by making a scene. He was leaving on a train that afternoon, he told me, heading home to his mother and sister. “Will you come later? For the”—he swallowed—“funeral?”

  “My God, yes, Jean-Luc, of course.”

  “I’ll call when I know more details. But if I can’t reach you, ask Nico. He will know. He will help.”

  I put my arms around him. “I will be there,” I said. “I promise.”

  At the end of the week, Nico drove Heather and me to Meursault in a rickety Citroën that trembled at high speeds on the autoroute. Afterward, when I thought of that day, only a few details remained sharp: The florid scent of lilies hanging in the chilled air of the village church. The simple wreath of homegrown roses adorning the casket. The thunderous creak of the wooden pews as the assembled crowd knelt to pray. The sartorial courage of Jean-Luc’s mother, with her immaculate hair and clothes, her pearls, perfume, lipstick. Only her glasses betrayed her grief, the lenses cloudy and smudged. The handshake offered by Jean-Luc’s sister, Stéphanie, just a brush of trembling fingertips. The flat line of Jean-Luc’s mouth as he delivered the eulogy, his eyes bright with unshed tears. Outside, the day’s callous beauty—pure blue sky, rich sunshine—glancing off the casket’s dark polished wood as it sank into the ground.

  After the service, we followed the crowd to Jean-Luc’s family’s home. In the garden, he stood amid a cluster of men with weathered hands and faces. The way they gazed at the distant vineyards—with proprietary concern—made me certain they were also vignerons, winemakers from neighboring domaines, the colleagues of Jean-Luc’s father. Jean-Luc’s arms were crossed, his head bent as he listened to some piece of advice, but his expression held none of the stiffness that I sometimes glimpsed in Paris. Here, amid the vines, he was at home.

  Later—after the neighbors and family and friends had left, after Jean-Luc’s aunt and uncle had whisked his mother and sister to their home in Charolles for a few nights, after Heather and Nico had helped put away the extra food and chairs, hugging us before heading back to Paris—Jean-Luc ran down the cellar stairs and reappeared several minutes later with a bottle in his hands. “My father’s first vintage,” he said, wiping it clean and removing the cork. “Tonight we will drink to celebrate him.” He managed a smile.

  “To your father,” I said, admiring the wine’s color, rich and golden, like a memory of sunshine.

  “Papa opened a millésime every spring when the vines started to awaken. He said it was an offering.” He touched his glass to mine. “To a good year. My first one . . . as vigneron.”

  My breath caught in my throat. “You . . . you’re taking over the domaine?” Even as I said it, the pieces began falling into place. Of course he was taking over: He was the only son, with a sister eager to escape the provinces. He had been preparing for the role of chef vigneron his entire life.

  In the dim light of the kitchen, his face was drawn, hard to read. “We talked about finding a viticulteur to tend the vines,” he said. “Or selling our crop to a négociant. But, in the end . . . well, Papa would not approve. I thought this was the best solution, and Maman eventually agreed.”

  I struggled to keep the shock from my face. He was only twenty-two! I was only a year younger! What did he know about running a winery—negotiating contracts, bargaining with exporters?

  Beside me, Jean-Luc pressed his lips together. With his jaw set, his face looked stern, hinting at where the lines might one day fall; his eyes, however, were filled with a confidence that was compelling in its strength. “The most important thing is keeping this land, this terroir, in the family. Kat—” He set down his glass and reached for my hand. “I know we talked about it . . . but I can’t come to the California. Not next year . . . and probably not for a long time. And, in fact . . .” His mouth drew flat.

  I crossed my arms, steeling myself not to cry. I knew what was coming next and though Jean-Luc was being perfectly sensible, I still felt like my heart was being ripped from my chest and hurled onto the tiled floor of the living room.

  “This is—” He picked up his glass again but his hands shook so that wine threatened to spill over the side. “This is not how I had hoped things would happen.”

  “It’s okay, Jean-Luc. I mean, obviously, it’s not totally okay—” I swallowed hard, willing my voice back to its normal pitch. “But—”

  “Kat,” he interrupted me, taking my hands in his own. “Mon amour, veux-tu m’épouser?”

  I gasped. “Marry you?” I became aware of my heart, thundering in my chest. “Are—” Are you serious? We’re too young! I was going to say. But something in his face made me bite back the words.

  “I know, I know . . . you are thinking that we are too young. But I’ve thought about this constantly over the last few days. I want to spend the rest of my life with you. I want to make a family with you. Grow old together, distribute our médicaments for each other. When I think about continuing this vineyard, I can’t imagine doing it without you.”

  I closed my eyes, trying to figure out what to say. Something like: This is crazy. You’re still in shock. Let’s take things slow. We’ll figure it out together. But I opened my eyes and there was Jean-Luc, his long legs ending in polished shoes, his mouth unusually vulnerable, trembling somewhere between tears and a smile. A wave of tenderness engulfed me. I want to take care of him, I thought. And I want to be taken care of by him. I had never before felt that emotion, of wanting to make someone happy, and trusting with all my heart that he wanted the same for me.

  “Oui,” I whispered.

  A couple of days later, we would tell his mother and sister: “Kat has made me so incredibly happy,” Jean-Luc would say, wrapping an arm around my shoulders. If his mother had any reservations, she kept them to herself, kissing me on both cheeks, and showing me her own wedding portrait, a blurry photograph snapped on the steps of the village mairie. I would watch her twist a thin gold band around and around her finger. “She
used to fidget with her engagement ring until they sold it,” Jean-Luc would tell me once we were alone again.

  Right now, however, we stepped out of the house and into the damp spring night, slipping over a low fence, scrambling to the vineyards that patterned the slope in stripes. The dry soil was engraved with shallow lines, and the wire trellis frames stretched empty, waiting to support the full weight of fruit and foliage that summer would bring. Above us, the country sky extended dense and dark, a thread of wood smoke drifting through the air.

  By the light of his cell phone, Jean-Luc showed me tiny shoots emerging from gnarled vinestock, the first signs of life after months of dormancy. “Next, we wait for the flowers,” he said. “And harvest will come one hundred days after that, according to the old wives’ tale.”

  But I never saw the harvest that year, nor the next, nor the one after that. No, I left France that summer with promises on my lips, promises that I would break once I returned home to California. Now, ten years later, picking grapes on land bordering Jean-Luc’s, I willed myself not to think about what might have been.

  In the end, it snuck up on me. One minute I was hefting my bucket to the end of a row, dumping the fruit into the wheelbarrow, the next minute I heard the tractor horn blaring, saw lights flashing. Kevin and Thomas, the twin twelve-year-old grape pickers who worked twice as fast as me despite being two-thirds my size were pelting Nico with fruit, covering his white T-shirt in purple splotches.

  “Madame! Madame!” The boys waved at me. They insisted on calling me “Madame,” which made me feel a thousand years old. “Come help us!” It was a harvest tradition to decorate the tractor, they explained, to celebrate the last load of grapes.

  I joined them, and together we gathered leafy branches and tiny blue wildflowers.

  “But we need more flowers. Bigger flowers,” Kevin said, gesturing at the endless green surrounding us.