Miranda #2
And anyway, Miranda was excited about Hartley Vineyard.
It could become the best in the state. The fine-wine field was wide open.
Gallo and Christian Brothers and so many others were still making swill, the kind of pink jug juice that had given California wine a bad name.
Inglenook and Beaulieu and a tiny handful of others had been devoted to fine wine for decades, with little to show for their efforts.
Even when it was the same quality, local wine sold for a fraction of the price of French because no one was willing to pay good money for anything other than a Lafite or another famous name.
At least Robert Mondavi was trying new things.
Sure, he still pumped out plenty of jugs, because they made him so much money, but he used those ill-gotten gains to research and produce increasingly excellent cabernets and chardonnays under his eponymous label, while his brother Peter did the same with the Charles Krug wines.
She’d learned a lot from Robert the summer she worked in his winery between her junior and senior years at Davis.
Hartley’s pinot kept improving, and the chardonnay was coming along now that she was using oak barrels from a cooperage in Missouri.
While most of the other California vintners used French barrels, she refused.
Something in her was stubborn about producing all-American wine.
Someday, when her chardonnay beat the French at their own game, she didn’t want to give the French any credit, and the victory would be hers, and her father’s and mother’s, and Emilio’s.
With a last look at the view, Miranda closed her eyes and breathed slowly in, then out, summoning her father’s ghost. Sometimes this worked, and she’d feel the air take his shape behind and around her, warm and reassuring.
But not this time.
With a sigh, she crossed Spring Mountain Road back to her truck and drove home. It was shaping up to be a gorgeous day; she hoped she’d have enough time at the end of it to relax in her father’s hammock, maybe with her sketch pad.
According to the note she’d left on the kitchen table, her mother was in the field when Miranda arrived, so she changed into her stiffest protective jeans and a canvas shirt, put on a wide-brimmed hat, and went to find her.
Joan, who was also shielded from the sun head to toe, was in the middle of the field of pinot grapes with Emilio, who wore a cowboy hat and a loose flannel shirt.
Always plaid. Miranda wondered, not for the first time, if her mother and this man were lovers.
He was handsome and wise and quiet, and he’d never married anyone else, but Miranda could understand why Joan might think an affair with Emilio unseemly—after all, her own husband had hired Emilio Parra to be head grower because he’d been leading teams of men picking fruit all over the state since he was a teen.
Emilio’s first language was Spanish, and men trusted him.
Dissatisfied with the increasing industrialization of farming in California, Emilio had looked for work in the smaller farms of Napa and Sonoma, which was where he’d met her father four years before he died.
By then, Emilio had worked enough vineyards to have mastered the technique of cutting clusters off the vines and placing them into buckets with minimal bruising, and he knew which men to hire every year to help.
He shared her father’s vision of making wine by hand.
Joan always said that no matter how good a machine got at picking grapes, Leo would never use one and neither would Emilio.
Once they were old enough, Miranda and Winnie had taken instructions on cutting clusters from Emilio and his brother Diego, and they had worked with them for long hours September to November, carefully denuding the trellised vines.
Well, Miranda had worked all those hours because she loved it and didn’t mind the way her body felt tired and a little sore at the end of the day.
Winnie was too young and never liked it, and no one was going to make a five- or six-year-old do so much labor, so she used to skip around and get gloriously filthy, looking for fairies between and under the trellised rows.
“Howdy,” Miranda said as she approached her mother and Emilio.
Neither of them looked up, though Joan waved her over and said, “Come here and tell us what you think.”
Miranda bent her head over the bunch of grapes that Emilio was assiduously not touching. It was mid-June, so the grapes were growing and best left undisturbed, and since the morning had been cool and foggy, the berries were covered in droplets of moisture that glittered in the midday sun.
“What do you think?” Miranda asked Emilio.
“They are ripening too fast. It’s been unusually warm.”
“Let’s have a taste,” she said, carefully plucking one green berry and popping it into her mouth.
Using her tongue and teeth, she peeled off the tough skin, which she pulled out with her thumb and index finger and dropped into the dirt.
Then she gently bit down on the slippery orb so as not to crush the seeds inside and release their bitterness into the burst of juice.
“You’re right,” she said, then spit out the seeds. “It’s sweeter than usual. How many have you tried?”
“From most of the rows in quads two and three,” Emilio replied.
“Let’s bring a few into the lab and test to be sure,” she said. “I guess we might have to harvest early this year.”
Emilio nodded.
“I’ll go get the test supplies in order,” she said. They needed to separate berries into groups for rows and quads so that they knew which areas were ripening fastest and slowest. Even a week’s difference could change the character of the wine.
“First you should have some lunch,” Joan said. “Did your sister feed you? At all?”
Miranda laughed because it was easier than trying to explain, again, that her sister was not a starving artist—though it was hard to explain what, exactly, she was to anyone who hadn’t seen the chaotic situation in the Haight.
“We ate well all week, Mom, and I brought you some sourdough.”
“Perfect. We’ll have it with the chicken salad. Emilio, this can wait till after lunch, can’t it? I want to catch up with Miranda.”
“You two go ahead, and I’ll get started. Save some lunch for me,” he said, and since he almost always ate lunch with them, Miranda sensed he was trying to let her mother have some time alone with her to find out more about Winnie.
Joan and Miranda traversed the side of quad three to make their way back to the house, which stood atop quad one and was composed of the original vines that her parents had planted and tended with their own hands, starting with the hardy phylloxera-resistant rootstock that dated back to the Missions.
Onto that, they grafted pinot noir and chardonnay vines imported from France.
“Le mariage heureux,” her dad used to say of the union of California roots and French varietals—which Miranda had to admit made her wine the tiniest bit French—and then he’d kiss Joan warmly as if to reinforce his point.
Joan and Leo had had a happy marriage, Miranda thought, in spite of how it ended.
Miranda didn’t begrudge her mother a second happiness with Emilio. She just wished she knew how to tell her mother that, but there was so much she and her mother had never learned to talk about.
Before Miranda and her mother entered the house, Joan stopped at the little vegetable garden she kept protected from rabbits, deer, and bears with a huge tent of chicken wire fencing.
“It’s not beautiful,” she often said, “but I don’t care when I have a perfect tomato to eat in July.
” She cut a handful of red leaf lettuce, then quickly examined the delicate yellow blossoms on her zucchini plants.
“I’ll be able to make a second round of fleurs de courgettes soon,” she almost sang.
Leo had taken Joan to France on a nearly yearlong honeymoon, where the two of them had spent most of their time at the vineyard in the Loire where Leo had first learned the art of winemaking.
Joan had always described it as one of the most contented times in her life, when she was living with the man she loved and indulging passions she cared about.
For her, that was gardening and cooking.
With Leo at the vines, she said, “We were like a perfectly drawn yin and yang.”
When Miranda told her mother that she wanted to enroll in the enology school at UC Davis, Joan’s joy had seemed disproportionate to the news.
Finally, the vineyard will be off my hands, Miranda could practically hear her mother think.
Not that Miranda blamed her—how could she possibly blame her, after everything she’d been through?
Miranda once asked Joan why she didn’t sell the vineyard after her dad died.
“I could as much sell the vineyard as cut off one of my own arms or legs,” her mother had replied.
“What if neither Winnie nor I had wanted to run it?”
“I suppose I would have had a difficult decision to make, then. But,” she said with a thumb-and-index-finger nip of Miranda’s chin, “I didn’t have to, did I?
You always were your father’s daughter. The best of him, anyway.
” Miranda didn’t like the shadow she heard in that statement about Winnie, who was like their father in other, more frightening ways.
Still, she basked in the compliment. Since his death, her father had taken on a mythical persona in the house, all the more powerful for how little they spoke of him, as if to say too much would interfere with the chimerical image of him as winemaking visionary, doting father, and adoring husband.
It was an unspoken rule that no one mentioned his suicide or who had found him the morning after.