The Winemaker's Daughter, page 4
But the coulee had its own microclimate, protected from harsh northerly winds in winter and insulated at times by fog that drifted in from the Columbia. During the early part of the growing season, warm winds kept the vines free of mold. In early winter, Angelo buried the vines that grew in the cold upper part of the coulee, as protection against killer frost. Like the hills around Alba, the land was walled off from incessant rain by a vast mountain curtain. The coulee was a big bowl of cobblestones and silty loam. To reach moisture in this poor soil, the roots went deep, picking up a taste of stone that was evident in the grapes. As it turned out, the great flood had created a little notch in the far corner of America that could produce fat, intensely flavored Nebbiolo grapes from a soil—terroir —of the ages. Plus, he had the sun. Angelo kept a wooden globe in his kitchen, with a line drawn from the Old World to the New, showing that the Columbia basin and his native Piemonte shared the same general latitude. Nebbiolo needs a long growing season, and as the Bureau of Reclamation men were always pointing out, the basin basked in two more hours of light than did California, which meant Angelo could get twelve more growing days in a season than Napa.
What Angelo had as a winemaker was his remarkable palate, which he followed instinctively. While still in college, he sampled wine from an ancient southern Italian grape, made by his friend in Walla Walla. “I can taste some cherry, some spice, and there’s raspberry in there as well,” Angelo said.
“My God!” said the older winemaker. “You have just described the essence of Primitivo.”
Three years after planting the vines, Angelo harvested his first crop. At the same time, he finished building a small stone chapel at the crest of the coulee and painted frescoes on the inside. Surely, his God, the one who changed water into wine to keep a wedding party going, would get to know Bacchus in this edge-of-the-world setting. Given the divine interest in wine, Angelo had no doubts that he would succeed. He started out making sixty gallons of wine a year from a bit more than half a ton of grapes—enough to give him a bottle a day. Virtually all the water for those first vintages came from the pond.
“You can tell this wine is going somewhere,” Angelo liked to say.
On advice from his Calabrese friend in Walla Walla, Angelo started experimenting, following the direction of his palate. During the crush, he did not remove stems from the grapes, nor did he wash them. His friend said he should use the powdery mildew for yeast and fermentation. At the same time, he aged the wine in small oak barrels, or barriques. After bottling, the wine had to spend years laid down before Angelo would let it go. The Wine of Kings was no match for the ephemeral American attention span, but Angelo waited, confident that he could create something extraordinary in his little coulee.
For another decade, he worked night shifts at the dam, sold his apples and figs at harvest, and dreamed of the day when his own version of Barolo would grow up and free him. The result, when he finally started to release his wine, tasted like nothing that had ever been produced in the New World; it was an original American showing of the Nebbiolo grape. A person with open taste buds would find ripe berries and other red fruit, but it was also layered, with a bit of licorice and a finish you could still taste a day after drinking the wine. There was a mystery and tease about the Cartolano Nebbiolo, a blend of coulee soil and ancient grape. The wild tannins were tamed just right, but they foretold a long life.
Angelo had stored the first vintages in his basement—the smell never far from the floorboards of the house—but as the fame of his red wine grew, he had to build a large cellar away from the house. His basement Barolo became the toast of the Pacific Northwest, attracting oenophiles from Sonoma and Napa, from Bordeaux and Burgundy, and from his native land. Angelo named his only daughter for the Brunello di Montalcino that one of these visitors brought to the coulee. He rejected every offer to sell; a Cartolano would cut off his foot before he would give up family land, he explained, and two of his three children understood what he was saying.
But now Angelo heard the clock; he felt he had no more than five years of winemaking left in him, with no one to take his place. He could barely make a fist out of his crumbled left hand. The water withdrawals deeply troubled him at a time when drought was calcifying the land. As a precaution last year, after much agonizing, he overwatered his grapes. At harvest, it showed; the grapes still had considerable flavor, but something was missing. He sensed the vintage would have no staying power, and when he sampled it from the barrel at Christmas he was heartbroken. No wine made from Angelo Cartolano’s hands had ever tasted so thin, with so little promise. Sadly, he concluded the worst thing he could ever think about a wine: “This has no story.”
Angelo spent that night in the cellar, shivering and sleepless. When he awoke, he knew he had given in to a corruption of the soul. But he felt he had no choice; a bad vintage would surely outlive him, erasing the magnificence of what he had done with his American Barolo. Immortality, for a winemaker, was what went into the bottle. So for the first time in his life Angelo took shortcuts. Not only had he overwatered the grapes, he now tried to rush the wine. He added sugar to raise the alcohol level slightly, trying to enrich it, to make it bigger. And he filtered the wine with oak chips, which would make it taste as if it had legitimately absorbed the skin of the barrel, though he knew in his heart it would be just another tarted-up oaky fruit bomb of the type preferred by the wine press. These practices were permitted in some parts of the winemaking world; only true connoisseurs of Nebbiolo would notice. But to Angelo, and certainly to any Barolo vintner, it was cheating. He could taste and smell the difference, and he hated himself for doing it.
At the party, Brunella is distracted by a pinch-faced man with thin orange hair. He is aggressively sniffing the wine, as if trying to clean the inside of the glass with his nose. On impulse, she scolds him. “Don’t park your snout in the wine. Just enjoy it.”
“It’s not a true Barolo,” the man says. “The tannins are still a bit unsettled. The nose is off. But superficially, at least, it’s quite close. You must be the vintner’s daughter. I’m your neighbor.”
Gregory Gorton explains that he lives part-time in one of the new houses on the far ridge above the coulee.
“What happened to the old cars in front of the Pickens home?” Brunella asks. “There was a ’52 Ford up there—”
“Those eyesores. Gone forever. We got an ordinance passed last fall. No more than two cars to a property can be visible at any one time. Which means your father is just barely within the standards of the law. Somebody tried to call them lawn ornaments, in defiance. Quaint, these locals. I don’t know if your father has informed you yet, but I put some cuttings in last year and expect fruit in two summers. I plan to make a Bordeaux-style meritage.”
“Where’s your water coming from?”
“Same place as yours. But instead of taking it from the Feds, for pennies, we’re taking it from the aboriginal inhabitants, for which they will be paid extravagantly—by their standards—and then returning the excess to them, for whatever it is these Indians do with water. Frankly, I’m puzzled. What do these Indians do with water?”
She grabs Ethan by the arm as a way to escape her conversation with pinch-faced Gregory Gorton. Brunella whispers an Italian word to Ethan: “Attaccabottoni.” He shrugs. “We need a word like that in English—a bore who buttonholes people with pointless stories.”
All eyes turn to one part of the garden, where Teddy’s mother is causing a stir. She appears to be drunk: red-faced and shouting, with spittle on her lips, screaming to the sky.
“The apple trees—gone! The peach orchard—dead! My husband—in jail! What did we do to deserve this?’’
She looks possessed. Brunella rushes over, trying to soothe her, fixing the strap on her print dress and pulling back her long white hair. Mrs. Flax pushes Brunella back. Her screed gets louder, disrupting the entire party.
“They say it’s for . . . for . . . salmon. Salmon! That’s a goddamn lie. You want salmon, go to the grocery store. These fish are just a goddamn ruse. The Indians are lying. The government’s covering up for them. This is not about salmon. It’s about getting even. It’s about power. The Indians want the water back, so they’re driving all of us out of here!”
She turns to face the entire party, nearly a hundred people. She flaps her arms, shouting into the listless heat. She takes a bottle and throws it against a stone wall. It shatters, splattering wine all over the deck.
“Listen to me, you people: Do something!” she says. “This is the finest orchard country in the world, and it’s all going to die! You think it’s just us—the poor damnable Flax family. It’s not. They will drive every one of you out until this land is a desert again. Until it’s dust. Until it’s the way it was, nothin’ but scrub and rattlers.”
Brunella leads her into the house and upstairs to her mother’s reading room. She sits Mrs. Flax down on a couch and brings her a glass of iced tea. Mrs. Flax knocks the tea out of her hand.
“This is war,” she says, her thin lips quivering as she lights a cigarette. “Don’t they see what’s coming?”
Brunella goes down to the liquor cabinet and returns with a three-finger shot of bourbon. She strokes Mrs. Flax, nursing her with the drink, this brittle woman who had once shown Brunella how to cross the snow on skinny skis, who made oatmeal cookies for her and Teddy, who climbed to the top of a cottonwood to retrieve a kite.
At dusk, Angelo announces that dinner is ready—a feast cooked over apple wood. The pork loin has marinated in ginger, rosemary, garlic, wine, and diced pears. Angelo went to his big basement freezer two days earlier and retrieved venison steaks. He has panfried them with mushrooms and sweet onions. The red and white potatoes that Angelo has always grown— his reserve food, in case the world collapses—have become gnocchi di patate, doused in fresh-made pesto. The Yakima corn is crisp and slightly charred, licked by fire. And there are fist-sized Cartolano family tomatoes, bleeding juice, covered with basil, olive oil poured over them. Louis Armstrong is still playing. Angelo loves jazz, which he heard first in Bushwick and then in the camp at Missoula. His uncle would never let anyone play Verdi, because it was what Mussolini liked.
“You see all this, Brunella,” he says to his daughter, as they watch people load up on food, “and you wonder why I have to beg you to come home.”
“You don’t have to beg me, Babbo. Stop with the guilt.”
“What’s wrong with our home, Miss Bigshot? You tell me, and I will stop.”
Midway through dinner, Niccolo stands to make an announcement. He clanks his glass, but after so many toasts it is hard to get everyone’s attention. Finally, he puts his fingers to his mouth and lets out a stadium whistle. Brunella, Teddy, and Ethan are seated together. Brunella’s leg rubs against Teddy’s; he doesn’t flinch. She keeps her leg against Teddy as Niccolo makes his toast.
“My dad will be eighty years old in October—”
“Bravo, Angelo!”
“A better-preserved old fart does not exist,” says Alden Kosbleau, a bit tipsy. Niccolo whistles again to regain control of the party.
“And my father’s journey from Alba in Piemonte, to Bushwick in Brooklyn, to Missoula, Montana, and to this valley is the great journey of the Cartolano family. Take a moment, please, everyone, and look around. Look at what he has created in this coulee. Look at the vines, the grapes, the fruit trees, the garden; all of this my dad . . . my dad made from scratch. He built the pond, which started it all, and gave the first vines their lifeblood. He built this house. He trellised every . . . last . . . one of these vines. He—”
“The fence,” Brunella says in a low voice. “The rock fence.”
“Oh, yeah, the river rocks that line the road, that fence—he did that by hand. Moved every one of those stones. All of this came from him. And it should not end here. So”—he takes a breath—“I have decided to stay.” He turns to his father. “When I graduate next spring, I will return and try to learn the ways of the Nebbiolo grape from you, Dad. And I will do it with humility.”
Locked on his father, Niccolo raises his glass. A hundred or more glasses come together. Angelo puts his right hand on his boy’s cheek and kisses him. His eyes are clouded by tears.
“Why didn’t you let me know?”
“I wanted to surprise you.”
Angelo turns to the crowd, voice quavering, his knotted left hand shaking badly. “Wine is . . . a living thing, a companion. With Niccolo’s promise just now, we will not be without our companion for another sixty years.”
“Hear, hear!”
Gregory Gorton, the pinch-faced orange-haired neighbor, rises with an announcement of his own. “This is excellent news about Cartolano Junior following in the footsteps of his father. And we may soon know exactly what we’ve got going in this coulee, for I have entered last year’s Cartolano Nebbiolo—a sizable sampling that Angelo was kind enough to give me well before its release—in VinFaire in Bordeaux. I know it’s young, but by God I think that wine you made last year is world-class, with a frightful load of potential. So here’s to our entry in VinFaire.”
Through the cheers and toasting, Angelo frets. “What’s wrong, Babbo?” says Brunella.
“He never asked me,” says Angelo, shaking his head, the color gone from his face. “I don’t want that vintage released.”
After dinner, the five climbers from the Last Man’s Club resume their poker game, which has been going on for nearly sixty years, started by fireside in the shadow of Mount Stuart. Distant thunder bounces against the high granite walls of the North Cascades. Alden Kosbleau wins a pile of money, threatens to walk away, and then stays to let the others pick at his earnings.
“They’re playing for real money,” Brunella tells Teddy. “But the ultimate prize is in the cellar. You want to see?”
She pulls Teddy Flax inside the house and down a narrow flight of stairs to the Cartolano library of wine. Her skin tingles in the chill of the cellar, where the temperature never rises above 57 degrees. Several thousand dust-covered bottles line the walls, marked by year, going back to Angelo’s first vintages in the early 1950s. Stumbling to find a light, Brunella brushes away a pile of fine-shredded bits of oak.
“What’s with the wood chips?” Teddy asks.
“I have no idea. Babbo still makes his riserva in this cellar.”
He points to a faded painting on the stone-and-concrete wall, depicting a grape harvest. “Frescoes?”
“He started here, but his best work is in the little chapel up on the ridge. Didn’t I ever show you this as a kid?”
“You ought to see the frescoes in Saint Ignatius, not too far from where I’ve been living. People come from all over the world to stare at the ceiling of this little mission church in Montana. Some Franciscan dude spent thirty years on his back drawing ’em, so it’s not the usual bleeding Jesuses and haloed Marys looking like they just got out of the dry cleaner’s.”
She goes to a locker, tries a combination. Inside is a single bottle.
“This is what they’re holding on for,” she says. “I’m sure it went south a long time ago.”
Teddy holds the wine up to the light, studying the faded droplets of blood from the ten boys who made it up the north side of Mount Stuart.
“Immortality in a bottle,” she says.
Close to him, she feels a gush of warmth as her skin touches his, the nipples of her breasts hard. She slips her tongue in his ear, whispers, and pulls back, wetting her lips. He turns his head slowly, and she does not move. Her body is charged; she bites her lip, looks into his eyes.
Upstairs, the poker game is suspended while everyone moves to the edge of the deck to look at the western sky. An electrical storm clanks through the Cascades, dry lightning, five-pronged forks thrown against the mountains. Some of the strikes are close enough to light entire mountainsides behind the coulee at one end. With each lightning strike, people count in unison—one, two, three—timing the thunder that always follows, applauding its arrival.
CHAPTER THREE
SLEEPLESS NIGHT. Dawn is at the door, the banana-colored light of August. Brunella makes coffee and returns to her room. Two images had followed her to bed: the broken woman who shrieked at the party, and the son with the silken face. She had kissed Teddy in the cellar, nipped at his ear, licked his neck, and wanted to spend the night with her legs wrapped around him. She cannot corral the impulse. He is a pretty boy, familiar and bighearted; maybe it’s nothing more than the lust that comes on like a sweet tooth. Morning reveals a bit of haze and still no breeze. She goes to the window, drawn by low voices below. The poker game has not ended; Niccolo is dealing, but her father has dropped out. She smells smoke, the air heavy with a tardy stench.
Brunella helps her father cook breakfast. He looks fresh, renewed by the party and Niccolo’s announcement. They slice up cantaloupes, mix the fruit with blackberries and cream, cook huevos rancheros slathered in salsa. Angelo wants Brunella and Niccolo to spend the day with him in the vineyard.
“We’re going to the Omak Stampede,” she says. “Ethan’s never been to a rodeo before.”
“Ah, yes, he wants to see the West.”
“I was afraid for Mrs. Flax last night, Babbo.”
“She is falling apart.”
“You’ve tried to help her?”
“I don’t know what to say, Nella. I can’t bring the water back. I’m more concerned about Gorton entering my wine in that contest. It’s going to destroy my reputation.”
At the call of breakfast, Niccolo suspends the card game for the year. He scarfs down a plate of eggs and some sausage and leaves the table for bed. While he is sleeping, his father goes into his room and stares at him, something he has not done since Niccolo was a baby. He is enraptured by the grown son at rest; even unshaven, smelly, snoring, with a dirty size-thirteen foot hanging over the bed and those Jason Giambi arms, the sight of Niccolo in repose nearly brings Angelo to tears. It bothers him still that too many Americans see Italians as gangsters. The Cartolanos are a family of artisans, and looking at Niccolo just now Angelo feels the pride of the Piemonte poised to assume greatness in another generation.
