San Martino

I pressed the 1934 fruit on the third of November, which was the eleventh day, gently, and put forty-one litres of it into a glass demijohn in the corner of the dairy where the temperature does not move. It is the single best thing I have ever made and I did it by doing less to it than I wanted to.

The fortnight after the books was the best fortnight of that whole autumn. The declaration went to Domaso with two signatures on it. We racked the top-terrace wine into the big oak on the Tuesday and argued about it for forty minutes first, in front of Ettore, like people. He told me three times that I was wrong about things and twice he was right and once I was, and nobody in that cellar had to guess what anybody was thinking.

And on the tenth of November Signora Amadei rang me and asked, in the voice of a woman who has decided not to say the other thing, whether Le Rive would be pouring at San Martino.

They have the festival in Pianello on the Saturday nearest the eleventh. Trestles up the length of the piazza, chestnuts in the iron pan, the band from Dongo who have four songs, and every grower on this stretch of shore standing behind a demijohn of something that is not wine yet, being asked what it will be like.

A nebbiolo six weeks old is not a wine. It is a rumour with a colour.

I took nineteen litres of the free-run off vat three — the top terrace, the fruit that came in dry on the twenty-ninth of September with the north wind through it, the best fruit I have ever picked in my life — and I put it on a trestle outside the café at four o’clock on the fourteenth of November, in proper glasses and not the plastic, and I poured it myself for three hours.

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You get everything at that table. You get the man who asks what the alcohol is before he tastes it. You get the woman who says her father made better and means it kindly. You get four Germans off a boat. You get the priest, who has a system.

And you get, about nine times in three hours, some version of this:

“Rinaldi’s done well with it this year.”

Not unkindly. Never once unkindly. A man in a good jacket holding a glass of my wine at half past five, looking at it against the light, telling me — me, whose name is on the trestle — that the man who did not pick it, did not sort it, did not call the date, did not decide the temperature and did not press it, had done well with it.

I said thank you. I said it nine times, and I smiled, and I poured him another.

I want to be honest: it does not feel like an insult at the time. It feels like weather. It only assembles later, on the way home in the dark, into something with a shape.

At about six the band stopped and Vanoli, who runs the co-operative and has run it for nineteen years and enjoys a microphone more than any man alive, got up on the steps of the church to do the thing he does, which is to thank everybody in the valley by name.

Then he said, “And Le Rive — a hard two years up there, and a very good wine in that jug, and I think we should hear from the man who made it. Teodoro!”

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Theo was at the end of the trestle with a glass he had not drunk any of, which is where he had been for an hour and a half, saying nothing, handing me clean glasses.

He did not want to go up. I watched him not want to.

He went up. He took the microphone off Vanoli and held it too far away, the way men of his kind do, and the piazza went quiet because a man who does not speak has stood up to speak.

“It’s a good wine,” he said.

Somebody clapped. He waited for them to stop.

“It isn’t mine. I want to say that once, properly, where everybody can hear it, because I have stood in this square for twenty years and let this village believe things about that hill.

“The fruit in the jug on that table came off the top terrace on the twenty-ninth of September. On the morning she called it I would have picked the lot, because there was forty millimetres coming and I have never in my life been able to look at fruit in the rain. Marisol Bianchi left the top terrace on stone for five days, through a front, on her own judgement, against mine, and it is the best fruit that has come off this hill since 2016. That is not a compliment. It’s a fact, and you can taste it in your hand.

“Three weeks ago she cut the brambles off sixty rows on 214/c that everybody in this square has called a waste of a terrace since 1998, and found twenty-nine vines alive, and set a pick date against me, and the weather did what she said it would do and not what I said it would do.

“I am not her teacher. I have not been her supervisor since the fifteenth of October; she ended it, and she was entitled to, and she gave up three years of her own qualification to do it. I have no standing at Le Rive of any kind. I don’t hold a share and I have never asked for one.

“So when you drink that, don’t thank me for it. I didn’t make it. I’m not being modest, I’m being accurate, and this village has never been able to tell the difference.”

He gave the microphone back to Vanoli and came down the steps.

It is very quiet, a piazza. People do not boo. They rearrange themselves.

What happened over the next hour was not dramatic and I did not understand all of it until later. Three men of my father’s generation came and shook Theo’s hand with their faces set, because what they had heard was a man publicly stepping away from Piero Bianchi’s daughter six weeks before a bank could take the place off her. One of them said, loud enough, that Piero would be pleased to know his partner had found his conscience at last. Vanoli did not come back to my table, and Vanoli has come to my father’s table at every San Martino since 2009. By seven o’clock the sentence going round the trestles had stopped being Rinaldi’s done well with it and become Rinaldi’s out, and by half past it had become Rinaldi’s going to Vallese, because Sacchi’s driver had spent two hours in that café on the twenty-ninth of October drinking coffee and asking pleasant questions and being answered.

Signora Amadei brought me a plate I had not asked for and stood beside me while I poured.

“He has just made himself nobody in this valley,” she said. “For a jug of wine and a girl who does not need it said.”

“I needed it said.”

“I know,” she said. “That is what I am telling you it cost.”

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There is a terrace behind Amadei’s, three steps down off the back of the café, where the wall drops to the water and there is one bench and a fig tree and the whole of the lake going black in front of you with the lights coming on at Bellano on the other side.

I found him there at nine with the noise of the band behind us.

“You could have told me,” I said.

“I didn’t decide till I was standing up.”

“That’s not an excuse.”

“It’s not an excuse. It’s what happened. If you want it to be a breach of the term, it’s a breach of the term and I’ll take it.”

“It isn’t,” I said. “It was about you.”

I sat down on the bench. After a moment he sat down on the bench, which he would not have done in September, or at any point in the two years before that.

“They think you’re going to Vallese.”

“I know what they think.”

“Are you?”

“No.”

We sat with that.

“I need to say the whole of it once,” I said, “so say nothing until I’ve finished, because if you’re kind halfway through I’ll lose my nerve.

“If anything happens between us, it costs me the only thing I have been fighting for. Vitali will find out inside a week; her people drink coffee in that café. The bank will hear it by Christmas. Every judgement I make for the rest of my working life gets handed to you — the pick, the press, the blend, all of it — and there is no argument I can ever make against that, because the moment I make it I’m a woman defending her lover. I’d be giving away the one thing nobody can take, which is that I got it right on my own.

“And the other half. I have had one man decide what I could bear on a wall in September, and another one write a clause about me in March, and a company in Milan offer me a photograph, and a village decide in a café that I would sell. I have spent two years being the thing people were careful with. And I am not going to stand here at twenty-six and let the last of it be me being careful with myself, because that is just the same arrangement with me doing the work.”

The band did the song with the trumpet in it.

“So I want to be plain, and then you can say anything you like. I want this. Not because I am grateful, not because you are the last person who knew my father, not because you look the way you look in a doorway at two in the morning, though that is also true and I have been carrying it since September. I’ve thought about it every day for eleven months and I know exactly what it’s going to cost me and I want it anyway.”

He did not say anything for so long that I nearly ruined it.

Then he turned on the bench and looked at me — straight at me, not past me, not down the row — and he said it in a voice I had not heard him use before, and it was like a different man walking in.

“I have gone up that hill at six in the morning for two years,” he said, “and I have told myself it was coffee.

“I’m not going to answer what you asked me in the cellar. Not tonight, and not because I’m hiding; because if I answer it I have to say what I was before he asked me, and I’d be putting your father in this. He isn’t in this. This is the two of us on a bench.

“What I can tell you is now. I want you. I have got nothing to offer you that a sensible woman would take — no share, no money, a roof that wants four thousand euros, and a village that as of an hour ago thinks I’ve cheated you. And I would rather be a man with nothing standing here than anything else I have ever been.”

“Say the last part again.”

“I want you,” he said.

“All right.” My hands were shaking and I did not bother hiding it. “Then I’m going to kiss you. If you don’t want me to, say so now, and we’ll go back round the front and do the pruning in January and I will never mention this again as long as I live, and I mean that.”

“Marisol,” he said. “Yes.”

“Say it properly.”

“Yes.”

So I put my hand on the side of his face, which I had been wanting to do since a doorway in September, and he put his hand over mine and turned his head into it first, which I was not ready for at all, and then I kissed him.

Nobody coughed. Nobody came round the corner. The band did not stop. Nothing on God’s earth interrupted us, and I have been at some pains since to tell it that way to the two or three people I have told, because the whole of my life until that bench had been things that got interrupted.

He tasted of my wine. He had drunk it after all.

We stayed on that bench for about twenty minutes and then we walked up the hill together, because it was cold and because there were three hundred people forty metres away and because I had decided, somewhere in the middle of it, that whatever happened next was going to happen in daylight and be mine.

Ettore was at the top of the track with his torch off, checking the gate the way he does at the end of any night when there are people in the village and the gate has been open all day.

He did not put the torch on.

“Buonanotte,” he said.

“Buonanotte, Ettore.”

He stood aside. We went past him, the two of us, up our own gravel, and he watched us the whole way and said nothing else at all.

I was twelve metres up the track before I understood that he had been standing in the dark on his own, with his torch off, waiting for me to come home.