Chapter 18 Saffron
SAFFRON
The December morning was cold enough that I could see my breath as Snapper and I walked into the Los Caballeros winery production area.
The fermentation tanks stood in neat rows, their stainless-steel surfaces beaded with condensation.
Our wine—the Christmas Blessing Wine—rested inside three of them, waiting.
Baron Van Orr stood near the tasting table with three wooden cases stacked beside him. He looked older than I remembered, his face lined with exhaustion or emotion or both.
“These are the last of the Van Orr Family Private Reserve,” he said, resting his hand on the top case. “What my grandmother contributed to the original blend.”
My father moved closer to examine the bottles Baron was pulling from the first case. The labels were hand-written in faded ink, and I counted twelve bottles per case. Thirty-six bottles in total.
“Do you know the amount used?” Cru asked.
“Ten percent of total volume.” Baron’s hands trembled as he set bottles on the table. “Two hundred liters.”
I watched him line up the bottles like soldiers preparing for battle. Each one represented a piece of his family’s history, his grandmother’s pride, decades of regret being put to rest.
Movement near the doorway caught my attention.
Kick had arrived, standing just inside the entrance like he wasn’t sure he belonged here.
Snapper’s entire body went rigid beside me.
His jaw clenched, and I heard him exhale through his nose—the kind of controlled breathing people did when they were trying not to explode.
The conversation from last night came flooding back. Snapper pacing at his house at midnight, too angry to sleep. “I’ve never been this angry with him.”
Kick had betrayed his confidence twice. And to Isabel, which made it so much worse. Nobody seemed to know for certain whether the two were involved, and asking felt like stepping into a minefield.
“Let’s get started,” Cru said, pulling my attention back to the wine.
Baron opened the first bottle with reverence, then continued in the same manner, handing them down the line.
We measured and poured, transferring the precious liquid into larger vessels.
Baron opened bottle after bottle, the aged wine pooling together until we had enough to blend into our tanks.
My mother stood beside my father, both of them watching with expressions I couldn’t quite read. Hope mixed with fear mixed with wonder.
Cru opened the valve on the first tank, and we watched the Van Orr Private Reserve disappear into our creation. The wine swirled together, young meeting old, three families reuniting after seventy years of separation.
“Thirty minutes for initial integration,” Cru announced. “Then we taste.”
Those thirty minutes crawled by. I paced between the tanks and the tasting table until Snapper caught my hand and pulled me against his side.
His warmth steadied me, but I could feel the tension radiating through his body.
He kept glancing at Kick, who stood on the opposite side of the room, examining equipment he probably knew better than his own reflection.
Isabel arrived halfway through the wait, but she and Kick didn’t speak or even acknowledge one another’s presence. Curious as I was, it was none of my business.
“It’s time,” Cru said, drawing samples from each tank, filling the glasses that he distributed around the table. I held mine up to the light. The color looked the same—deep ruby with garnet edges—but when I brought it to my nose, everything had changed.
The bright fruit was still there, but now, it had a foundation. The aged wine had given our young blend something to stand on. Berry and plum and cherry layered over earth and leather and time itself.
I tasted.
The wine hit my tongue, and I understood immediately what had been missing.
The Van Orr component bridged the gap between fresh and complex, between promising and complete.
The tannins that had been good were now remarkable.
The acidity that had been balanced now sang.
The finish went on and on, evolving as I held the wine in my mouth.
“Oh my God,” my mother whispered.
Around the table, faces transformed. My father’s eyes went wide. Baron pressed his hand to his chest. Even Snapper, who’d been so certain this would work, looked stunned.
“This is it,” Snapper said. “This is what they made.”
Baron set down his glass with a hand that shook. “My grandmother regretted her choice every single day for the rest of her life. And now—” It was as though his words stuck in his throat.
My father moved around the table, and he and Baron embraced while the wine their grandmothers had created came together again after seven decades apart.
Tears spilled down my cheeks, and I didn’t bother wiping them away.
“How long until we can bottle?” I asked.
“Two to four weeks for full integration,” Cru said. “The components need time to marry.”
Four weeks would put us past New Year’s Eve. Past the deadline. Too late to save anything.
“Two weeks, then,” I said. “We taste again in two weeks.”
“December twenty-third,” my father calculated. “If it’s ready, we bottle Christmas Eve.”
“That gives us one week to get everything to auction,” Baron added. “New Year’s Eve.”
The math was tight. Terrifyingly tight. But it was possible.
“Two weeks,” Cru agreed. “December twenty-third.”
For the next fourteen days, I existed in a strange suspended state where time moved both agonizingly slowly and impossibly fast.
Snapper and I fell into a routine that should have felt comfortable—sleeping at his place most nights. We’d make love, then he’d pull me against his chest and I’d fall asleep listening to his heartbeat. Every morning, he sneaked out of bed and returned with a cup of coffee for each of us.
But underneath everything ran a current of anxiety I couldn’t shake. I couldn’t plan. Couldn’t think past December twenty-third. Every time someone mentioned Christmas or New Year’s or anything beyond the next few days, my mind went blank.
“What do you want for Christmas?” Snapper asked one morning. We were in his kitchen, and I was stealing bacon from his plate even though I’d insisted I wasn’t hungry.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know, or you can’t think about it?”
“Both.” I reached for another piece of bacon, and he caught my wrist and brought the piece to his mouth instead.
Then he licked my fingers, first making me giggle, then spreading the heat of desire throughout my body.
We ended up leaving the rest of the food on the table, uneaten, and returned to the bedroom, where I forgot about everything except the feel of his mouth on mine and the way his hands moved up my spine.
We checked the wine every few days, drawing samples to monitor the integration. Each time, it tasted better. More cohesive. More complete. But would it be ready in time?
“Stop worrying,” Snapper said time and again, catching me staring into my glass like I could divine the future from wine.
“I can’t help it.”
“I know.” He took the glass from my hand and set it aside, then put his arms around me. “But worrying won’t make it integrate faster.”
“As if logic can stop it.”
“Fair point.”
Lucia would come by the winery whenever she saw Snapper’s vehicle parked in front. She never arrived empty-handed, insisting neither her son nor I were eating enough.
“We would love to have you and your family join us for Christmas dinner,” she said on one such day. “It would mean so much to have both families together this year.”
I told her I’d mention it to my parents, but the weight of the unknown pressed down on my chest. So much rode on the wine currently resting in stainless-steel tanks, counting down to either salvation or devastation. Until I knew which it was, I couldn’t think beyond Christmas Eve eve.
Snapper still hadn’t spoken to Kick. I noticed it in the way he’d tense whenever his brother’s name came up, the way he’d change the subject or suddenly remember something he needed to do in another room.
“You need to talk to him,” I said one night. We were lying in his bed, and I could feel the tension radiating through his body despite the late hour.
“I’m not ready.”
“When will you be?”
“I don’t know.” He ran his hand through his hair, making it stand up in ways that would have been funny if the conversation wasn’t so serious. “Maybe never.”
His evident pain made my chest ache. These were brothers who’d been best friends, roping partners, who’d spent their entire lives joined at the hip. And now, they couldn’t occupy the same room.
“He betrayed me, Saff. Twice. How do I get past that?”
I didn’t know, so I just held him tighter and hoped it was enough.
December twenty-third arrived cold and clear. I woke in Snapper’s bed with my stomach in knots, too nervous to eat the breakfast he’d made. We drove to Los Caballeros in silence, his hand gripping mine so tightly my fingers went numb.
Baron was already there when we arrived at the winery. My parents walked in shortly after us, then Cru appeared from the fermentation room with Isabel at his side. She’d been around more in the past two weeks, and each time, her presence became more comfortable.
“Before we taste,” Baron said, reaching into a bag at his feet, “I brought something.”
He set two bottles that made my heart stutter on the table. The labels were faded but unmistakable—Christmas Blessing Wine, 1955.
“I thought they were all gone,” my father said, barely above a whisper.
“I kept two bottles hidden even deeper than the others.” Baron’s hands trembled as he reached for them. “I was saving them for—I don’t know what. But it seems right to have them now. When the new wine is ready, we can taste them side by side and know if we’ve honored what our grandmothers created.”