The Italian Sister (The Wine Lover's Daughter, Book 1)
Page 22
“A penny for your thoughts.” Sofia felt Nicholas’s breath on her cheek. She smiled at him and he gave her a long leisurely kiss. She heard a chuckle and when she turned her head, she saw Adriano and Gerda look at them with a big smile on their faces.
“Ah, how romantic. Love in Tuscany,” Gerda said and Adriano lifted his wine glass and toasted them.
“Remember, Sofia, when you were concerned about being part of the family?” he said.
Sofia nodded. “Yes, it has happened. I found my Italian family.”
“And, not only that,” Adriano said. “You also found a ragazzo, a boyfriend. Congratulations.”
“Yes, I’m grateful for everything. It’s wonderful to have both my Italian and Californian family here with me.” She hugged Emma and Julietta. “And to be able to celebrate with all my friends.” She lifted her wine glass. “And to Henry, who in his admittedly unusual way made it all possible.” A few people chuckled.
“To Papa,” Julietta said.
Gina and Edoardo toasted them. “Let this be the beginning of a new relationship between California and Toscana and our wines,” Edoardo said.
“Congratulazioni.” Donna held up her glass of wine and gave them a warm smile.
Sofia took a deep breath and felt her eyes tear up, this time from happiness.
The End
Dear Reader:
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If you would like to find out more about Sofia and Nicholas and their adventures, read Finding Angelo, the second part of The Wine Lover’s Daughter series. An excerpt follows further down.
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Information about previously published books, you can find on my website: www.christa-polkinhorn.com and on my Amazon Author Page.
EXCERPT FROM FINDING ANGELO
Chapter 1
Sofia narrowed her eyes as she spotted the two men. “They couldn’t already be done,” she murmured.
Her husband, Nicholas, and Martin, his grandfather, came walking across the meadow. They worked together with Matthew, Nicholas’s younger brother, digging up their new field to prepare it for planting their Zinfandel grapevines. Perhaps they were just taking a break. Sofia went into the kitchen to prepare more coffee.
As she stepped outside to wait for the men, she discovered the first signs of spring—a patch of yellow daffodils in the corner of the patio that seemed to have emerged over night. The shrubs of purple sage next to the now green meadows shimmered in the sun. A breeze came up, whispering through the grass and bringing a whiff of moist leaves. Stretched along the length of the hill above their home were their three vineyards.
After a rainy winter, they welcomed the sunshine of early March in San Luis Obispo County. The water was a godsend after years of drought, but the heavy rains during the last weeks had made it impossible to till the soil in their new field. Now, the conditions were perfect.
Nicholas and Sofia worked the three vineyards Nicholas’s grandfather had owned. The harvest of their Sangiovese, Nebbiolo, and Aglianico grapes last fall had been plentiful and the wine promised to be of excellent quality. Martin Segantino, a long-time successful vintner and winemaker, had more or less handed over his three grape varietals to them in exchange for a percentage of the profits from the wine sales. It had been a fruitful and mutually beneficial relationship.
Nicholas had always been Martin’s favorite grandson. Both of them had similar ideas about winemaking. They liked to keep things simple, to work the vineyards the natural way with as little human interference and chemicals as possible. And this spring, the kind and generous man surprised them by gifting them the fields outright.
“It’s time for me to sit back and watch you guys sweat while I drink a glass of your wine,” he had said with a snicker and a twinkle in his eyes. However, he continued to help with the work and lent his experience and knowledge to them.
Nicholas’s father, who owned the rest of the family estate, supported them as well. He had paid for the picking crew during the first few harvests.
The support from Nicholas’s family, Nicholas’s savings, and Sofia’s contribution had made it possible for them to quit their other jobs and dedicate themselves fully to growing grapes and making wine.
The adventure had begun three years before when Sofia and Nicholas met on a vineyard in Tuscany. After Sofia’s father died unexpectedly of a heart attack, she discovered a shocking secret. Sofia had known nothing about the double life her father had led for many years. He owned part of a vineyard in Tuscany and had a daughter there who was ten years younger than Sofia. Uncovering his hidden existence, meeting her sister Julietta and Julietta’s Italian family for the first time had been a turbulent and emotional experience. Added to that, someone on the estate had tried to kill her to prevent her from inheriting her father’s part of the vineyard.
Eventually, love and compassion won out and Sofia, Julietta, and the rest of the Italian family became very close. And best of all, Sofia met Nicholas, a young vintner from California, who worked on the estate in Tuscany. They fell in love and decided to pool their resources and work together on the vineyards of Nicholas’s grandfather in the Central Coast area of California.
And here they were, enjoying the fruits of their labor. It was hard work, but Sofia enjoyed it. She had been an editor and writer for a wine, food, and travel magazine, and she still worked for them as a freelancer, writing occasional articles. But her focus was the vineyards she and her husband cultivated.
Sofia sipped her coffee while she watched the two men approach. They stopped halfway and from what she could make out, they were having an animated discussion. Nicholas waved his hands while his grandfather looked down at the ground, nodding occasionally. When they came closer, she saw immediately that something was wrong. Nicholas ran his hand through his blond hair. His honey-brown eyes looked troubled. His grandfather, a tall, skinny man in his seventies with short salt-and-pepper hair, was rubbing his lined forehead.
“What’s the matter?” Sofia asked.
Their faces were somber. “There’s a problem with the new field,” Nicholas said.
“What is it?” Sofia put her cup of coffee on the garden table.
“We made a gruesome discovery,” Martin said.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book has been a collaboration between myself and many kind and helpful friends. To mention them all by name is a challenge but I’ll do my best. Through my research into the world of winemaking, which is an important topic in this book, I met a lot of interesting and very helpful people and made some lasting friends. I would like to thank first and foremost Mark and Dave Caparone from the Caparone Winery in Paso Robles, California. Mark showed me around their winery, let me taste their excellent wines, and spent hours answering my many questions. A thank you also goes to the Ginori Lisci estate in Querceto, Tuscany, Italy, which gave me the first glimpse of Tuscan winemaking, to the Obrecht Family in Jenins, Switzerland, who took time out of their busy day during the grape harvest to explain the process from picking grapes to bottling wine. A big thank-you to my patient family and friends whom I dragged around vineyards and wineries in Tuscany and Switzerland: my nephew Rico, my niece Claudia and her husband Alberto, to Claudia and Weltsch Bamert and their son Severin and Severin’s friend Megan, to my great-niece Risayra and her boyfriend Oliver, to Vreni Nieth who accompanied me to Jenins, to Silvia Delorenzi-Schenkel who shared her knowledge of growing grapes and making wine and who introduced the Obrecht family to me. I also want to thank travel guide, Annie Adair in Volterra, Italy whose videos on Volterra helped me a lot in my research. This hill-town served as model for my imaginary town of Vignaverde. Thank you dear Beta Readers/Editors for your valuable feedback: Helen G
inger, Linda Cassidy Lewis, Susan Dormady Eisenberg, Lindsay Edmunds, Silvia Delorenzi-Schenkel. Thanks to Linda Cassidy Lewis and Diane Busch for the final proofreading and thank you, Diane, for the lovely cover. And last but not least: A big thank-you to my editor, Sharon Stogner, for her keen eye for detail and the many helpful suggestions.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christa Polkinhorn, originally from Switzerland, lives and works as writer and translator in Santa Monica, California. She divides her time between the United States and Switzerland and has strong ties to both countries. She is the author of four novels and a collection of poems. Her travels and her interest in foreign cultures informs her work and her novels take place in several countries. Aside from writing and traveling, she is an avid reader and a lover of the arts, dark chocolate, and red wine.
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