The Bordeaux Betrayal wcm-3

by Ellen Crosby

  But if it were true that Clay Avery had been thinking of hiring Valerie to write for the Washington Tribune, then Ryan couldn’t be too sorry that she was dead and no longer a thorn in his side. And if she were right about the Washington bottle, he’d look like a fool for having staked his reputation on its authenticity.

  Which gave him—even more than Joe—more than one motive for murder.

  Chapter 6

  Another big crowd came through the winery on Sunday as the glorious weather continued to hold. It had only been two weeks since the sun moved from the northern to the southern hemisphere on the autumnal equinox, but the longer, lower rays of sunlight already bathed the vines and fields with a gilded light that came only at this time of year.

  We had moved the tasting outside to the courtyard to take advantage of the view and the weather. Francesca Merchant had hired a string quartet to play chamber music for the afternoon.

  “I know you like this classical stuff, but it just doesn’t do it for me. Frankie says they’re good musicians, but everything sounds like the same guy wrote it. Vivaldi, Beethoven—whoever,” Quinn said to me as we stood in the shade of the loggia and watched Gina hand out tasting sheets and explain our wines to three older men who’d arrived in a limo with three good-looking young women.

  The quartet was playing a baroque piece by Telemann.

  “There’s a big difference between Beethoven and Vivaldi. You just don’t pay attention.” I fingered the collar of yet another of his Hawaiian shirts, this one with skimpily clad girls in grass skirts and postage stamp bras, swaying, presumably, to a hula. “Couldn’t you have worn a different shirt?”

  “Why, is there a stain on this one?”

  “Never mind.”

  My brother Eli showed up midafternoon without my sister-in-law Brandi and my one-year-old niece Hope. As always he looked a little too dapper and even a bit feminine. I knew why. Brandi now picked out all his clothes, like Barbie dressing Ken. She favored pastels so I was getting used to seeing Eli in sherbet colors like the pale yellow shirt and matching linen trousers he wore now.

  “Hey, babe,” he said. “Thought I could sponge off you this afternoon. What’s to eat? The girls went to my in-laws’ for the weekend.”

  “Tapas. I’ll make you a deal. Help us out for the next few hours and I’ll send you home with leftovers.”

  Eli pushed his Ray-Bans up so they sat on top of his perfectly gelled hair. “I guess I could stick around for a while.” He placed his hands on the complacent paunch that had once been his washboard stomach. “I could use a bite now, though. Woke up too late for breakfast and spent all morning at Jack and Sunny Greenfields’.”

  “What were you doing there?”

  “Jack’s renovating his wine cellar.”

  “Moonlighting?”

  Eli suddenly looked weary. “Helps pay the bills.”

  I knew he was just scraping by. He adored Brandi and couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell her the money tree had been picked clean. Last I’d heard he’d borrowed the equivalent of the GNP of a small country to cover what they already owed.

  He walked over to one of the tables, returning with a plate filled with enough food for three people. “Good stuff.” He stabbed a sausage with a toothpick. “Where’d you get these?”

  “The organic butcher in Middleburg. What’s Jack doing to his wine cellar?”

  “Everything.” Eli spoke through his chorizo. “Installing a security system, upgrading the cooling system—really shelling out the bucks for glass murals, limestone flooring, redwood wine racks, map drawers showing where the wine comes from. The whole caboodle. And a computerized inventory—finally. Shane’s handling it. Jack’s been paying insurance out the wazoo for years without knowing the actual value of his collection.”

  “Why does he need a security system all of a sudden?”

  Eli licked his fingers. “Got a napkin? I don’t want to get grease on these clothes. First time I’ve worn them.”

  I handed one to him.

  “Jack’s got, oh, easily thirty thousand bottles. He wants to protect his investment.” He picked up a fork and dug into a small mountain of marinated piquillo peppers. “Plus he heard about those wine cellar thefts in California. Decided he needed something more than a padlock on the door. The security guy came by this morning and did his spiel, explaining all the things they can do. I felt like James Bond when M demonstrates the toys.”

  “It’s Q. M is his boss. Q does toys.”

  “Whatever.”

  “If you’re done with your snack, James,” I said, “how about helping me pour wine in the villa?”

  “Shaken not stirred,” he said. “Just let me grab some more chorizo.”

  Frankie stood behind the bar in the tasting room when Eli and I walked into the villa. A pretty strawberry blonde in her early fifties, I liked her low-key, capable ways and gentle, dry sense of humor. So, apparently, did our customers. Since she joined us, she’d acquired a small but faithful group of regulars who dropped by on weekends, claiming they came for the wine. I knew they came to talk to Frankie. You could find an ocean of compassion in those clear blue nonjudgmental eyes.

  “Go get something to eat and enjoy your string quartet,” I said to her. “Eli and I will take over for a while. I think he left you a sausage. Maybe two.”

  She smiled. “Thanks. Amanda Heyward called about half an hour ago. Said she planned to drop by to give you the fixture cards for the next few months. Also something about a guest list.”

  A fixture card was a one-month calendar listing dates and locations of meets for a foxhunt. For more than a century, my farm had been part of the territory of the Goose Creek Hunt. During hunting season their meets commenced at Highland Farm once every five or six weeks. Amanda, the GCH’s secretary and an old family friend, was responsible for distributing the cards.

  As thanks for letting the hunt ride through our farm so often, she’d also offered to take charge of the guest list for our auction and mail the invitations. Amanda had worked in corporate fund-raising for heavyweight multinationals and big-name museums for years until too many eighty-hour workweeks burned her candle to a charred wick. Her offer was a godsend.

  She showed up in the tasting room dressed in mud-spattered jodhpurs, riding boots, and a high-necked white blouse, her long gray-brown hair pulled up in a windblown knot, ruddy face sunburned after an afternoon of galloping across the countryside. She kissed Eli and me and accepted the glass of Cabernet Sauvignon he poured for her.

  “I just went riding with Sunny.” She climbed up on one of the bar stools and dropped a leather satchel on the floor. “Heard you were there this morning discussing Jack’s wine cellar, Eli. All that security stuff he wants to install is driving Sunny crazy. Costs a fortune. What does he keep in there worth that kind of money? The goblet they used at the Last Supper?”

  “You’d be surprised,” Eli said. “He’s got some wines you’ll never find anywhere anymore.”

  “Yeah, but around here everyone’s got fantastic or expensive vintages on their sideboard or in the basement. I know I do—and half the time we don’t even bother to lock our front door it’s so safe.” She set her glass on the bar and tucked a stray piece of hair back into her French knot.

  “Among other things, Jack has verticals of some of the legendary Bordeaux,” Eli said.

  “What’s a vertical?” Amanda asked.

  “A bottle of wine for every single year it was made. Sorry,” he said. “I thought you knew wine jargon.”

  Amanda babysat for us when we were kids and she’d changed Eli’s diapers. Mine, too. Eli, acting pompous, didn’t impress her.

  “I know enough about wine to know some of those years had to be duds,” she said. “So he’s got swill among the gems.”

  “Not exactly.” I joined her on another bar stool. Some days my bad leg ached worse than others. Today was one of those days. “Most wine is drunk in the year it’s produced. It’s only the good stuff that gets l
aid down to drink later. If the year was a dud, as you said, those bottles generally were consumed right away. Later it’s harder to find that vintage, which drives up the price. The value of owning verticals comes from the fact that it’s a complete collection.”

  “Fair enough,” she said. “But I still think the last time anyone had to worry about locking something up around here was when the Yankees were in town during the War of Northern Aggression. Jack’s going really over the top with that bionic password stuff or whatever it is he’s thinking about.”

  I saw Eli suck in his breath. He wasn’t going to let this go. I glared at my brother and said to Amanda, “Didn’t you want to talk about the guest list for the auction?”

  “Oh, sure.” She bent to retrieve her satchel from the floor and missed seeing Eli make a face at me and roll his eyes. When she sat up, she put on a pair of reading glasses and opened a paisley folder, pulling out a spreadsheet.

  “We have just over one hundred sixty people coming so far. That’s not counting the RSVPs we’ve received since Ryan’s column on the Washington wine ran in the Trib. We’re probably going to be at our max capacity by the end of next week. Then we start turning people away.” She looked up over the top of her glasses.

  “What a shame,” I said. “Why don’t we talk to Mick about setting up a tent in his garden? Then we don’t have to turn away anybody.”

  “His house is magnificent,” Amanda said, “now that Sunny almost finished redecorating. I’d hate not to use it. We could put a tent any old place.”

  “Let’s think about it. We’ll figure out something,” I said. “By the way, Ryan agreed to be our auctioneer and said he’ll write up the wine notes for the catalog. It looks like we’re going to have plenty of donations thanks to the Romeos. They’re like the Mafia volunteer squad putting the squeeze on people. Everyone’s contributing at least one bottle. Sometimes more.”

  “I’ll bet your new neighbors aren’t.” Amanda’s eyes went cold. “The Orlandos.”

  “I don’t know. They only just moved in,” I said. “I haven’t met them.”

  “His law firm represents animal rights groups.” She slapped the folder with the spreadsheet shut and jammed her glasses into a small Burberry case with a sharp shove. “She’s the kind who throws paint on people who wear fur. They came by the kennels asking about the condition of the hounds. Very confrontational. Shane happened to be there and was more polite to them than I would have been. He said the hounds were well treated and not to worry. Then they insisted on coming inside to see for themselves. So he told them it was private property and asked them to leave. The next day they sent a letter saying we should consider their farm closed to the Goose Creek Hunt. Until hell froze over.”

  She picked up her wineglass and downed the contents.

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

  “They have the right to keep you from foxhunting there if they want to,” Eli said. “It’s their land now.”

  “Which has been part of our territory for more than a century.” Amanda banged the base of her wineglass on the bar emphasizing each word. “Oh, God, sorry. I’m just livid every time I think about it. I know it’s their land, but they have no idea what they’ve just done. What that means.”

  “No visit from the Welcome Wagon?” Eli said and smirked.

  I slashed an index finger across my throat and shook my head. He smirked some more.

  “You grew up here,” Amanda said. “On this farm. Or have you forgotten about it, now that you’re living in subdivision land?”

  “Come on, Amanda, that’s not—”

  Amanda cut him off. “George Washington had foxhounds. He wrote about hunting all the time in his diaries. So did Jefferson. The earliest surviving record of organized foxhunting in America comes from right here in northern Virginia—a pack organized by Lord Fairfax in 1747.” She recited the names and figures, glaring at Eli. “Foxhunting is part of our history, our culture. You know perfectly well how hard we fight for the open spaces, to keep land pristine and undeveloped. The Orlandos came from Manhattan. Acres of concrete between two rivers. The only place more disconnected from reality and the world of nature is Disneyland.”

  “Have you tried talking to them?” I eyed my brother, who grinned at me and picked up my cane, hooking it around his neck to fake a swift stage exit.

  Amanda looked at Eli like he was dryer lint, then glanced at her watch. “Not yet. There’s a meeting at the kennel in half an hour to discuss what we’re going to do. In the worst case, how to work around losing all that land. I’d better get going. I’ll call you about the guest list in a day or two, Lucie.” She nodded stiffly at my brother. “Eli.”

  After she left I looked at my October fixture card. They’d scheduled a meet at Highland Farm for the sixteenth, in nine days. Mick now rode with the Goose Creek Hunt. Maybe I could ask him what the hunt decided to do about losing the Orlandos’ land as part of their country. With the auction coming up, I didn’t want to get Amanda worked up on that subject again.

  Eli picked up her glass and set it in a dish drainer behind the bar.

  “Man,” he said, “is she pissed off.”

  “You didn’t help.”

  “I just played devil’s advocate. You know it’s their right to close their farm. If she takes their head off the way she just did with me, your neighbors are in for it, babe.”

  “Sure sounds like it,” I said.

  Ryan Worth showed up at five o’clock, just as we closed for the day. I’d warned Quinn he was coming by.

  “I’ll be sure to get lost,” he said. “And leave you two lovebirds alone together.”

  Ryan had panned one of our wines—our Pinot Noir—in a recent review. Quinn was furious. Without telling me, he called Ryan and gave him a piece of his mind.

  Apparently that was the high-water mark of their conversation because after that Ryan brought up Le Coq Rouge, the California vineyard where Quinn worked before joining us. Quinn hadn’t known Ryan’s good friend was Tavis Hennessey, the owner. Nor had he known that Ryan was completely au courant of the scandal involving the winemaker—Quinn’s former boss—who’d gone to jail for selling adulterated wine on the black market in Eastern Europe. Business at the winery tanked and Hennessey finally closed Le Coq Rouge. Though Quinn had never been charged with anything, Ryan had made a when-you-lie-down-with-dogs-you-get-up-with-fleas crack to Quinn. As far as I knew they still weren’t speaking.

  “Why did you have to call and yell at him like that?” I’d asked. “I didn’t think the review was fair, either. But you get more with honey than you do with a club.”

  “Maybe,” he’d said, “except you don’t feel as good afterward.”

  I met Ryan by myself at the ivy-covered archway to the courtyard. A gust of wind blew an unused cocktail napkin that had eluded our cleanup crew in front of us as we walked to the barrel room. I picked up the napkin and stuffed it in my pocket, glad I’d worn a jacket. The temperature had dropped at least twenty degrees since this afternoon.

  “Your winemaker joining us?” Ryan asked.

  “Unfortunately he’s got another appointment this evening he couldn’t get out of.” With his washing machine.

  “Too bad.”

  Ryan held the door to the barrel room for me and I hit the lights as we walked in.

  “How many lots have we got so far?” he asked.

  “Fifty-five and still counting.”

  The barrel room smelled of the tangy, slightly acrid odor of fermenting wine. About the size of an Olympic swimming pool, the semiunderground cave had thirty-foot ceilings, fieldstone walls, and four interconnected bays, where most of our oak barrels lay undisturbed in cool darkness. The stainless-steel fermenting tanks stood along the far wall. The gentle gurgling of the glycol-and-water solution circulating inside the refrigeration jackets was soothing as we walked the length of the room.

  Ryan pulled out a chair from a long table we used for winemaker’s dinners a
nd private parties. He sat down, flung his briefcase on the table, and took out a reporter’s notebook.

  “We’ll take the top forty and put them in the live auction.” He began making notes. “Everything else we’ll do as a silent auction. It’ll take me about ninety minutes to dispense with forty lots. After that, the natives get restless and you don’t get as much bang for the buck.”

  Above his head, my mother’s cross-stitched sampler hung over one of the archways leading to the recessed bays. She’d stitched one of her favorite quotes from Plato—“No thing more excellent nor more valuable than wine was ever granted mankind by God.”

  I stared at the sampler and nodded. Ryan had brought up things that never would have occurred to me. Thank God he’d agreed to help, fee or no fee.

  “How much longer should we keep accepting contributions?” I asked.

  “Cut them off soon. I still have to do the write-ups and figure out which ones to do live. Then we’ve got to get the catalog to the printer.”

  “Sunny Greenfield will handle the printer,” I said. “We’re using one of my mother’s paintings of the vineyard on the cover.”

  “Nice. I always liked her art.” He looked around. “Hey, bartender, any chance of a drink? This is going to take a while.”

  I decided against the Pinot and got a bottle of Cab. For the next two hours he checked bottles against the list I’d made, writing about each one in his notebook.

  At last he threw down his pen and sat back in the chair, rubbing his eyes with the palms of his hands. “Can we call it quits here? We’ll get those last few on the next round. Plus whatever else comes in.”

  “You’re in charge.”

  He reached for the bottle of wine. I covered my glass with my hand, so he filled his own.

  “You’ve got some nice wines. A few clunkers but I didn’t spot any outright fakes.”

  “Can we talk about the Washington bottle?”