Chapter Two Satoshi #3
‘Satoshi, why don’t you take Fiona out the back?’ Charlotte, one of my bar staff, materialised at my side. ‘It’s quiet now. The dinner rush has passed. I can handle everything out here.’
‘Oh, you don’t need to do that!’ Fiona was off her barstool in an instant. ‘I didn’t come in here to distract you – you’ve got a job to do! – and—’
‘Don’t even worry about it,’ Charlotte said. ‘You did the same for Birdie last year, right? We owe you one.’
Just for a second, Fiona wavered.
I used that second to survey the bar quickly. Under normal circumstances, I’d never dream of leaving the floor without a qualified somm in charge, but Charlotte was right. There was hardly anyone here, and she was one of my most experienced staff – and I’d only be ten steps away if she needed me.
So even though it went against my most hard-wired, professional instincts, there I was, coming around the bar and taking Fiona by the elbow. ‘I actually have something you can help me with. Come out to the office with me, finish your glass of wine, and give me a hand, all right?’
‘I, um—’
‘Charlotte, come and get me if you need me,’ I said over my shoulder, steering Fiona towards the back. Charlotte gave me a thumbs up in response.
Fiona scrubbed her wrist across her eyes as I closed my office door behind us. ‘So what is this thing I can allegedly help you with?’ she asked. ‘I don’t have many useful skills.’
‘Firstly, that’s nonsense, Ms Copywriter. You know how often I plagiarise from you in my tasting notes. Secondly, if you can follow instructions, you can help me.’
I pulled my glasses down my nose so I could look at her over the top of them like a stern schoolmaster. ‘You can follow instructions, can’t you?’
That made her laugh, just a little. ‘Yes, Satoshi, I can follow instructions.’
My anxiety at leaving the floor started to recede, overshadowed by a different set of feelings. If I lingered too long on the idea of her following my instructions…
‘What do you need me to do?’ she asked.
‘I had a disaster of a blind tasting today.’ She’s still half-crying, Satoshi, get your mind out of the gutter.
‘Stunningly bad. Songs will be written about what an incredible failure it was. Forget becoming an MS, if this gets back to the powers that be, they’ll kick me out of the Court of Sommeliers entirely. ’
She laughed again. My heart swelled so much it was almost painful.
‘So, I need someone to help me study old world white wines – which, coincidentally, is what you’re drinking, that arneis is from Piedmont in Italy. How would you feel about being my study buddy for the evening?’
‘I can do that.’ Fiona thumbed the last of her tears away. ‘What do I have to do?’
I took some blind tasting sleeves from the shelf. ‘Can you grab a tasting sheet from the second drawer of the desk? It’s laminated with six circles on it, with numbers underneath.’
She did. I lined up six wineglasses on it, aligning them precisely with the outlines, and set a spittoon beside them. ‘Now I’m going to turn my back. See those three cases of wine in the corner, next to the fridge?’
‘Yep.’
‘Choose six bottles from them – any six – and put them into these sleeves, so I can’t see what they are.’
I faced the wall. There was some rattling and rustling as she did what I’d asked her. ‘Done.’
I turned back around. ‘If you look in the same drawer as before, there’s a stack of deductive tasting grids. We need six.’
I started opening the wines she’d put in the sleeves, eyes cast up to the ceiling so I didn’t get any hints from the foils or the corks, while Fiona scrabbled around in my desk. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘here we are – oh my god, Satoshi.’
‘What?’
She gestured. ‘How can you do that so fast? Without looking?’
‘It’s just practise.’ I discarded the sixth cork and put my wine knife back in my pocket. ‘And maybe a dash of genetics. Strong fingers.’ I waggled them at her.
‘That must make you popular.’
It took me a moment to process what she’d said, by which time she’d covered her mouth with her hands. ‘Oh my god, I’m so sorry!’
She was so mortified I couldn’t help but laugh, despite the flood of extremely vivid images rushing through my brain. ‘Come on, Fiona,’ I said, starting to pour tasting measures from the open bottles into the glasses. ‘We’ve talked about sex before. You can’t scandalise me that easily.’
‘That doesn’t mean you want to be sexually harassed by a woman old enough to be your mother!’
‘You’re only eight years older than me. If you think you’re old enough to be my mother, there might be some significant gaps in your sex education.’
She buried her face in her hands and groaned.
‘Tsukamoto-sensei can run through some basics for you, if you like,’ I said, unable to stop even though this was an extremely dangerous conversation. ‘The human reproductive system—’
‘Don’t you dare, Satoshi.’ She looked at me from between her fingers, and there it was, that mischievous sparkle in her eye, the one that had gone so dim since Matt left. ‘Don’t you fucking dare.’
I wrinkled my nose at her. She wrinkled hers back.
Then she dropped her hands. ‘Anyway, I believe I’m supposed to be the one assessing your knowledge right now, young man, not the other way around,’ she said, putting on a mock-businesslike tone. ‘Tell me what to do.’
I gestured for her to sit down in my desk chair, then took a seat across from her.
‘The way the MS tasting exam works is that you have twenty-five minutes to taste six wines blind and figure out what they are: the grape, where they’re from, the vintage, any quality markers,’ I explained.
‘It’s like maths – you get points for showing your working, in the categories you can see there on the grid.
So if you come to the wrong conclusion but you get things right along the way—’
‘—then you still get some points.’ Fiona was studying the deductive tasting grid, squinting slightly, and my fingers itched with the desire to reach over and smooth the furrow between her brows. ‘I get it. So I just mark down what you say, and then at the end we work out how many points you get?’
‘Exactly. Think you can do it?’
‘I can give it a try.’ She reached into her handbag and took out her phone. ‘I’ll put a timer on. Are you ready?’
I wasn’t, really. My brain was stuck on her saying tell me what to do, busy producing images so graphic they could probably get me sent to some kind of horny jail.
‘I’m ready.’ I scooted my chair as close to the desk as possible. ‘Are you? Got enough wine? Twenty-five minutes is a long time.’
‘I’m still working on the rascal.’ Fiona raised her glass of arneis to me, an innocuous gesture that was somehow the sexiest thing anyone had ever done. ‘And if I run out, there are six open bottles for me to try.’
She grinned at me, eyes crinkling in the corners. ‘Now show me what you’ve got, Satoshi. Your time starts… now.’
I picked up the first glass, taking a deep breath as I tilted it so I could look at the wine’s colour against the white of the tasting sheet.
‘Wine number one is a clear white wine,’ I began.
‘No sediment. It’s deep gold, with some brownish hues, which could indicate either age, oxidation, or the presence of botrytis. ’
I smelled it, doing my best to sink into the familiar ritual of blind tasting.
‘On the nose there’s ripe pear, peach and baked apple, as well as—’ I swirled it a couple of times, then smelled it again ‘—honey and chamomile, with notes of saffron, toasted almond and burnt sugar. It’s spent some time in oak, almost certainly old oak. ’
I tasted the wine, sucking in air at the same time to oxygenate it, and let it sit on my palate for a few seconds – there was jasmine there too, along with all the honeyed ripe fruits on the nose – before reaching for the spittoon and rattling off structural characteristics: sweetness, tannin, acid, alcohol, body, age, complexity.
‘My initial conclusion is that this is a cool climate old world wine, probably French. It could be sweeter-style riesling from Alsace; but my final conclusion is that this is chenin blanc from the Loire Valley, Vouvray appellation, vintage 2015.’
I dared a glance at Fiona. Her pen had been scratching busily against the grid, but she’d stopped, and she was looking back at me, cheeks flushed, mouth slightly open.
Well, I’d clearly got that one right.
I smiled at her, buoyed, filed her facial expression away to think more about later at extremely great length, then picked up the second glass.
‘That was amazing,’ Fiona said once we were finished. ‘Should I get you some water?’
‘Please.’
She pulled a water bottle out of a half-open case I had in the corner and handed it to me. I drank most of it in two gulps. Exam condition blind tastings always made me feel like I’d run a marathon.
‘I could watch you do that for hours,’ she enthused. ‘And you got all of them right! You were perfect!’
‘Perfect is going a bit far,’ I said, although I was very pleased with myself. I’d never managed six from six accurate conclusions before. ‘This was much easier than a proper blind tasting would be. It’s not like I didn’t already know what was in the cases you picked the bottles from.’
‘Will you just let me compliment you?’
I rolled my eyes to the ceiling dramatically. ‘Ugh, if you insist.’
She laughed that champagne laugh of hers, and I wanted to bottle it and keep it with me, always.
‘Seriously, though,’ Fiona said. ‘I feel… privileged to have seen you do that, Satoshi. To see an expert at the top of their game. To see you think like that. I’ve never been good at anything the way you’re good at that.’
‘Don’t sell yourself short.’ I lobbed my empty water bottle into the bin. ‘You’re good at thinking about wine too. Do you think I’m always using the things you say in my tasting notes just because I like you?’
She didn’t shrug exactly, but there was the smallest rise and fall of her shoulders. ‘I’m decent at snappy wording. That’s not hard.’