Chapter 11 Lost Souls
Lost Souls
In late January, Otis burst through the door with a case of wine in his hands. “Ladies and gentlemen, today is a good day.”
Bec and Camden huddled over the table, drawing with crayons. “Hi, Daddy,” they both replied.
Otis set down the wine and kissed the tops of their heads.
He pinched Cam’s cheek and said in a baby’s voice, “Guess what Daddy has in this box? Your birth vintage. Can you believe that? When you’re old enough, once you’ve cut your teeth in the cellar, we’ll pull a cork together. What a day that will be.”
Otis looked to Rebecca. Bags collected under her eyes. “You okay?”
She looked away. “Yeah, just tired.”
Otis knew it was more than that. Maybe seeing the wine would turn her around. “Can we take a look?”
He pulled back the shipping tape and drew a bottle from the box. “Here we have it, the first vintage of Lost Souls.”
Bec had been instrumental in the design.
They’d studied countless labels, noting how Carmine Coraggio and Inglenook and Martini and dozens of others used a painting or drawing of their chateau or their vineyards.
Others, like Mayacamas or Foppiano, focused on a logo.
Otis and Rebecca opted for simplicity with a white label and black text.
Lost Souls
1973
Murphy Vineyards
Sonoma
“You did it, baby.”
“Are you kidding me? We did it. This bottle wouldn’t exist had you not been pushing me all along.”
She worked hard to hold her smile. He was losing her. He could feel it, the way she was pulling back. It might not necessarily be about him, but she’d lost herself, or, at least, the part of her that Otis had come to know best.
He slipped his hand into hers. “I know, I know. I’m too focused, but we have to do what it takes right now. Losing your paycheck hurts. I have to work overtime. I’m trying to get to a place—”
“I get it,” she said in a tone that suggested that no excuse would justify how little time he was spending with his family.
He held eye contact with her for a while.
What she didn’t get was that she’d been taking out her frustrations on Otis.
Her parents had proved to be terrible grandparents.
Still, she continued to try with them, always inviting them over for dinner or taking Cam for a visit.
Jed’s drinking and drug use had gotten worse, and Bec had become highly invested in convincing him to go to rehab.
He was a complete jerk half the time, but Bec kept trying to love him and reason with him.
It didn’t help that she and Otis still hadn’t conceived another baby.
Sometimes she acted as if another baby would fix everything.
Though she was an expert at hiding her troubles from Cam, Otis saw all of it: the way she got up in the middle of the night, sometimes for hours, the creases on her forehead, her lack of patience with him.
Could she not see the truth? That she was still trying to make up for running away.
Otis did his best to support her, but he was no good at it. When she simply needed him to listen, he’d always jump in with solutions, and that never went well. Maybe the best role he could play was as the target, someone to bear the brunt of her inner turmoil.
Not that Otis was trying to eschew all the blame.
He was working too much. How nice it would be to ease his workload and make more time for Bec and Cam, but he simply had to keep his eyes on their dream.
She understood more than anyone what it was like to be broke.
The only way they could ever pay back their school debt and eventually build up some kind of financial cushion was if he relentlessly pursued the growth of Lost Souls and eventually found a way to purchase their own land.
Even as he thought it, he could hear his father cheering on his demise, ready to say “I told you so” at the finish line of his failure.
After dinner, Otis took a bottle to Carmine, and they cracked it open. Puccini played loudly on the record player. “It’s coming around,” Carmine said. “And the label’s nice. I’d consider washing my feet with such a wine. Maybe even give it to the dogs.”
Otis melted into the earth.
Carmine smacked his back. “Oh, lighten up. It’s far better than what I made with my second vintage. You and your wines are growing on me.” A long beat of contemplation ensued. “Come back Monday and I’ll put you to work.”
Otis looked at him dumbly.
“You asked for a job, didn’t you?”
The next morning Otis shipped a case of his wine to his parents and then went to visit Paul to tell him that Carmine had offered him a job.
“I get it, Otis. Work here when you can, but go learn from that guy. Maybe share some of his secrets with me. In the meantime, that block is still yours. I can’t get enough of Lost Souls. ”
Otis wasn’t a hugger, but he stepped forward and pulled Paul in. “I’ll pay you for the fruit.”
“Nah, just give me a few bottles every now and then. A man like you needs to have his own vines to farm.”
Carmine threw Otis right into the mix, first pruning with two other guys who’d worked there for twenty years. Every day was a master class on organic vine, pest, and weed management, using only holistic treatments. So much of the talk centered on energizing the soil and the ecosystem.
He learned that cover crops attracted beneficial insects—pollinators, ladybugs, wasps, and spiders—as well as prevented erosion.
Cover crops also made the vines compete for water and nutrients, forcing them to struggle, which made them focus on reproduction, which meant activating their own antioxidant-rich, stress-resilient pathways that would energize the fruit.
No matter what, Carmine did not allow synthetic chemicals on the property. “Chemicals permeate the vine, poison the berries, and kill their potential. Then the toxins end up in your wine! Do people think that the process of fermenting can kill chemicals? No, it can’t.”
More than once, Carmine would dig into the earth with a shovel and show Otis the health of his soil.
“You see the earthworms, the life. My soil is a living thing with bacteria and fungi, an environment ready to thrust its sexual energy into the vines.” He winked to inject some humor, but he was deadly serious.
“A balanced vine means a balanced wine,” Carmine would often say.
Every week they would move the black Hebridean sheep from block to block so that the animals would mow the tall grass, softly agitate the topsoil with their hooves, and leave their manure as fertilizer.
Carmine had a way with those sheep. They’d come running to him like a dog might. He could clap his hands, and they’d follow him into the next fenced-in area, where the tall grass waited. They’d even eat out of his hands. Carmine was the one who ignited Otis’s own love of animals.
When they weren’t tending to the awakening vines and the animals, they scrubbed clean the cellar, sterilized pumps, topped off and cleaned barrels, racked the wines, and monitored them through tasting and testing. It was a never-ending cycle of work that repeated itself year after year.
Carmine also taught him the art of taking notes.
For a guy whose outward appearance exhibited disarray, he wrote down everything.
A notebook for each vintage offered meticulous information on each cellar task and monthly tasting notes of each lot and their chemistries.
Even at his age and his level of mastery, he always strived to make the next vintage better.
Experiencing the truth of what made a good wine, Otis fell in love all over again.
In early April, Otis’s father sent a letter that included a newspaper article from The New York Times . Addison wrote:
Thanks again for your bottle of wine. I’m including a clipping of a writer I’ve come to admire, a Sam Ledbetter.
Not sure if you’ve heard his name, but he has a column in the Times called Vine Matters.
Might be interesting to send him a bottle, see what he thinks. I expect he could give you some tips.
In the article, under a black-and-white drawing of the man’s face, Ledbetter reviewed several wines of the last year, featuring particular favorites from André Tchelistcheff’s latest efforts at Beaulieu.
Otis knew his father meant to help, but he felt a dent in his pride. Even when his parents had called to thank him for the wine he’d sent, Addison hadn’t exactly praised him. He certainly hadn’t acknowledged what a feat it had been to farm a block of vines and create a passable wine.
In the morning, as they compared wines from Hungarian and French barrels, Otis asked Carmine, “Do you know of Sam Ledbetter?”
“Oh, sure, that old curmudgeon. He makes me look like a happy guy.”
“He’s tasted your wines?”
“Sure, he’s tasted everyone’s wines. He comes out every year to meet with folks.”
“What’s his opinion on yours?”
“I hear he likes them, but I don’t seek out the articles. All I can do is my best. How they’re received is not my problem.”
Ovulation meant the Olympics of sex every month, as Otis and Rebecca had yet to make another baby. Nineteen seventy-five was a feeding frenzy for Bec’s libido. She’d even track him down between the vine rows and tear the shears from his hand and rip down his pants to seize the opportune moment.
Though it had started out fun, a desperation began to fill her eyes ... and Otis started hiding from her.
One day in mid-July, when he came in for lunch, she fired a finger at him. “Take your pants off. Let’s go.”
“Bec, I’m ... let’s give it a break till tomorrow.”
“This is my window. Now. Pants off, c’mon. Cam’s going to wake up any minute.”
Otis felt no stir at all down below. In fact, he said, “Bec, my lobster tail is rubbed raw, and you have to get me excited in some way. I’m not a fornicating machine.”
Bec crossed her arms; her eyebrows curled. “Is it really so much to ask for you to make love to your wife?”