Chapter 10 A Harvest to Remember #2
Finally, the old Italian man took a sip.
Otis waited with a breath caught in his lungs.
He wondered how Carmine had any palate left with all the cigarettes he’d likely burned, but who was he to question the man’s ability?
Carmine had a funny way of tasting, moving his whole head to shake the wine in his mouth, then he looked up to the sky and let gravity drop the juice down his throat.
He smacked his lips and then closed his eyes.
“This is your second vintage?”
Otis nodded proudly.
Carmine set the glass down and pulled on his beard. “You’ve been working hard, haven’t you? How are you learning?”
“From Paul down at the Murphy Vineyards. Reading everything I can get my hands on. Tasting as much as I can afford.”
Carmine was quiet for a long time. “You have a good name. Till. That’s what I would have called it, but all you young kids don’t like using your last names.
I’m okay with Lost Souls, though. That speaks to me.
Here’s the thing. You need to forget what everyone’s been telling you .
.. what you’ve read. What I taste here is damn near perfect, scientifically speaking.
No strange flavors. No VA. You kept it away from oxygen.
It’s clean. You filtered, I’m assuming?”
“I did.”
“And you picked at a good time. I like the balance.”
Otis sat up straighter.
“It’s not my kind of wine, though,” Carmine said. “To me, it’s boring. Tastes like every bulk wine from every country in the world. There’s no heart in there, Till. Can you tell that?”
Otis had gone from having the best day of his life to falling on his ass. “I thought it was pretty good. Everyone seems to like it.”
“Who is that, your mom and sister?” He chuckled to himself. “It’s fine. Delicious even. In the same way that orange juice is fine. You’ve made something that is entirely palatable, but you’re here telling me you want to make something great.”
“That’s right.” Otis wanted to fling himself in front of a tractor. Entirely palatable . Wasn’t that a phrase for the ages.
“Filtering is your first problem. If you use anything tighter than a window screen, you’re stripping the marrow from your wine.
If a drinker complains about sediment, they can go fuck off.
More importantly ...” He recalibrated.
“Stop trying to please others and stop trying to make something great. I keep hearing you talk about yourself. You, you, you want to do something great. That’s not how you make a wine that’s true.
You need to get out of the way and let the land speak. ”
“How do I do that?”
“It’s taken me a lifetime to figure that out.” Carmine laughed, then tapped Otis’s head. “Stop creating with this.” Then he jabbed Otis in the chest. “You make it here. With your heart. Your essence.”
Chills traveled up Otis’s spine. Carmine didn’t make clear how to do such a thing, but the sentiment was powerful.
Carmine stomped on the ground, shaking Otis. Scaring him. “When I see you again and ask you what you want, you know what you should tell me?”
Otis didn’t dare speak.
Carmine leaned in, his pungent sweaty-and-smoky smell invading Otis’s nostrils.
“That you want to turn your land to liquid, that it’s not about you and your silly dreams. It’s about tapping the vein of your farm and running a line of it right into the bottle.
” A gold tooth in the back of his mouth sparkled.
He bent down and gathered a handful of dirt, then held it over the glass and let it fall through his fingers. The soil splashed into Otis’s wine. Carmine spun the glass in a sharp, angry motion, then tossed the wine into the back of his throat.
Otis about shit himself.
“Become one with your land. Speak her language. Know when she’s sick, know when she’s mad. Tend to her with the respect she deserves. Get down on the ground and make love to her. Eat her dirt and let it spread under your flesh. You understand?”
“I . . . sort of?”
“You’re not even a shepherd. You’re a pair of hands, the only opposable thumbs on the farm, the only being who can do the math.
So pick the grapes, move them from tank to barrel, do your measurements, and get out of the way.
Don’t worry about making a wine that tastes good.
Taste has nothing to do with it. Make a wine that sings the sermon of the earth! ”
Otis exhaled, as if he’d narrowly missed a bullet. He had no idea what Carmine was talking about, and yet he’d learned more in the last twenty minutes than he would the rest of his life.
Carmine kept going, sharing wisdom that Otis would try to wrangle into reason for years to come.
“What is it?” Carmine said after a while. “I can see you have a question.”
Otis rubbed his eyes, wading through a minefield of question marks. “I don’t mean offense, but—”
“Out with it, Till.”
“You say I have to take myself out of it, but then you tell me I should have put my name on the bottle. That’s what you do.”
Carmine stuffed a cigarette into his smiling lips and drew in a long puff.
The red cherry glowed. Out with the smoke came more wisdom.
“Just when I worried that you were another pawn falling in line. Now you’re thinking, ragazzo .
It’s a hell of a question, a complex one.
To make a great wine, you must take ego out of it.
You have to let your farm lead the way and take all the glory, but the reality is that to sell a wine, we need to sell ourselves too.
“In a perfect world, my labels would be blank. Or better yet, I’d just press some of this dirt into them, but we must consider marketing.
If we are to be the stewards that usher juice into people’s mouths, we must give them a brand.
But what we put in the bottle is not the brand.
It is life, nature ... God. Brands are a short-term tool forged on the impatience of the human capitalist perspective. ”
Otis laughed at that. This fellow had a way with words.
Carmine helped himself to another glass and knocked it back. “I have work to do. Aren’t you sorry you came to see me?”
“I’m begging you ... let me help around here. I’ll work for free.”
“I don’t need help, and you’re not ready.”
“Why not?”
Carmine stood and looked down at Otis. “For one thing, you need to go to the Old World. Go to the church of wine. Go to Burgundy and Bordeaux. Go walk the magical hills of Tuscany. You know what? Go baptize yourself in the Mosel. They started making wine there in the fifteenth century. Soak that up. Then go buy a farm and learn how to tend to land. You’re up there working a block at Murphy Vineyards.
It’s not about working a block, ragazzo .
It’s about working a farm. You see all these trees around here, you see those animals, the biodiversity?
You hear those bees? Fermenting wine is the easy part. All right, class dismissed.”
He found a pen and wrote his number down. “So that next time I don’t shoot you for trespassing, at least call first.”
As Otis took the paper into his hands, tears welled under his eyes.
Otis would never forget his first trip to the Mosel Valley, courtesy of his father, who’d paid for it as their honeymoon trip.
Carmine was right—the hills were damn near cliffs.
The naked riesling vines descended steeply down from the mountain mist and stopped just shy of the ancient fairy-tale town of Bernkastel-Kues, which straddled the Mosel River.
A grand church tower stood over the half-timbered fachwerk buildings that made up most of the architecture.
Before they even unpacked, Otis was dragging Rebecca and Camden out the door. They’d barely slept, but he was wide awake. They enjoyed sausage and sauerkraut and beer and then wandered along the old stone wall that created a border between the town and the vines.
Whispers trickled down like fog descending a mountain.
“Do you hear them?” Otis asked.
“What’s that?” Rebecca asked.
“The vines. They’re talking.”
Rebecca smiled. “I’ve never seen you like this.”
“And I haven’t even tasted wines like this. My God, Bec. We’re on holy ground.”
Thanks to Lloyd, they had an afternoon appointment with a five-hundred-year-old winery.
In the depths of a musty cellar underneath the town, as Camden lay on the floor drawing in a coloring book, a German man with shaggy hair and a plaid scarf guided them through a lineup of rieslings.
The first few vintages were crisp and delightful quaffers , but nothing that sent Otis reeling.
Then the man pulled corks on older wines from the early sixties that blew Otis’s and Rebecca’s minds.
It was as if riesling slept for the first decade before coming alive and running in a million different directions.
Wines from grapes grown only meters apart tasted like they’d come from different parts of the world.
“This is how the riesling works,” their host explained in stilted English. “The wine needs many years for it to find its way.”
“Just like us,” Rebecca murmured.
Otis stared into the golden hues of a ’61. “I have never understood wine till this day.”
Rebecca wiped Otis’s eyes. “What am I going to do with you?”
“My whole world has changed. It’s flipping fruit juice, Bec, but it means so much to me.
Being here. These wines. This town. The history.
They were making—no, growing wines here five hundred years ago on those unbelievably steep slopes.
” Otis stuffed his nose back into the glass and spoke in reverent whispers.
“I’m eager to get back to California and tap in, but another part of me wonders why I would even try.
How can we ever find a piece of land back home that would be worth devoting our lives to?
” He looked at the dusty racks of wines dating back hundreds of years and sighed.
“The how doesn’t matter. All we have to do is will it.”
“Will it? Are we back to this Seth thing again? You and Sparrow really need to settle yourselves.”
Sparrow and Rebecca had become best friends, despite the decade that stood between them, and Sparrow had pulled Rebecca down into a wormhole of New Age thought.
They’d both recently read a book called Seth Speaks , which supposedly captured the wisdom of a spirit named Seth who had written a book through a channeler named Jane Roberts.
Otis thought that the two women might have eaten too many magic mushrooms, but a small part of him—an infinitesimal part—wondered whether perhaps he was missing out on something.
The way Bec spoke lately, she’d changed.
It was like she’d stepped into herself, tapping into a power of which she hadn’t been aware.
Lately, she and Sparrow had been talking about manifestation. Apparently Seth talked about how mind created matter, that humans, either intentionally or unintentionally, drew their own reality as if they were sketch artists.
“Okay, magic genie woman,” Otis said, his sarcasm thicker than the Beerenauslese they were about to try, “I want fifty acres on a hillside in Sonoma County. A place near a river with centennial vines parked on a south-facing slope.”
Rebecca gestured to his wine, the ’61. “Smell that again.”
He did so.
“Wake up and smell the riesling, my love. There’s no room for doubt right now.”
“Wake up and smell the riesling,” Otis muttered. “That’s a bumper sticker waiting to happen.”
Back at the hotel, Bec jammed a metal rod into the spokes of Otis’s peaceful evening.
Camden slept in a crib inside the cramped room, and the adults sat out on the balcony in the chilly night air, looking out over the lights of Bernkastel-Kues, a place barely touched by modernity. The stars burst overhead.
“I want another baby.”
Otis had taken a sip of Sp?tburgunder and coughed it out onto his shirt. “Another baby?” He wiped the pinot noir from his chin. “So now we’re buying land and wanting another baby? When are we winning the lottery?”
“I’ve always known we’re having two.” Her playful side took over. “What’s the problem? Have you lost your attraction to me?”
Otis pulled her onto his lap. “Moi? Lost my attraction to you? I’d put a poster of you on my wall.”
She turned and whispered over her shoulder, “Then take me, Otis Till.”
“Right now?”
“Why not?”
“Camden, for one.”
“He’s asleep.”
“Yeah, but ... we’re kind of on display up here.” He gestured toward the people wandering the street four stories down.
“Fine, you know what? I’ll go down to the bar and see if there are any handsome German men who might be more interested.” She popped open a button on her blouse, then another. “Catch you later.”
“You wouldn’t dare.” He slid to his knees and rested his hands on her thighs. “You’re mine and no one else’s.”
“Ah, there’s the Otis I like. Tell me again, what is it that you want?”
He attempted to slow the sexual craving rising up from within. “Fifty acres on a hillside. Centennial grapes. A farm that we tend. Animals. Two rug rats. How about you?”
She took a moment to solemnly consider the question.
“For a while I thought that I was stealing your dream. That I needed my own. But I realize now that we’re the same.
I want to help you tend to our farm, to do my part to make the wines sing.
I want to live off the land, to build a sanctuary where we have a giant garden and fruit trees of every kind, maybe even a U-pick farm.
I want to make my own honey and jam and bread and sell it at the market.
You do your vines and wines, and I’ll do the books and manage the rest of the farm.
I don’t want to worry about money anymore. ”
He glided his fingers on the back of her neck. “Me either, lovey.”
Bec cast her gaze up toward the North Star. “I can see it now. For the first time in my life, because of you, Otis Till, I think—no—I know we can make it happen.”
For the first time in his life, Otis did too. Even if that sense of knowingness existed only up there on a balcony overlooking the Mosel River on this one night, the feeling was real, and he would revisit that memory and this place as often as he could, for the rest of his life.
Bec slid her fingers down his chest and abdomen and farther, igniting a carnal awakening from deep within. “Now take me, Otis, you lost soul you. Put a baby in me ... and don’t wake up the whole town with your howling. Then, when we get back home, let’s go make this thing happen.”
The howling came soon enough. With his clothes piled on the floor, Otis stood at the railing and beat his bare chest and howled into the night like he never had before, calling up to the moon, demanding that the universe make way for their dreams.