Miranda
“You’ll cross that bridge when you come to it, Sister,” Winnie reassured her. “For now, this is what’s true.”
At the same time, more small vineyards were opening nearby that were dedicated to the same level of quality as Hartley.
Warren Winiarski, a talented winemaker who’d been working nomadically around the valley, finally got his own land, and Lee and Helen Paschich, who had sung the praises of oaked chardonnay, acquired the old Tubbs estate, Chateau Montelena, then hired Mike Grgich to craft the wine.
The valley was full of new ideas and exciting promise, although Joan was skeptical.
“Sure, now they’re coming,” she said at dinner one night. “Winifred, you must make sure that people know we were one of the first to see the promise of this place.”
“Mom,” Miranda ventured, “we were hardly the first. There were the Spanish, then the Italians and other immigrants of the late nineteenth century, and—”
“I don’t need a history lesson,” Joan snapped.
“Prohibition wiped the wine country of California clean. Aside from the Christian Brothers and a few others that weathered the storm by growing exportable grapes, Napa was a blank slate when your father and I bought this land. It was a plum orchard before we made it into a vineyard. And anyway, in that much earlier period, it was California vines that saved the French,” Joan said.
“They did?” Winnie appeared shocked.
“I suppose you need a history lesson,” said Joan. “When phylloxera was killing most of the French vines in the late nineteenth century, they had to import rootstock from California vines that had become resistant to the pest.”
“Seriously? So the way we graft French varietals onto native rootstock is the same as how the French vineyards do it?”
“You didn’t already know that?” Miranda was genuinely surprised.
“No,” Winnie said. “I had no idea. This is something we should call attention to! French wine is California wine, as much as California wine is French.”
“It’s not quite that simple,” Miranda said, although she could see that the way her sister was spinning it could have real value—if they could convince consumers that California and France were more like close siblings than rivals, maybe they could make deeper inroads with the wine drinkers who only drank French because of a long-standing snobbery.
“I think what your sister said is brilliant,” said Joan, raising a glass of cabernet from nearby Beaulieu. Winnie clinked her glass to her mother’s.
Miranda ground her teeth. She didn’t want to oversimplify an extremely complex winemaking process she’d gone to school for and devoted her entire life to.
Also, and this was hard to admit even to herself, Miranda felt jealous of this new ease between her mother and sister.
Every time she came into the kitchen at the end of a long day outside or in the lab to find the two of them cackling or shimmying to music while cooking together, she felt left out.
Then she felt small and ashamed of her feelings.
This was her sister! She should be happy that Winnie and their mother were finally getting along, that she didn’t have to make peace all the time.
Instead, though, what she felt was resentful and dejected.
Of course their mother would fawn over her long-haired, wild, and wildly talented prodigal daughter.
Of course her sister would want to soak up her mother’s approval after so many years of discord.
Miranda wished she could stop the gnawing sensation in her body.
She wished all three of them could feel at home together, at the same time.
A few days later, Winnie knocked on Miranda’s bedroom door and asked to come in.
Miranda had been reading about decision trees in a business textbook she’d picked up at the Davis bookstore the last time she’d been up there to meet with the university’s catering service.
She didn’t have the time or the inclination to get a business degree, but she read books about how the best businesses worked, and implemented what she learned.
She surprised herself by finding herself fully engaged in the stories of other businesses that had gone from small to large by getting better at managing probabilities.
Sitting cross-legged at the foot of her bed, Winnie looked like a sprite from another land in her long skirt and crocheted sweater, especially compared to the suited men that Miranda had been picturing in her mind while reading.
“So I went to town hall and looked up the history of deeds on this property to see if I could find anything juicy that would help us with our marketing,” Winnie said.
“This place was owned by a German family named Weber starting in 1870. In 1922, Marcus Weber, the son of the first Weber, sold it to a man named Isaac Miller. It was Miller who sold it to Dad in 1938. It must have been Miller who planted the plums in the twenties, right?”
“Must have been,” Miranda said. Then hesitantly, recalling Emilio’s family story, she asked, “Do you know who owned it before the Weber family?”
“Juan-Paul Delgado. It was called the Delgado Ranch.”
“Ranch? Like cattle?”
“No, and this is where it gets interesting, and maybe not so great. I was able to read through many of Delgado’s papers, like letters and ledgers and things.
He ran it as a winery, and he sold most of his grapes to the San Luis Obispo and Carmel missions.
He also kept records of the men who worked on the ranch.
” Winnie opened up a small leather-bound notebook and flipped through it till she found the page she wanted, and read from it.
“This is from 1860. ‘Wang, man 25 and son 10. Zhao, man 30 and nephew 12. Fu, man 18,’ and on and on.”
Miranda swallowed. “I can’t imagine they were treated well.”
“No. California was technically a free state when it joined the union in 1850, but my friend Gretchen from Berkeley used to talk about how the people from her tribe were enslaved and remained enslaved in practice even though slavery was technically illegal. She said the same was true of the Chinese immigrants.”
Miranda and Winnie sat in silence, letting this sink in.
“I wonder how many Indians worked on this land? Were there records of them?”
“It’s hard to know,” Winnie said. “There were the Chinese names, and there were some Spanish names, but the men with the Spanish names might have originally been Indian and given Christian names when the Spanish conquered the land.”
Miranda’s skin crawled with this news. She wondered if current owners of former cotton plantations in Georgia and South Carolina felt the same way. “Is this something we need to…talk about publicly?”
“I don’t know how we would,” said Winnie. “It’s just so…big.”
“Plus, it was also a long time ago.”
“Long before Dad got here.”
Winnie nodded. “I looked up the same information for a bunch of the other wineries, and they mostly have similar histories.”
“Somehow that is both reassuring and horrifying at the same time,” said Miranda.
“I know. Listen, you know I’m the first person to criticize others for unfair labor practices and all that, but Hartley is doing the right thing now.
All of our men are part of Chavez’s union, and I don’t think Emilio would work for us if he felt like we were part of some kind of secret slave-owning history. ”
“I agree, so…What should we do?” Miranda liked the feeling of collaborating with her sister; it made her feel less alone.
“In my promotional materials I’m just going to focus on how Dad ripped out the plum trees and used time-tested French methods for the vines.”
Miranda nodded. “That sounds right.”
“We’re already getting some traction with that approach. The France-California equivalence is definitely turning some heads.”
“Yeah, and talking about the Spanish history won’t do us any favors.”
“No. Even though I hate that.”
“Me too.”
They were silent for a minute, then Winnie asked, “Do you think that what Mom said is true? That Prohibition had made the land a clean slate?”
Miranda was touched that her sister seemed to care what she thought about this. “No, I don’t,” she replied. “But I’m not sure who it would help to bring all this to light right now.”
Winnie nodded.
“Maybe someday,” Miranda said, both to cheer her socially conscious sister and also to make herself feel better. Some histories were better left buried—of that, at least, she was certain.