But what a place. I took a deep breath and hopped off the barstool. I walked around the tasting room, surveying it. Above me, there was a pitched ceiling with exposed beams. A balcony ran along the outside of what would have been the second floor. There was room up there for small café tables and bistro chairs. Along the outer walls were leather couches and coffee tables. But the center of the room was empty. There was space for a dance floor in the center, a band in the corner. And up against the far wall, photos depicting the history of the winery, from its founding in the 1870s by a Hungarian count to its purchase by William Rockford, presumably William’s grandfather. I wondered where William was. I couldn’t remember when he’d said he would leave. If he’d said.
It felt like a place that had history; that was important. And it felt like a place that needed someone to help highlight the history, to share the greatness of the place with more people. It deserved to be seen and known, and I felt like I was the person to make that happen. It made me feel part of something. And that was what I had been missing when I thought about working for an investment bank.
I was standing in the dark corner where I envisioned the three-piece jazz band when Linda came into the bar. “Hannah?” she said loudly.
“Over here,” I said, emerging from the shadows. I headed back across the room to the bar, telling myself not to have an emotional breakdown.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I hadn’t told Everett about our agreement. He’s not one for change. And there’s been a lot around here recently. Our other dog, Zinfandel, died. William is leaving for New York next week. Business hasn’t been great. But really, I was being a coward. Because he doesn’t think we need help and I didn’t want to make him mad. So I didn’t tell him. But now you’re here and he’s mad anyway.”
“I thought we had a deal,” I said, my voice quiet, quaking slightly. I threw everything away because of a whim. Tears bloomed in my eyes.
“Of course we did, darling,” she said, patting me on the shoulder. “I’ve told Everett all about it now. He’ll get used to you eventually. He might even start to like you if you bring some customers into this place. There’s a lot of competition around here, as you might have noticed.”
“Oh,” I said. “Thank you so much. I was so scared. I mean. I . . .”
“It’s going to be good,” she said.
“This place is the best,” I said. “Thank you so much. You won’t be sorry you hired me.”
“Of course I won’t,” she said. “You’re a good girl. Where are you from?”
“Iowa,” I said.
“Perfect,” she said. “Salt of the earth. Let me show you to your cottage.”
“I can’t stay,” I said. “I mean, I can, but I have to go back to Berkeley for a few days for graduation and to move out of my apartment. I’ll come back next week for good.”
“Okay,” she said. “But you must have a few minutes. Can I just show you the cottage? I know you’ll love it. We can have one glass of wine and then I’ll have Everett drive you to the bus station.”
“Who could say no to that idea?” I said.
Linda put her arm around my shoulders. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “There aren’t enough women around here. Even Tannin is a boy.”
“Squad goals,” I said, weakly.
“Indeed,” she said, looking a little confused.
It was an emotional roller coaster already.
* * *
—
I followed Linda through the mysterious behind-the-bar door. There was only an office back there, but it felt like I was now in the inner sanctum of the winery. A place I was excited to be. The office led to another door, which led out to a flagstone patio on the side of the building opposite the parking lot. The path transformed into a set of stone stairs. At the top of the hill was a stone cottage with two perfect front windows and geraniums exploding out of the window boxes. Beyond the cottage, what looked like a castle rose out of the hill behind the winery. Somehow it wasn’t entirely visible from below, but a huge stone mansion that would have been more likely on a PBS miniseries than at a California winery was placed about a quarter of a mile behind and above the tasting room.
“The castle!” I said. “I’ve heard about it. But wow.”
“It’s pretty spectacular, isn’t it?” she said. “It was built by our founder back in the 1870s. Beautiful, but it’s just too much for us. We really only live in a small part of it. Your cottage was the winemaker’s cottage. It’s much more manageable. I sometimes wish we lived there. But it would be a bit strange to have that giant thing on our property and not use it.”
“You could turn it into a museum,” I said.
“You have lots of ideas,” she said.
I blushed. “I mean, I would never not live in a castle if it was available,” I said. “But I’ve never lived anywhere larger than fifteen hundred square feet, so what do I know?” I realized that I was rambling, so I gritted my teeth to get myself to stop talking. Like gnawing on my cuticles, nervous talking was a bad habit.
I sat on a little stone bench next to the front door as she dug around in the pack she wore around her waist until she produced what looked like an iron skeleton key. She put it in the keyhole. “We’ve never updated the locks,” she said, then turned the lock and handed the iron key to me. “Sorry about that. It’s a bit heavy.”
I held it in my palm and turned it over. It was weighty. It had seen things. Been in generations of pockets and purses. “I feel like I’m in a Frances Hodgson Burnett novel,” I said.
“Who?”
“Remember The Secret Garden?”
“Oh,” she said. “We had a son. He only read comic books, but that sounds vaguely familiar from my own childhood.”
“Right,” I said. “The story is probably as old as this winery. Well, there’s always a skeleton key in those kinds of novels. I’ve always wanted one is what I mean.”
“I don’t tend to read old novels. Maybe because our life is kind of like one. But the good thing about the key is you’ll always know if it’s in your purse,” she said. “It’s not light.”
Inside, the cottage was the perfect combination of rustic and modern. I was glad that I hadn’t come with William the other night, because now my reaction was honest. I grinned and clapped my hands. “This place is stunning,” I said to Linda. But she wasn’t listening. The main room was open, with lots of light—the back of the cottage, which faced east, had been renovated to have big floor-to-ceiling windows. A big overstuffed white couch faced a stone fireplace with a reclaimed wood coffee table between on rusty wheels. The coffee table sat on top of a white shag rug.
Between the living area and the kitchen was a giant farmhouse table surrounded by about a dozen mismatched wooden chairs, all painted different colors, but all fading in exactly the same way. Past the table was a large marble-topped kitchen island and a well-appointed kitchen—huge stainless refrigerator, which sat next to a fully stocked wine refrigerator. Open shelving revealed every type of wineglass imaginable. While they hadn’t updated the locks, they clearly had updated the kitchen.
Our home in Berkeley was a cookie-cutter graduate student apartment. Brown particleboard cabinets. White refrigerator. Tile table. Our furniture was all from IKEA. Ethan complained about it all the time, but he never did anything about it. Clearly he had the money; he had grown up in an apartment (and a summerhouse in the Hamptons) filled with custom pieces sourced by his mother’s decorator. Needless to say, we hadn’t invited his parents to our grad school apartment.
But for me, IKEA honestly was a step up from the house I grew up in. At least the IKEA furniture was new. The furniture in my tiny childhood home, which was a house not much bigger than my graduate student apartment, had all been bought secondhand or found by the side of the road. My childhood bed frame and mattress had originally been my grandfather’s.
My father had also slept in it as a kid and had passed it down to me. Needless to say, it was a little bit lumpy. But after he died, it felt wrong to ask for another.
All of that was to say that the “cottage” felt like true luxury.
“Thank you,” Linda said, finally hearing my compliment. “I’ll admit that it’s one of my favorite places on the property. All of my favorite books are on that shelf, and that chair next to the fireplace is the most comfortable one I’ve ever sat on. I’ve taken many a nap on that chair.”
I took a look at the bookshelf—she had Housekeeping, Infinite Jest, some Evelyn Waugh, some Michael Connelly, a Nora Roberts, an ancient-looking copy of Little Women. I plucked Little Women from the shelf and plopped down in the giant chair. “It’s so comfortable!” I said. “This was my favorite book when I was a girl. I used to bring it with me everywhere and read it so I wouldn’t have to talk to people. I was shy as a kid, but I think reading made me outgoing in the long run; it always gave me something to talk about.”
She pulled open the wine fridge and took out an open bottle. “It’s a good one. Didn’t I promise you a glass of wine? I just opened this yesterday. It should be even better today. It’s a Chardonnay, but a good one, not oaky, I promise. We age it in stainless steel.”
I laughed a little. I wasn’t a wine snob yet. Everything tasted good to me.
She grabbed two slim glasses from the stemware shelf and poured for us. “Let’s relax on the back patio,” she said. I pulled myself out of the giant chair and left the book on the seat. I headed to the back door to hold it open for her so she could go out with the glasses. I grabbed the bottle from the counter and followed her. We settled on wrought iron chairs with an iron bistro table between us. The chairs had grape-leaf cushions on them, the only nod to wine I’d seen so far. Linda adhered to my rules about avoiding signs and themed décor.
The patio was surrounded by huge cedar trees, but the main house was still visible. We talked about the history of the winery and my background—I told her that my father had been a truck driver and my mother a nurse. That my older brother and I were on our own for most of our childhood and adolescence.
“You’ve managed to take yourself far,” she said. “I grew up here. I haven’t gone very far at all.”
“But look at what you’ve done,” I said, gesturing to her home, the vines, the cottage.
“This was all here for me. I just had to take it on,” she said.
“What would you have done if . . .”
“If I had a choice?” She sighed. “I don’t know. I never even allowed myself to think about it. I don’t hate making and selling wine. And besides, I don’t know how to do anything else.”
The way she said it made me think she didn’t not hate it either. Hating making wine was not something I could imagine, and yet William didn’t want to do it, and now I wasn’t even sure if Linda did either.
“This place was in Everett’s family. It was founded in the 1870s by Count William, during the Wine Rush, as they call it, but it fell into disrepair in the early 1900s, during Prohibition, and Everett’s grandfather resurrected it in the forties. Most people didn’t have the money or the taste for wine then. He actually was using it to farm fruits and vegetables for a time and was cutting back the vines that were stubbornly trying to grow through. But when the vegetable business started to collapse, because more vegetables were being imported from South America, his son, Everett’s father, had the foresight to change over to wine. Or change back, I guess is more accurate. The vines wanted to grow. My father owned the winery next door—the land is up past the castle—and he had planted his vines himself. They’re much younger than the vines here but also were cultivated exclusively to be a winery, unlike here, where everything was in chaos for a long time. My father had been a food scientist and an amateur horticulturalist. He created artificial grape flavor and made a lot of money. But he started thinking the world of engineered food was disgusting and probably dangerous in the fifties, and he had the money from inventing the flavor, so he quit the flavor business and bought the land up here to farm real grapes, he said. He invested everything in the land. He had a mildly successful business, but nothing in comparison with the Rockfords’ next door, who were the go-to winery around here until all of those commercial places started popping up and ruining our business, but that’s another story. Anyway, in the early seventies, Everett’s father wanted to buy my father’s land, but my father didn’t want to sell. So they worked out an arrangement that if we, Everett and I—and mind you we were children at the time—were to get married, my father would get shares in the Bellosguardo business and we would be trained to run the winery. Eventually we would inherit together.”
Maybe I was a little drunk—I had had more wine during daylight hours in the past two days than in my entire life—but as I listened to Linda talk, I couldn’t help but think that she had, essentially, a modern-day arranged marriage with Everett.
“Did you want to work in the winery for the rest of your life? Why did you agree to it?” I asked.
“My parents didn’t want to make wine anymore, but they also wanted the land to stay in the family. I was their only child. I didn’t really have a choice. I also loved the Rockford castle. It had been a second home to me growing up. The problem was, in the early eighties, right around when they were preparing to turn the business over to Everett and me, commercial wineries started popping up all around California—Kendall-Jackson and Gallo—and their wines were everywhere, and they started pushing out the smaller producers like us from shelf space and wine lists. And this was just at the same time that big-box retailers started really getting in the game of selling brands. We weren’t a brand like Gallo; we just didn’t produce at that level, and we didn’t want to. Plus, Everett’s father, who was the one who knew the most about the business, passed away shortly after William was born. Everett’s mother moved to San Francisco. My parents were so happy for Everett to deal with the business that they bought a condo in Hawaii. So they left us here, in a total crisis for the business. Honestly, we haven’t quite recovered from it yet. We’ve always made the wines here naturally and we’ve always grown all our own grapes, but that wasn’t a selling point for a long time. Now we can call them ‘estate’ bottles, which means that all the grapes are grown here, on the estate. And we don’t put sulfur in our bottles, which can keep them from seeming corked but also can change the taste. Recently, we’ve started to notice that people are more interested in independent growers and natural wine again. But if we had used the words ‘natural wine’ even five years ago, we would have been laughed out of the room. It’s pretty wild, how the pendulum swings.”
“Wow,” I said. “I’m glad the pendulum is swinging your way. I’m learning about natural wine already.” Or, at least, William had said words to me that sounded like he was teaching me about natural wine.
“It’s the best way to make it,” she said. She poured the last of the bottle into our glasses. “Anyway, that’s enough about me. I know you’ll enjoy graduation.”
“I can’t wait,” I said, with only mild sarcasm in my voice. It was going to be superweird when I got back to Berkeley; I knew graduation would feel bittersweet.
She smiled and put her hand on my arm. “You’re a hardworking girl, I can tell. Come back on Sunday night so you can be at our last dinner with William before he leaves for New York. I can tell that he’s fond of you.”
I blushed a little. I wondered what she knew. Not that there was anything to know.
“Just mother’s intuition,” she said. “Besides, I have a stake in it as well. If you’re here and he likes you, maybe he’ll be more inclined to come home.”
“Whatever works,” I said. “I just want you to be happy.”
Linda looked down at her hands and a kind of gloom came over her face. “Everett should take you to the bus,” she said and stood up from the table.
&n
bsp; I looked around and tried to figure out what I had said or done wrong. I stood up as well, not wanting to be rude.
“I can’t wait to live here,” I said. “It’s going to be really fun.”
* * *
—
She walked me up to the house to find Everett, and he and I got in the truck together. Everett drove me back to the El Dorado Hotel to get my bag and then to the bus depot in silence. But he let me hold Tannin on my lap, so I just chatted with the dog and the dog gave me little kisses on my nose. I made a comment about the weather and got no response. Then I made a comment about the beauty of Sonoma. No response. Finally, I said, “Does it seem like it’s going to be a good year for grapes?”
He finally answered. “It’s been rough the past few years. I don’t like to irrigate because then you don’t get a real vin de terroir. We lost a lot of the younger grapes during the drought. The old guys, they’re hearty; their roots are so deep, they get the water they need and they refuse to die. California rootstock is the strongest—our roots are immune to diseases that kill French grapes all the time, like phylloxera. There was an outbreak in the 1870s, right after the count founded the vineyard, but all of the vines that survived are hearty. And these vines, they lived for years here without being cared for at all. Anyway, we’ve finally had some rain this year, so I think we’ll be okay.”
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