by Laura Dave
I waited for her to disappear up the stairs before heading that way myself. But before my mother was gone, she called out a final good night. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad you’re home.”
That made one of us.
The Contract
I woke up to the sound of a Bach cello sonata, the sun heaping through the windows, joining the music in an intense wake-up call. It was how I woke up most every morning as a kid—my father wanting us to get up with the sun, my mother reserving the first half hour of each day to practice, to keep her hand in.
I used to love the sound of her cello, the warm tones greeting me. Post-midnight run-in, though, her cello had another connotation, images of a naked Henry running through my head, dancing along with the music.
I rummaged through my suitcase, searching for a decent pair of jeans and a sweater, lamenting how little clothing I’d brought from Los Angeles. Nothing to battle the early morning fog, nothing to battle the late afternoon heat. The only shoes I had with me were a pair of ballet flats. My favorite boots left behind, my favorite everything left behind.
In my rush to get out of the house before my mother finished playing, I almost missed the note she had left on the countertop: “Coffee on. Banana muffins in fridge. Made yesterday, but delicious.”
I took a cup of coffee and a muffin, and headed down the hill to the winemaker’s cottage to find my father.
It was just after 9 A.M.—a gorgeous time in the vineyard. The sky was intensely blue, the early morning fog starting to burn off, letting in the sun, the morning heat. I passed through the gardens that served as cover crop, their wildflowers snaking between the vines, the land all purples and greens.
I stopped to study the vines, touching the shoots, feeling it come over me. It was a feeling that I only knew when I was back in the vineyard. A potent mix of happiness and excitement and something I couldn’t name except to say that being back in Sebastopol, back at my parents’ house, was like seeing a lost love again.
Until I was fourteen, I couldn’t get enough of the vineyard. I’d followed my father around to do the most mundane tasks: to trellis the vines, study the grapes, make teas to feed the soil. My father would dig into the compost, and I would join in, just to be a part of it. Before school, after school, we discussed vines and vintages. My father would even take me down to the wine cave and give me a taste of the racked wine, a taste of the wine still waiting to be racked. He never said it, but he was thrilled I wanted to be a part of it.
Then came the day I wanted nothing to do with any part of it.
The same vineyard, the same fifty acres that had brought me so much joy, became suffocating as opposed to freeing.
It coincided with two awful harvests in a row. The first harvest had gone awry due to weather, the rain forcing the grapes off the vines long before they were ready. The second had been the result of rolling forest fires, the smoke drying out the Sebastopol air, searing the vineyard. After years of everything going fairly smoothly, the two bad vintages—the only two my parents ever had in succession since early on, since before I remembered—had threatened to put us out of business.
It was still hard to think about how awful those winters were. My parents had tried to shield us from how scared they were about losing everything they had built together. But late at night, after we were supposed to be asleep, I’d hear them talking quietly in the kitchen, a pot of coffee between them. It would have been better if they had screamed it out loud as opposed to what it felt like, sitting on the other side of the door, thinking about all the ways I couldn’t fix it for them, thinking about all the ways our family’s life was about to fall apart.
I started going into San Francisco every chance I had. One night I convinced my father to take me to see an art exhibit of light installations. The truck broke down on the way and we took a cab the rest of the way into the city. Afterward, we walked the streets downtown, past the Ferry Building and the pier, up into the ritzy hills of Pacific Heights. We passed a small jazz club, a ninety-year-old woman singing Gershwin. If that sounds ridiculously romantic, it was. And I was completely hooked. I loved the noises of the city, people fighting and laughing in the streets. The old woman singing Gershwin. It’d be easy to say that it was the energy of the city that pulled me in, but it wasn’t. It was the noises. Suddenly, it felt like everything I had known before then had been too quiet. My parents’ sadness, the vineyard, Sonoma County itself.
I spent the next summer staying with my cousin who ran a law office downtown. She was beautiful and elegant and she took me under her wing, introducing me to city living: coffee shops and skyscrapers, streets and bookstores, fancy shoes and cigarettes at parties. She even gave me an internship at her law firm.
She warned me that it would be boring, but it was a relief. Law was specific. It was concrete. The soil and fruit and wind and sun and sky didn’t have to cooperate for work to go well. After years of watching my father struggle at the mercy of the weather patterns, that type of control felt empowering.
When the vineyard worked, it was beautiful. But two years of fallow crops were decimating. And they were especially decimating when I realized they weren’t the first. After I left for college, I learned that my parents had narrowly escaped previous disasters, previous moments when it had seemed the only option was throwing in the towel.
My chosen path was far less unpredictable, which felt like a good thing, a different thing.
Maybe that was just childhood? You hurry up, pick the opposite path, try to make childhood end. Then, as an adult, you have no idea why you were running away. What, exactly, you needed so desperately to get away from.
When I arrived at the winemaker’s cottage, the front door was open, but no one was inside.
“Dad?” I said.
There was no answer.
I nudged the door open and walked in, taking a seat in the small living room. I knew my father was probably somewhere in the vineyard, but I’d be better off waiting for him to take his normal morning break after they finished picking. That was how it worked. They’d pick grapes from 2 A.M. until 10 A.M.—when the land was cooler, night lamps guiding their way. Most winemakers left this to the vineyard manager to oversee, but my father liked to be involved in the picking himself.
I didn’t want to try to find him out in the vineyard, or by the receiving table, watching the grapes come in off the vines, sorting through them, picking which ones would last. I didn’t want to interrupt. Maybe I wasn’t anxious for a confrontation.
The point is that I didn’t plan on snooping. I planned on sitting, all the windows open, the late morning sun streaming in, an entire banana muffin and cooling coffee waiting to be enjoyed.
But I put everything down on the coffee table too quickly—and I spilled the coffee. All over the table. All over a heavy pile of files.
Files labeled: MURRAY GRANT WINES SALES FOLIO.
There were no napkins, so I picked up the wet files, wiping them against my T-shirt. I was trying to dry them off, though I doubted it mattered. My father hated Murray Grant Wines. He wasn’t alone. Most of the small winemakers in Sonoma County did. They hated them not only because of the quality of their mediocre production, but because they treated winemaking like a business. It was a business, of course. It was just also supposed to be something else.
So I assumed the papers were a dumb mailer, my father keeping up on what Murray Grant Wines was doing. He had to keep up with them. They were one of the biggest wine producers in Napa Valley, shipping five million cases of wine annually.
Direct competition, of course, to my father’s five thousand.
But then, as I rubbed the second file clean, I came across a series of contracts. They were lengthy and specific contracts that couldn’t say what they seemed to say. Except that I was a real estate lawyer and worked on far more complicated deals. And I knew they were saying exactly what they seemed to say.
The Last Straw Vineyard. Ownership Transfer. To Murray Grant Wines.
My pulse started to throb in my ears, drowning out my ability to slow down, figure out what I was reading.
“No way!”
I looked up to see my brother Bobby in the doorway. He was standing there, wearing a dark blue suit, his tie slung back over his shoulder. The smile on his face, which on another day I would describe as charming, was more like a smirk.
I wondered if this was one of the reasons we had trouble getting along. Bobby had a penchant for showing up at the exact time that there was no one there to blame but him.
“What are you doing home? Aren’t you getting married in, like, ten minutes?” he said. “I have two incredibly excited and very cute ring bearers who can’t wait for the wedding.”
I still hadn’t said hello, the files in my hands. I held them up higher. “Did you know about this?”
His smile disappeared. “About what, exactly?” Bobby said.
He ran his hands through his blond curls, which matched our mother’s—and which Bobby thought made him look angelic. What did make him look angelic were his ragged fingernails—Bobby biting them to stubs since we were little kids. It was my favorite part of him.
“Mom and Dad are selling the vineyard,” he said, trying to sound casual, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. As if we were talking about a car.
I sat back down and opened the files up, trying to ascertain where they were in the process. I was unhappy to see my father’s signature already on the final page, notarized.
Along with the signature of someone named Jacob McCarthy.
Jacob McCarthy. CEO of Murray Grant Wines.
Bobby shrugged. “I guess Dad didn’t want to bother you until after the wedding.”
Then he leaned down over me, a little too close for comfort. I thought about swatting him with something. My muffin came into view.
“What happened to the contracts?” he said, biting his nails nervously.
I moved away from him.
“And why are you freaking out?” he said. “This is a good thing. Dad won’t have to work again. Murray Grant made them the kind of offer that comes around once in a lifetime.”
“Do you even hear yourself?”
“Do you even hear yourself?”
If looks could kill, I might have killed him. Right then. That was the thing about Bobby. He had always been logical and robotic about everything. His feelings were like something he practiced—he should be emotional about a wedding, shedding one calculated tear—but never embraced. It was why he was so good at business. It was why he was so bad at showing that he cared about anything else.
“Since when is that what they want, Bobby?”
“That’s what everyone wants!”
Bobby drilled me with a look.
“You’re yelling at the wrong person,” he said.
“I’m not yelling.”
“You are YELLING,” he yelled.
“You are both yelling.”
We turned toward the doorway to see my father. He stood there in jeans and a T-shirt, looking younger than he was, with a thick mound of hair, skin brown from the sun. He was holding a thermos and a glass jar of grapes, his hair sweaty against his face.
He looked toward me as I dropped the files on the table, back in their pile of wet coffee.
He clocked it, my tenseness. He didn’t ask when I’d arrived home, and what I knew about what was happening here with my mother. My father knew what I knew. He was already thinking about how to make it better.
“Daddy,” I said, which I hadn’t called him since I was a little girl. “Please tell me it’s not true.”
He walked past Bobby, squeezing his shoulder hello, and sat down beside me, putting down his grapes.
He put his arms around me, kissed the top of my head.
Waiting for another minute, so I could possibly believe him.
“It’s not true,” he said.
The Secateurs
This is what your mother and I want to do,” my father said. “Honestly.”
We arrived on the northwest part of the property, the last twenty acres my father bought. These were the farthest vines from my parents’ house. He’d bought them from a developer for too much money—the beautiful, slightly lusher land that he thought could make a Pinot that was slightly more fruity and light than what he was producing with the western light.
We knelt down in Block 8, and started clipping ripe grape clusters off their vines, picking at a rapid pace. These were the grapes that produced B-Minor—the wine that I loved, the wine that Bobby loved. These clones also helped to produce a wine called Opus 129, which I found to be sharp, too rigid—though it was among my father’s most popular wines. How they were both made from the same grapes could be confusing, but it didn’t confuse my father. That, he believed, was often how it happened. The grapes liked to do different things depending on how you fermented them, how you trusted them to ferment themselves.
Normally we wouldn’t be picking midday. The grapes were at risk for fermenting in the sun, crushing in the bins. But my father had tested the Brix—the sugar in the grapes—and he didn’t want to wait until tonight to get them off the vines.
That was where he had been, testing the Brix, when I’d found out that he was giving away his life, as he had known it.
“Murray Grant Wines . . .” he said, “made a generous offer.”
“You hate them.”
He smiled at me, his warm smile. “I don’t hate anybody.”
Then he motioned for me to keep moving. His hands wove through the clusters effortlessly, clipping in quick succession, dropping the clusters in a bucket. I was going at half-speed, not a fast enough speed for him, not when he wanted these grapes off the vine and somewhere cooler.
“All hands on deck, or we can have this conversation later.”
“I want to have it now.”
“Then keep up,” he said.
I started moving faster, gently removing the grapes, careful of the heat coming off of them, careful not to add to it. Truthfully, my father didn’t need the help. He had five men out in the vineyard helping already. He needed to be doing something that made him seem busy, though. My father needed to be busy so there was a chance I wouldn’t notice how sad he was.
But I did notice. My father was sun-kissed and solid from spending a lifetime outside, doing work that he loved. And he was usually pretty happy doing it. His eyes and his bright smile made him seem perpetually young, Finn’s big brother as opposed to his father. So the contrast was sharp. His eyes were dark. His skin tight and gaunt. I could see how much energy it was taking him just to smile.
He shrugged. “It all fell into place,” he said. “I hadn’t sought it out, but your mother had been wanting to make a change of some kind, to not be so locked to Northern California, and Jacob came along . . .”
“Who is he?”
“Murray and Sylvie’s son,” Bobby answered.
“I was asking Dad,” I said.
“I can’t answer?” he said.
Bobby gave me a look, perplexed as to why I was so pissed off at him—as to why, in his mind, I was demonstrating the version of myself that was more like Finn as opposed to the one that was more like him. The version that Bobby had embraced, who had put herself through law school and had become a lawyer, who was marrying a stand-up guy.
“Jacob is Murray and Sylvie’s grandson,” my father corrected.
Those were names I recognized. We had heard them often when we were growing up. They were the founders of Murray Grant Wines—or, actually, Murray’s father was, but they were the ones that had taken it national—and then international. They’d put production in the millions. Their daughter, Melanie, was about ten years older than my parents, but she’d moved to New Y
ork and married a Wall Street guy when she was young. Big society wedding. Last name McCarthy, apparently. Son named Jacob.
Bobby, unfazed by all of this, kept working, pulling off clusters of grapes. He surveyed them as he dropped them into that silver bucket. The way my father had taught us, now second nature.
“Murray wanted to slow down, so Jacob moved to the Valley last year. He has taken over most of their operations, and he’s doing a good job for them. He’s smart and he’s a nice guy.”
“I don’t doubt that,” I said. I doubted it very much.
“What’s your problem?” Bobby said, angry.
I ignored him. “I’m just not sure why you didn’t talk to me first, Dad, before making such a big decision.”
“It felt like the right decision to make for my family,” he said.
“And we appreciate it, Dad,” Bobby said.
I shot Bobby a dirty look.
Bobby met it with a look of his own. “What?” he said.
“How about Adler Wines, Dad?”
“How about Adler Wines?” He met my eyes, annoyed.
Adler was a small, biodynamic winery near Alexander Valley. The owners, Beth and Sasha, were friends of my parents’. They got bought out by Seville Wineries. The folks at Seville promised that they would keep production exactly as it had been. That devotion to biodynamics, to sustainable farming. At first, Adler retained the same level of quality. Its first year as a subsidiary of Seville, it had its best harvest. The grapes turned out richer and riper than usual, yielding the kind of fruit-forward, jammy wine that came from Sonoma County’s warmest harvests. But the demand that harvest created made Seville greedy. They grew the company far too fast for any type of quality control. Then they put Adler Wines in every Whole Foods in the country. All it had in common with the original was the label.
“That’s not going to happen here,” my father said.
“How do you know?”
Bobby met my eyes. “What do you mean, how does he know? He knows!”
