Chapter 17 Built on the Back of White Zin #2
“I understand,” Otis finally said, but inside, maybe he didn’t understand. He could only hope that Camden would have a change of heart. He still had a long way to go before he had to commit to a profession.
The winter of 1987 to ’88 was a blur. Addison’s death and Eloise’s words on the day of the funeral hung over Otis. He buried himself in work and was short with Bec and the boys, and even the workers. Any attempted apologies fell flat.
“I know I’m being awful,” he told Bec during the first week of the new year. “Please know that I’m trying.”
“You know I have all the patience in the world,” she said in a weary tone, “but it’s wearing thin.
You’re allowed to grieve, but you still have to love the ones you’re with.
Though you were physically here, you weren’t actually here during the holidays.
How many more Christmases do we have with the boys?
And I don’t know, maybe you should allow yourself to grieve more, as opposed to distracting yourself, running around like everything is on fire. ”
A burn flared up in his chest. “My father just died, Bec. Cut me some slack.” He knew better than anyone that all she’d ever done was cut him slack.
That’s what she did with everyone. For some ungodly reason, she surrounded herself with broken people and then fed them slack like she was helping a climber rappel down a rock face.
Bec wisely ignored his defensiveness, which only made Otis angrier—at himself, more than at anyone else.
“Let’s not forget all this money pouring in, the success we’re having.
Do you know how many wineries out there would kill for it?
” He fired his index finger into the air.
“That doesn’t happen if I’m sitting around stewing in my grief.
” Every word that escaped his mouth fueled his self-loathing.
It was true, though; they’d become unstoppable.
His growing friendship with Joe Montana didn’t hurt their momentum.
Photos of Joe drinking Lost Souls were as good as marketing could get.
Other celebrities began to contact Otis, and all of a sudden, he was experiencing his own celebrity.
Especially around San Francisco. He knew every chef in town.
None of them would let him pay for a meal.
Instead, they’d come out and shave fresh truffles on his pasta or pour him four fingers of Pappy Van Winkle.
Otis got that level of respect everywhere he went.
Rebecca wanted nothing to do with it. She told him that she had to take care of the boys and the farm and that she wasn’t interested in going out on the road and schmoozing.
Otis bought a convertible BMW 325i and slapped a Zinman license plate on the back.
He’d don a silk scarf, crisp white button-down, khakis, and loafers and drive his new car fast up and down the coast. Not even a couple of speeding tickets slowed him down.
He’d splash into San Francisco, catch up with some of the big retailers, and take them out on the town, thanking them for all the hard work.
He knew he had to stay away from his family till he got it together. He didn’t want to poison them with the pain he felt inside. What his mother had said about his father’s failures stuck to him like flypaper. Had she been confused?
Otis made a bold decision. Being a successful winemaker required following trends, and now that he’d sold his soul to the devil with white zinfandel, other lines began to blur.
Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate continued to grow in popularity, and many new writers had started scoring wines on the one-hundred-point system. Though Otis didn’t agree with attempting to objectify wine, he also knew that high scores made life much easier.
Whenever he nabbed high scores, the phones rang. He could hike the price, and no one would balk. Or, if they did, he’d say, “I’m sure I can find another home for it.” He became a shrewd businessman—and winemaker—in that way.
Fortunately, the recipe to make a high-scoring wine wasn’t too difficult to follow: Pick the grapes late; add enzymes to enhance color, flavors, and texture; age in new oak barrels; add back a touch of sugar and gum arabic; and then sterile filter the holy hell out of it .
.. and whatever else it took to make the wines big and bold, giving them the oomph they needed to stand out in a tasting.
You wanted someone to pull the cork and be knocked over by the power of the juice.
If you could do that, then the critics would eat it up.
Otis had already begun to succumb to the temptation.
During the previous harvest, with hurt feelings over the 93-point ratings he’d received, Otis had picked his estate fruit later than usual, at higher Brix.
An element of shame pierced his soul as he walked his land, but he kept telling himself that a few years of this would mean even his grandkids would never have to work again.
His sins didn’t stop there. Once the wines had fermented, he’d racked them into all brand-new, heavy toast French oak barrels, which would over time soften and smoothen out the tannins and impart notes of graham cracker and toasted marshmallow, along with seductive vanilla and baking spice flavors.
This practice was a far cry from his previous regimen of using mostly used barrels, which didn’t mask the expressive fruit and allowed the geography to shine.
Now that terroir was dead—and it was—what the hell.
In March, he decided to push it even further by transferring the wines into yet another set of brand-new barrels, a proverbial touch of additional plastic surgery that would make this particular vintage absolutely irresistible to consumers and critics alike.
Otis was no longer capturing a time and place in a bottle; he was the Willy Wonka of wine, the King of Smooth, bottling fluffy clouds of cotton candy that might garner the first 101-point rating in history.
Otis Till has made the first wine that’s actually beyond perfect!
There would be no authenticity to speak of, but who cared anyway?
It was all one big sham. If he was going to abandon his beliefs, why not drive a Lamborghini while doing so?
Otis didn’t tell a soul—not even Bec. It would be too hard to say out loud.
Only the vineyard crew and cellar rats could see what he was doing, and he found himself avoiding eye contact with them when he gave them the latest instructions.
“Make it smoother than smooth, fellas,” he’d say, knowing they’d all be happy when he handed them their fat bonuses.
Distributors started giving Otis a hard time for ignoring them, and that was the excuse he used when he said he had to start traveling again soon.
Escaping the man he’d become on his own land was closer to the truth.
There were days when he’d walk through the rows and notice that the reverberant whisper of his farm had gone silent.
“Just a few months of working the market,” he told Bec.
“My face is being forgotten. The white zin market’s crowded.
I want to stay front of mind. Besides, I don’t even know if the trend will continue.
We can’t start getting lazy.” He often found a way to sneak in another barb.
“Don’t forget, this was your idea, building this empire. ”
Perhaps in the back of his mind, he did sound like his father, making up excuses to keep working.
He tried to remember his childhood. He sought clues to his parents’ unhappiness.
How in God’s name had they fooled him into thinking that it had been Addison’s decision to move?
Eloise had made it seem like he was a hero.
She’d painted this version of Addison for him, that he was the greatest man to walk the earth.
Then, in a few short words, she’d cut it all down.
Starting in April, Otis hit the road. He’d land in a town hungover and drop his bags at a hotel; then one of the reps for the distributor would drive him around all day to meet with the most powerful buyers in each city.
Otis had found that he was far more personable after a nip of wine, so he didn’t spit when he tasted with them, even if it was ten in the morning.
By eleven, he’d have a nice buzz and would wax poetic about his practices in the vines to buyers who gathered around him at long tables in back rooms of restaurants like he was the final word on terroir.
It was in the bathroom of Le Bernardin, an exquisite restaurant in Manhattan led by the genius chef Eric Ripert, when Otis’s backslide took an even worse turn.
He was on a whirlwind trip on the East Coast and hadn’t been home in three weeks.
Having decided to embrace his artistic side, he wore a flashy silk shirt with a few buttons undone to expose a gold chain.
He was there to meet with all the higher-ups from his new distributor.
One thing he’d started doing in the late eighties was replacing distributors. They’d started getting lazy on him, and he had no room for it. “Don’t tell me sales are down. I’m giving you something easy to sell. And look at the scores!”
They were sipping on Manhattans and about to order dinner when one of the reps slid a bag of cocaine into Otis’s hand.
He hadn’t touched it in years, not since a trip to Chicago years before, but nothing kept him from it tonight.
The truth was that he was exhausted. He was out of energy and tired of talking to people, tired of being in the spotlight.
Three weeks on the road, and he’d barely slept, and he couldn’t keep up the facade much longer.
No quantity of Manhattans or Negronis would help.
He took the bag into the bathroom, rolled up a bill, and sniffed a line as long as his middle finger. Woo, it woke him up. Suddenly all that weariness disappeared, and he returned to the table more charming than he’d ever been.