The Winemaker's Daughter, page 34
“What are you doing here?”
“We have business to settle.”
“We?”
“I’m the new buyer.”
She rises from her chair.
“Please,” Ethan says, extending a hand with chalky fingers. “Don’t walk out. Oh, waitress, can you bring me some hot water for tea?”
Ethan keeps his coat on as he removes a stack of documents from his briefcase. His hands move slowly, without fluidity.
“Your father’s wine?” he says, pointing to her drink.
“Yes.”
“How is it?”
“My father always said his wine would make him immortal.”
“And?”
“He lives in this glass. So does Niccolo.”
Ethan turns to the legal papers in his folder. “I had thought of structuring this as a straight gift.”
“A gift?”
“The way people with old money pass something on to their ultimately inferior and typically ungrateful children. But I have no ultimately inferior and typically ungrateful children, as you know. I have no siblings. Both parents are dead. I decided to pay your brother for the place, exactly as outlined in the deal memo, and then sell it back to you for one dollar.”
“One dollar?” Her face is blank. “Sell it back to me?”
The hot water arrives.
“What happened to your voice, Ethan? I can hardly hear you.”
“But then I thought, No, that won’t work. For tax purposes, it’s a drain. I’m trying to speak up. . . .”
“What’s wrong?”
“Will you pour the tea for me? What I came up with was a sort of trust, another trick of the rich; I’m learning these things, though I’m still nouveau, of course. It’s like a conservation easement, if you will. Are you familiar with those? I’m sure you are, with all your preservation work. People do this when they want to keep a ranch from becoming another strip mall. So, here’s what I’ve put together: The Cartolano vineyard will stay as it is, a working vineyard, for eternity. It can be sold upon your death, but it must stay as a working vineyard, no matter how many hands it passes through. What do you think?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“There is a catch. One condition, only: You would have to stay on the land.”
“Stay on the land?”
“Yes. You can make wine. You can pay somebody to make wine. You can spend your winters in—I don’t know—wherever, but you have to make the coulee your primary home.”
“I . . . I . . . you say it will always stay a vineyard, as long as I live there?”
“Yes. I know it sounds like a form of indentured servitude. But you would never hear from me again. I promise. I can put it in this document, if you want. It would be yours, basically.”
“Are you okay, Ethan?”
“I’m sick. Can’t you tell?”
“I didn’t want to say anything.”
“Surely, you knew something was wrong with me long ago. Our hike almost killed me. And remember when I stumbled at the stadium? I didn’t think I would make it up those stairs.”
“I just thought you weren’t very physical.”
“Not my choice. It’s . . . this is embarrassing, Brunella, because I hate sports. I have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—’’
“Lou Gehrig’s disease.”
“They’re making progress at the degenerative neurological institute on Lake Union, but I don’t have ten years to wait for the research. Anyway, that’s the way I structured this deal. Do you accept?”
“Why are you doing this, Ethan?”
“It’s cheaper, for tax purposes.”
“I understand that part, but why—?”
“Oh, I suppose that’s a complicated palaver for another time. But let’s say I envy you your consuming passions.”
“You said I fall in love too easily, with too many things.”
“And I don’t fall in love with anything. But listen: Will you accept?”
“I live in Italy now, in a valley not far from the Alps, where they’ve been making wine for three thousand years. I have a farm, an old villa, a husband I love, a baby girl, and some grapes.”
“But where is home?”
She holds the glass of wine, raises the blood of the coulee, and looks at the color, a vino rosso with a story. Could she ever make such a thing?
Brunella has no trouble finding her father’s grave, a small mound of dirt at the crest of the coulee. The pond is so full that water spills out three overflow ditches, the primitive canals that Angelo dug by hand when he first moved here and had no other source of water. She watches it trickle out and flow evenly into the vineyard. She kneels over the grave, claws away the top layer of soil, the pebbles Angelo loved, one parent of his magnificent vino, talking all the while, telling the story of Uncle Giacomo and his place in Italy, describing what happened in Barolo, the rude man with the swollen fingers, the insults, and how the Cartolano wine proved itself in the end when judged against the Wine of Kings. She tells him that she knew—in that instant—that the Cartolanos belonged to this coulee because Nebbiolo belonged to the Columbia basin. And yes, it’s true, as her babbo always said, you could tell you were home when you could look at the tangle of grapes, the flowering orchards, the blushing walls of granite to the west and say, È bello da mozzare il fiato. It did take her breath away—still. She scrapes at the wet pebbled ground, takes the small vial of her baby’s placenta, and buries it, smoothing the soil over Angelo’s grave. Mount Stuart is veiled, but on a clear day this is the best view.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Through the years, this story was sustained by fresh enthusiasm when it was most needed. The smoke jumpers of the United States Forest Service have answered more questions than government service requires, while opening their doors as well. My Seattle manuscript readers, especially Anne Hurley and Michael Knoll, tried to make sure the illogic of fiction stayed consistent. My thanks to Ash Green, Luba Ostashevsky, Kathleen Fridella, and Sonny Mehta at Knopf, and my agent, Carol Mann, for literary matchmaking. In the art of living well and the craft of winemaking, I owe much to the late Angelo Pellegrini, whose philosophy is best distilled in his book, Lean Years, Happy Years. Also, The Wine Project: Washington State’s Winemaking History, by Ronald Irvine with Walter J. Clore, is an excellent resource. John and Cora Picken, at Lake Chalan, know the irrigation country better than anyone. In Italy, Sergio and Rina, our neighbors one floor below, revealed some of the timeless secrets of Chianti Classico, even while tolerating our feeble Italian. And finally my deepest gratitude to Joni, for three dimensions of support.
TIMOTHY EGAN
THE WINEMAKER’S DAUGHTER
Timothy Egan, a third-generation westerner, is the author of Lasso the Wind, The Good Rain, and Breaking Blue. He has been a writer for The New York Times for the past fifteen years and was part of a team that won the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for national reporting. He lives in Seattle with his wife, Joni Balter, and their two children. This is his first novel.
ALSO BY TIMOTHY EGAN
Lasso the Wind
The Good Rain
Breaking Blue
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, JANUARY 2005
Copyright © 2004 by Timothy Egan
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries
is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Hal Leonard Corporation for permission to
reprint an excerpt from “Brass in Pocket,” words and music by Chrissie Hynde and James
Honeyman-Scott. Copyright © 1979 EMI Music Publishing Ltd., trading as Clive Banks
Songs. All rights for the United States and Canada controlled and administered by EMI
April Music, Inc. All rights for the world excluding the United States and Canada
controlled and administered by EMI Music Publishing. All rights reserved.
International copyright secured.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Egan, Timothy.
The winemaker’s daughter: a novel / Timothy Egan.—1st. ed.
p. cm.
1. Women architects—Fiction. 2. Wine and wine making—
Fiction. 3. Northwest, Pacific—Fiction.
PS3605.G36 W26 2004
813’.54—dc22
2003112114
www.vintagebooks.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-42963-6
v3.0
Timothy Egan, The Winemaker's Daughter
