The Vineyard at Lake Como

At six in the morning on the second terrace, Marisol Bianchi tastes one berry from the shoulder of a cluster and one from the tip, and decides when eleven hundred vines are picked. She is twenty-six, she has a diploma from Turin, and for two years she has been the apprentice at Le Rive. On the Tuesday probate finally clears, she stops being the apprentice: the land is hers, the loan her father took after the frost is hers, and it is callable at the end of the year.

There is also a clause. Theo Rinaldi, her father’s partner for eighteen years, may buy forty per cent of the estate at a fixed price any time before the thirty-first of December. It would clear most of the debt. He has had two years to mention it and has never once said the word, and when she puts the will in front of him he talks about the drainage and works the press until three in the morning.

What she knows about Theo: he brings coffee too hot to hold, he can smell a frost before the weather service can, and he tells her the truth about her wine when everyone else in the valley tells her she has her father’s palate. What she learns, in a fermentation shed at two in the morning, is that after the funeral, when she could not taste anything without crying and hid it from everybody, he noticed in a week, said nothing, and quietly built her palate back one glass at a time.

A buyer from Milan wants the terraces and will keep the Bianchi name on the bottle. The only other way to keep the place is the clause, and the clause is a man she has started watching across the harvest table. Then a storm puts the power out while they are bottling, and Marisol asks Theo the one question he has spent two years making sure she would never think to ask.

Content note: brief references to historical threats of physical violence, offstage.