Vintage Ladybug Farm

by Donna Ball

  “Ida Mae!” Lori called. “We’re not only going to open it,” she told her mother, “we’re going to drink it.”

  Bridget made a face. “At this time of morning?”

  And Lindsay added, “I see we’ve been a very bad influence on you.”

  Lori held the bottle up with both hands, showing the label. “This,” she told them, “is last year’s shiraz from the Three Ponds Winery, from where we’re going to order our crush. You’ve got to taste this.”

  Derrick shrugged. “I’m game.” He crossed the room, where a decanter of sherry and a display of Murano cordial glasses were displayed on a Queen Anne console table. He removed the decanter and brought back the tray of glasses.

  Dominic took the bottle and examined the label. “New York, huh? Old vines?”

  “European stock,” Lori assured him. She turned and called again, “Ida Mae!”

  Dominic took his key chain from his pocket and flipped open a corkscrew. Lindsay gave him an admiring look. “I do like a man who’s prepared.”

  He flashed her a grin and started opening the wine.

  Ida Mae appeared at the door to the parlor in the rooster-print apron that Lori had given her for Christmas and a purple cardigan over her housedress and jeans. “What’s all the bellowing about?” she demanded with a scowl. “I’m too old to be running up and down this hall every time somebody hollers, and I’ve got a cake in the oven.”

  “What kind?” Paul wanted to know.

  Ida Mae ignored him and slapped a stack of envelopes on the table by the door. “Here’s the mail,” she said and turned to leave.

  Lori hurried to take Ida Mae by the arm, urging her back into the room. “Wait, Ida Mae. I need you to taste something.”

  Dominic pulled the cork free from the bottle and sniffed it, then lightly inhaled the fragrance of the bottle itself. A slight tilt of his head suggested nothing as he poured a tasting measure into each of the glasses on the tray. Ida Mae watched him suspiciously.

  “What’re you all up to, bringing out spirits this time of day? You’re gonna burn in perdition, ever’ last one of you.”

  “Not spirits,” Lori insisted, bringing her a glass. “Wine. A very special wine.”

  Ida Mae threw up her hands and stepped back, looking as though she’d just been offered poison. “Are you crazy, girl?”

  Cici said, “Lori, really, is this some kind of joke?”

  “Really,” Lori insisted, pressing the glass on Ida Mae, “just taste it. A tiny sip.”

  Derrick cast a wary look toward her. “Are we all going to suddenly start shrinking and fall through a rabbit hole?” Nonetheless, he took a glass and held it up to the light, examining the color, and then waved it cautiously under his nose.

  Dominic did the same, then took a sip. Everyone watched as he rolled the flavor on his tongue for a moment and then swallowed. “Nice base notes,” he admitted to Lori. “Chocolate, maybe a little raspberry … something else. Familiar, but I can’t quite say what it is.”

  Lori pressed her hands together excitedly, watching as, one by one, the others tasted the wine … everyone, that was, except Ida Mae, who looked at them all as though they’d lost their minds.

  “Well?” insisted Lori, eyes shining. “Do you taste it?”

  Lindsay held out her glass. “I don’t even taste the chocolate,” she admitted. “Of course, I just brushed my teeth.”

  “Funny,” observed Bridget, “how wine doesn’t taste nearly as good before lunch as it does after dinner.”

  “Wait a minute,” Paul said. He held out his glass, then brought it back to his face, inhaling the aroma. “There is something familiar about it.” He looked at Derrick, who nodded.

  “Loire valley Beaujolais?” he suggested.

  “Not Beaujolais,” Dominic disagreed, taking another sip. “It’s young, but you almost think if it aged another few years …”

  “What does it remind you of?” Lori insisted.

  “Odd,” said Cici, examining the glass. “It’s not sweet, but it makes me think of something sweet.”

  “Chocolate?” suggested Lindsay.

  “Ida Mae’s fruitcakes!” Lori exclaimed impatiently. “The Blackwell Farms ’63!”

  The Blackwell Farms Winery had become famous for its ’63 shiraz, the last bottle of which had sold at open auction for in excess of $8,000. Ida Mae, oblivious to this, had been using it to marinate her Christmas fruitcakes for years—thus gaining the well-deserved reputation for the most exquisite fruitcakes in the county, perhaps the world. The last of the ’63 shiraz, however, had been used on the last fruitcake the year the ladies moved into the house.

  For a moment, everyone stared at her and then re-tasted their wine. Even Ida Mae took a careful sniff, frowning. “Don’t smell a thing like fruitcake,” she declared.

  “Maybe.” Paul took another sip. “There’s something there.”

  “I knew it was familiar,” Derrick agreed. He smiled at Ida Mae. “The best thing I ever tasted at Christmas!”

  “Not quite there,” Dominic said thoughtfully, gazing at Lori. “But close.”

  Cici said, “I don’t know how you expect us to taste anything this time of morning.” But she took another sip anyway.

  “No, he’s right.” Bridget sniffed the wine again, then re-tasted. “It’s … reminiscent.”

  “Sorry,” Lindsay told Lori, setting aside her glass. “Tastes like toothpaste to me.”

  All eyes turned to Ida Mae as she sniffed the cordial glass again, stared at it, and then took one small, very careful taste. She smacked her lips. She looked at the glass. She set it down with a clack on the side table. “It ain’t Blackwell Farms wine,” she pronounced. “But,” she added as she turned to go, “it’s close.”

  Lori whirled back to them, beaming. “See? Was I right?”

  Dominic smiled, lifted his glass to her in a small salute, and put it on the side table beside Ida Mae’s. “You did good, kid,” he told her. “You’re starting to develop a real palate, and that’s not something that comes with a college degree.”

  She glowed under his praise, and then he added, “But you know, last year’s vintage has nothing to do with this year’s crush.”

  “I think it does,” Lori replied confidently. “Especially if you blend Ladybug Farm wine into it. Don’t you see it’s perfect?” She turned from one to the other of them, her excitement all but sparking in the air. “You wanted a unique wine brand, and this is it—the taste of the glory days of the Blackwell Farms winery with the jazz of the contemporary Ladybug Farm grape! Wait, I have to write that down. That could be our marketing copy.”

  Cici gave a weak, uncertain chuckle. “Lori, I don’t know anything about wine-making but I’m pretty sure that mixing fresh grapes into aged wine is probably not a good idea. And we don’t have any actual wine. We won’t even have grapes until fall. Maybe.”

  “Except she’s not talking about this year,” Dominic said, with an approving glance toward Lori.

  “Right.” Lori gave a single adamant nod of her head. “This year, we bottle and label the wine we make from the crush. But we hold some in reserve. Next year …”

  “We blend our own wine into the reserve,” added Dominic thoughtfully. “A special edition.”

  “Exactly! And a winery is born.” Lori held up her palm for a high-five, and Dominic slapped it with a grin.

  Then he grew serious. “You asked them about fermentation and pump overs? What about ML inoculation? Did they use CO2 in the cold soak?”

  Bridget, Lindsay, and Cici exchanged blank looks while Lori and Dominic engaged in a few intense moments of technical conversation. Paul murmured, “I think we need to renew our subscription to Wine Spectator.” And Derrick nodded agreement.

  “Young lady,” Dominic decided after a few more moments of rapid-fire questions and answers, “I think you just might have a future in the wine business. California’s gain is our loss.”

  Lori’s cheeks colored with gratific
ation, and Cici gave her daughter’s shoulders and affectionate squeeze. “I agree,” she said.

  “Good,” said Lori. “Because they said they’d waive storage fees if we ordered before the end of the month, so I told them they could ship two hundred barrels.”

  “Two hundred!”

  “Lori, are you crazy?”

  “Lori, we can’t possibly—”

  Dominic held up a quick, placating hand. “It’s okay,” he assured them. “We can accommodate that, and she’s right—the sooner we get the new wine into our own barrels, the more control we have over the outcome. As long …” he gave Lori a meaningful look, “as they don’t expect payment in advance.”

  “I held it on my credit card,” she assured him blithely. “They’re mailing the contract. Here’s what I negotiated.” She took several typed papers from her bag and handed them over to Dominic.

  Cici took a long, slow breath. “Lori,” she said carefully, “you do realize that you’re not actually an officer in this corporation, don’t you?”

  Lori had spotted the box of Valentine candy, and she headed toward it happily. “Not a problem, Mom. My pleasure.”

  Dominic examined the papers with an appreciative lift of his brow. “Pity we can’t hire that girl,” he murmured to Cici. And to Lori he said, “You could have gotten a better price on shipping.”

  “Not for that small amount,” she assured him, biting into a caramel, and Dominic winked at Cici and handed her the papers.

  “We’ll take this up at the next board of directors meeting,” he said, “which should be, what? In a couple of hours? Meanwhile, you all have wedding dresses to look at, and I want to check that pump again. We may need to order a new valve.” He gave Lindsay a look that was obviously meant to be casual and which no one in the room could be persuaded to believe, and added, “Walk out with me?”

  “I’ll get my coat.”

  Cici went to take Lori’s papers to the office, gathering up the mail on her way. “Oh, wait,” she said, pulling out an envelope. “It’s from the bank. What do you know about that? These must be the final papers on our loan. Perfect timing, huh?” She opened the envelope and pulled out a paper.

  “Well, you know what they say,” Lori replied cheerfully. “When you’re doing what you’re meant to do, the universe smiles on you.”

  “Now there, you see?” Derrick agreed. “There’s always a reward in it when you get up at six in the morning to slog through the mud and take pictures of the groundbreaking ceremony for a friend’s new house.” Lindsay came back from the foyer, pulling on her rain jacket. “If we sign everything now, Dominic and I can run into town before the bank closes.”

  Cici looked up from reading the paper. There was an odd expression on her face. “What does the universe do when you screw up?” Her tone was dull; her eyes looked stunned.

  “They turned us down,” she said. “We didn’t get the loan.”

  ~*~

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In Search of an Angel

  “Remember the lilies of the field,” Noah advised somberly.

  The seven pairs of eyes that turned on him were neither appreciative nor encouraging. Nonetheless, he explained, “They toil not, neither do they reap.”

  Noah, who had a half-day on Wednesdays, had come home for lunch to find everyone glumly picking over turkey sandwiches and searching for options. An hour later, Ida Mae cleared the table, but still they sat, the embers of the fire dying behind them, the bottle of Montrachet half-empty before them, the box of Valentine candy open in the center of the table.

  “Thank you, Noah,” Lindsay said before he could go on.

  Lori gave him an impatient look. “Don’t you know any verses about vineyards? There’s lots of stuff in the Bible about vineyards. Quote something helpful.”

  Noah shrugged and reached for a chocolate.

  Ida Mae rattled plates and saucers in the background, muttering to herself. Bridget twisted in her chair to look at her. “What’s that, Ida Mae?”

  “I said, the only thing you folks know about wine is how to drink it,” Ida Mae replied. She scooped coffee into the coffee maker. “Shame on you, sitting here at the kitchen table, guzzling and moaning this time of day. Ain’t you got anyplace better to be?”

  “Actually,” said Bridget with a sigh, “no.”

  “Although, I did sketch out a cute design for the winery office,” Lindsay said wistfully, “where we could have had our meetings, instead of at the kitchen table. If we had a winery, that is. Right there in the west corner of the barn, next to the restaurant. There was room for a gift shop, too. We could have sold your wine jams and gift baskets, and on the front wall, right over the cash register, I was going to do a six-foot-tall canvas with a single cluster of grapes. With the tall ceilings in there it would’ve looked fabulous.”

  “Could’ve done a tin ceiling,” added Noah, “and left the beams exposed so that it still looked like a barn. People would’ve liked that.”

  “We could have decorated the restaurant with your art,” Bridget said, “and sold it there, too, just like they’re doing at the B&B.”

  Derrick smothered a groan. “Restaurants and B&Bs sell food, not art. Lindsay, darling, we really must talk about what you’re doing with your life. Not to mention Noah’s.”

  She returned a steady gaze. “What I was going to do with my life was operate a winery and sell my paintings in the restaurant. Now I don’t know what I’m going to do with it.”

  Cici took a breath. “I think it’s important to remember that we weren’t rejected because of our credit, or because of the idea. The bank just doesn’t have the money.”

  “It’s the economy,” agreed Bridget.

  “Which will never get better if banks don’t start loaning money,” said Lindsay angrily.

  “The point being,” interrupted Cici firmly, sensing a tirade, “that this is just one bank. We can try others.”

  The coffee pot gurgled in the silence that followed, filling the room with its rich aroma. Cici looked around the table for encouragement and found none. Dominic put it into words. “Your local bank is always your best chance for a small business loan,” he said. “If they turn you down … Well, it’s like a black mark for everybody else.”

  Bridget took a deep breath and let it out. “It’s funny,” she said. “Until now, I don’t think I realized how much I wanted this. I mean, I didn’t even think it was a good idea at first. But The Tasting Table.” She smiled wanly. “That was a good name for a restaurant, wasn’t it?”

  Lindsay reached over and patted her hand. Noah took another chocolate. Derrick refilled his glass.

  “You know,” he said, “Noah may be on the right track. What you need is an Angel.”

  Noah frowned, apparently trying to remember a verse that referenced angels, and everyone else looked at Derrick curiously.

  “He’s right,” Dominic said. “We talked about this before. Failing cash or credit, we need investors. Or an investor. An Angel.”

  Lindsay slouched down in her chair until she could rest her head against the back rail, her demeanor a metaphor for the defeat they all felt. “We’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars. I don’t know anyone with that kind of money. And even if I did, how could I ask them to risk it on a winery we haven’t even established yet?”

  Lori said without hesitation, “Dad is sending me a check for the wedding. You can use that.”

  “Absolutely not,” said Cici.

  Derrick and Paul exchanged a look. Paul said, “If we took out the pool …”

  “And the radiant heat in the bathrooms …”

  “And the terraced landscaping …”

  “Stop it.” Bridget reached across the table and grasped both their hands. “Thank you,” she said sincerely. “But we don’t want you to sacrifice your dream for ours.” She smiled at Lori. “Either of you.

  “Besides,” said Lindsay with a sigh, “it wouldn’t be enough.”

  Cici kicked her
under the table.

  “If only we could sell the house on Huntington Lane,” Paul said, frowning. “Cici, are you sure you couldn’t get your real estate license reinstated in Maryland for just a few months? No one ever moved property like you.”

  “All that custom crush,” Lori said, dejected. “The base notes of chocolate and raspberry … Gone.”

  “I could call Kevin,” Bridget suggested uneasily. “He’s always talking about the hit his stock portfolio took last year. Maybe he’d like to invest in something more substantial.”

  Lori looked at her mother. “If you won’t call Daddy, I will. He has plenty of money.”

  “Honey, no one has plenty of money these days.” But she looked a little uncertain as she glanced at Bridget and then at Lindsay. “Besides, I hate being in debt to Richard.”

  “It wouldn’t be debt. It would be business.”

  “Even more fun.”

  Lori pushed back her chair, her eyes suddenly alight. “I’ll call Mark’s parents! They were wild about this place. They would love—”

  “No you won’t!” All three ladies objected at once.

  “We barely know them,” Bridget added. “We’re not going to ask them for money!”

  “What kind of family will they think their son is marrying into?” Cici said, horrified. “No. Absolutely not.” She looked at Lindsay for support.

  “It’s never a good idea to go into business with relatives,” Lindsay agreed. “Or to owe them money.”

  “Which is why you’re not going to ask Kevin,” Cici said to Bridget. “He’s your only son. What if something goes wrong and we lose everything? Who’s going to take you in if he loses everything, too?”

  Bridget pulled a dry face, which nonetheless held a note of concession. “Which is a perfect argument for why you shouldn’t involve Richard. Despite the fact that I know you’d love to see him lose everything, who would take care of Lori?”

  Lori said, “Why is it that old people always look on the dark side?”