Chapter 22
NICO
I stay the weekend and work the vines with her.
The sun slashes down without mercy. It’s obvious the weather didn’t get the memo that it’s October and it’s freaking autumn.
This isn’t my first harvest. But I haven’t worked the vines like this in nearly a decade—and my body knows it. You can train in a gym all you want, lift heavy, run hard, push a personal trainer to exhaustion, but picking grapes is a different kind of work entirely.
It’s repetitive, unglamorous, and relentless.
Every rise and dip in the soil throws my ankles off balance, muscles I forgot I had protesting with each step.
The land doesn’t care how fit you think you are—it humbles you fast.
I shoulder a wooden crate, feeling its weight like it’s packed with wet concrete.
My gloves, already slick with grape juice, rub the skin raw at my fingertips. Sweet, sticky purple seeps through the thin leather, staining my nails and slipping under my cuticles.
“Lift with your legs,” grumbles Sergiu in Italian, one of the seasoned pickers, as he passes me in the next row.
His sunburned cheeks glisten with sweat, and his straw hat is tilted back, exposing a fringe of gray hair.
Sergiu, like many of Alessia’s picking crew, is from Romania.
Workers from across Europe come to Italy’s wine country during harvest, but Romanians are the largest group of foreign workers, returning year after year, following the harvest north and south across Italy, forming the backbone of the vendemmia.
Without them, a third of the industry would simply stop.
We have Albanians and Moroccans too, a handful of Senegalese nationals as well as a few local hands who come for tradition more than money—but it’s the Romanians who set the pace.
They know how to cut cleanly without tearing skins, how to stack crates so the fruit doesn’t bruise, and how to move fast without rushing.
Harvest looks romantic from the outside, but it’s migrant labor that makes it possible at this scale.
“It’s not my first harvest,” I tell Sergiu.
He looks at me skeptically. “Whatever you say, capo.”
They’ve been calling me “boss” ever since Alessia introduced me as the big boss of the House of Alighieri. No one here gives a damn about my title—if anything, it’s made me fair game. And judging by the way they’re roasting me, the vines clearly outrank the CEO.
Sergiu’s friend, Florin, looks me up and down. He snorts, grabs a crate, and carries it off effortlessly. The man has at least fifteen years on me, and he picks up the crates and bins like they weigh nothing.
Show-off.
Alessia manages the whole process—harvest to cellar—with alacrity, like she was born to do it. She stays with the crew during harvest and then with them in the cellar as they sort and fill the fermenters. Her dedication underscores her skill as a leader.
I’ve worked in vineyards where the workers wonder where the fuck the winemaker is. Not here. They know because she works with them—puts in the backbreaking labor.
I watch as Alessia moves methodically through Block C, pruning shears gleaming in the light. She jerks her head slightly, tasting a berry on the vine, brow furrowed in concentration. When she speaks, her voice is low but carries across the rows.
“Block D needs a longer break—rotate them out in ten. They’re rushing and bruising fruit.”
Lucia, who’s leaning against a wooden post, nods. “Copy that,” she says before speaking into her radio in…Romanian?
Apparently, she speaks Romanian.
I have learned that my wife is adept at several languages—French and Italian, certainly, but also Spanish and Afrikaans, because she spent a summer working in South Africa.
Within minutes, there’s a whisper of movement, and the pickers in D slow down.
Alessia ducks under a vine, snips a cluster with a single decisive cut, and drops it into a bin.
A young man hesitates beside her, fingers hovering over a ripe bunch as if it’s made of glass.
Giorgio, I think is his name.
He’s one of the locals, here to learn. In most vineyards of this caliber, an inexperienced picker would not be allowed in, but Alessia is not most anything. She’s teamed Giorgio up with a proficient picker so he can learn.
Alessia kneels, guiding his wrist. She demonstrates the slice—quick, fluid.
“You don’t force it,” she instructs. “Let the vine tell you where to cut.”
He tries again. The stems part cleanly. She smiles, a quick upturn of her lips. “Perfetto.”
The boy straightens, his eyes bright with triumph and his cheeks flushed because he has a crush on my wife.
She checks bins for weight, tastes grapes, jots notes on her phone.
She glances up at the stone-walled winery in the distance, then back to the field, asking Edam about barrel temperatures, nodding at Hortensio’s report on ambient cellar heat.
“Water break,” she calls. “Cinque minuti—ten minutes—no exceptions.”
It’s welcome respite, and everyone complies. The last thing we need is someone collapsing from dehydration.
By noon, my shirt clings to me like a second skin, and my arms shake. I set down a crate so hard the grapes bounce. Alessia appears at my side almost instantly.
“You okay?” she asks, worry flickering in her dark eyes.
“Define okay,” I rasp, chest heaving.
Her lips curve. “Better than Renzo was when he tried. He blamed his shoes after twenty minutes.”
Despite myself, I laugh.
She hands me a bottle of water. I take it and revel in the cool relief sliding down my throat.
“Why don’t you head back?” she offers. “We’re almost done here. I’m going to the cellar in a bit myself.”
“I’m staying.” I lean in to kiss her, softly aware that I’m a lucky bastard to have a wife like Alessia. She makes time for me even when she’s busy. Cares for me.
Guilt hits me again, this time sharp—though it has been assaulting me in slow waves every minute of every day since Cesare made his decision to bring a winemaker in from the outside.
A part of me likes this backbreaking work because it keeps me from facing the truth I know I can’t dodge for too long.
I am not on Alessia’s team when it comes to her replacing Matteo—and even though there are very good reasons why, I know she won’t see it that way.
I’ve gotten to know my wife a little, and she values loyalty above all else.
She doesn’t get that from her father; also, she doesn’t expect it—but she does from her sisters, from Matteo, from the people she works with… and now, from me.
You’ll explain it to her. She’s a reasonable woman. She’ll get it.
Alessia wipes sweat from her forehead with her wrist and leans into the next row of vines. She doesn’t know yet how things will play out at the Palazzo. She doesn’t know I stood by and let her fade into the background.
So I bend to the vine, as if by being shoulder-deep in grape stalks I can repent for every moment I stayed quiet. As if hauling these purple-stained boxes can atone for every word I failed to speak.
I take care of her the best I can.
I make sure she eats.
I even make her take a bath to soak her sore muscles.
I hold her when she sleeps for the short time she allows herself to.
By the end of the weekend, I am heartily sick and tired of myself and almost relieved to leave, so I don’t have to look at my wife and wonder, fearfully....
If she’ll be able to keep business separate from our burgeoning marriage.
If she’ll be practical instead of emotional.
If she’ll leave me….
As soon as that thought emerges, I tamp it down. I’m never letting her go.
We’ll figure this out, work through it.
She’ll understand.
She has to.
I lift off Monday at dawn, the helicopter’s blades chopping the cold air like a relentless heartbeat.
I don’t get to take a break from running the House of Alighieri because I’ve finally cracked the code of being a husband. Alessia trails me to the edge of the helipad at the far end of a stone garden, away from the vines, facing the sea, and presses a single, feather-light kiss to my lips.
“Call me tonight,” she breathes.
“I always do,” I whisper.
Her smile strikes like contraband, and I stow it deep in my chest as we slice back toward Florence.
Renzo follows me into my office.
He doesn’t sit.
“You’re not going to like this,” he warns, voice low.
“I rarely do.” I yank at my tie. The silk feels like steel.
He crosses his arms, a wall of cold certainty. “Cesare has his heart set on Davide Fontana. The son of a bitch has already spoken to him—sounded him out, tested his interest.”
My jaw tightens. “We haven’t talked to even one of the damn candidates.”
I protest. I need time. I need to think. I need to prolong this interview process—somehow.
Renzo exhales slowly. “He keeps saying if we can get Fontana…and I get him, it’ll be a big win.”
But for Alessia, Davide Fontana would be a prize.
He made his name in Piedmont, starting at a mid-sized Barolo estate in La Morra—cleaned tanks, ran ferments, the whole apprenticeship.
By his early thirties, he was head winemaker.
Took a property no one outside Italy cared about and turned it into a reference point—got 100 points from Robert Parker for the Davide Fontana Barolo Fontanavecchia Vigna del Silenzio Riserva 2017.
The man has an ego big enough to name his wine after himself. Luckily, his name is big enough that he’s allowed.
He left Piedmont six years ago to consult internationally. Burgundy. Rioja. Even Napa—though he complained about the American winemakers, and they didn’t care for him either.
“Americans,” he once remarked in an interview, “have a peculiar relationship with humility: you’re expected to be exceptional, but only if you perform a kind of Nordic modesty about it. Confidence is permitted. Greatness is not.”
Everywhere he goes, critics fall over themselves.
Davide Fontana is a living legend.
Obsessive about structure.
Long macerations.
Native yeasts when he can control them. He brought back old-school extended aging—no flash, no shortcuts.
Critics call him a purist with modern discipline.
That, combined with the fact that he has a penis, makes him Cesare’s favorite kind of winemaker.