The Fermentation Shed

There is no romance in a fermentation shed at two in the morning, whatever people who have never stood in one think. It is a stone room with four open vats in it, and the air in it will kill you.

That is not a figure of speech. A vat in full ferment throws off carbon dioxide faster than the doorway can take it away, and carbon dioxide is heavier than air, so it lies along the floor like water and it has no smell and it does not hurt. Men have died in that room in this valley. My father’s cousin’s neighbour, in 1986, going in for the plunger.

So you prop both doors and you light a candle and you stand it on the bottom step, and if the candle goes out you do not go in, and if you are my father’s daughter you check it twice because your father told you a story once when you were seven that you have never got out of your head.

The candle was burning. I went in.

Vat two was at 1.008 and twenty-nine degrees, which was one degree hotter than I wanted, and the cap on it had set hard enough to walk on. I got the plunger and started breaking it, corner first, and the smell came up out of the break the way it does — not wine, nothing like wine yet, something between bread and blackcurrant leaf with a hot thread of alcohol going through it — and the skins came up dark and the juice under them was that impossible purple that has no business existing outside of a vat.

Punchdowns are every four hours for the first week. Six, ten, two, six, ten, two. You do not sleep in the first week of a red harvest. You lie down in your clothes and set an alarm and get up into somebody else’s hours.

Theo came in at twenty past two with a torch and did not say hello, because at that point in the week you have stopped greeting people you have seen nine times that day.

“Two’s at twenty-nine,” I said.

“I’ll take the jacket off three and put it on two.”

“Do it after. I want the temperature on the way down before the next one or we’ll get it stuck at 1.005 and then we’re warming it up by hand for a week.”

He looked at the gauge, agreed with me by not saying anything, and went to move the jacket anyway, because after in Theo’s vocabulary means in eleven minutes.

We did vats three and four together. That is a two-person job: one on the plunger, one holding the light and watching the cap for the dry patches, and you work close because the shed is nine metres long and half of it is full of vats, and there is nowhere to be except next to each other.

At ten to three I put the plunger in the rack and got the papers out of my jacket.

“I went into Papà’s filing cabinet on Sunday.”

“Mm.”

“Second drawer. Everything before 2005 is in an envelope marked vecchio.” I unfolded it and held it under his torch. “That’s the deed for parcel 214/c. November 1998. Sixty rows, ungrafted nebbiolo, and the vendor is Giancarlo Rinaldi.”

He looked at it for a long time. Longer than you need to read a deed you already know the contents of.

“You could have asked me.”

“I did ask you. You went to Dongo.”

And then he did something he had not done in two years, which was to sit down in the middle of a job. He sat on the second step with the torch pointing at the floor, and the light came back up off the wet concrete and caught the underside of his face, and he told me.

“My grandfather planted those rows in 1934. On their own roots, no American rootstock, because that terrace is all sand over stone and the phylloxera never went into it. There are maybe nine parcels like it between here and Colico and four of them are dead.” He turned the torch over in his hands. “My father had a haulage firm. Two lorries, then six, then eleven, and in 1997 he took a contract with a building consortium in Lecco that paid him in ninety days and then in a hundred and eighty days and then not at all. In the November he owed money to five people, and one of them was a man who does not write letters.”

“How old were you?”

“Ten.” He said it without weight, which is how you say a thing you have said to yourself several thousand times. “Your father bought the parcel off him. He paid more than it was worth and he paid it in cash on a Saturday, and he told my father it was because he wanted the frost drainage, which was a lie, because there is no frost drainage, it is a terrace above a wall.”

“Papà never told me that.”

“No. He would not have. It was not a kindness he wanted looked at.” He set the torch on the step. “My father sold the lorries one at a time over four years and then he sat in the kitchen for nine more. He died when I was nineteen and he left about seventy thousand euros of other people’s money behind him, and none of it was legally mine.”

“You paid it.”

“I paid it.”

“All of it?”

“Twelve years,” he said. “The last of it went in March 2019, and then in April there was a frost that took the lower blocks off this vineyard, and your father asked me to go in with him on the replanting loan, and I said no, because I had been in debt since I was nineteen and I had been out of it for six weeks.” He looked up at me then. “That is the two hundred and fourteen thousand euros. If I had said yes in April 2019 it would be a hundred and seven, and it would be half mine, and you would not be standing in a shed at three in the morning working out how to keep your own house.”

I did not know what to do with that. I still don’t, entirely. I had been carrying my father’s debt around for two years as a thing the weather did, and he had been carrying it as a thing he did.

“That’s not what happened,” I said. “A frost happened.”

“Yes.”

“You’re allowed to have had six weeks.”

He did not answer that at all. He got up and went to look at the cap on vat one, which did not need looking at, and I let him, because I had worked out by then that he needs about ninety seconds after anything.

· · ·Scene break

The thing I asked him next, I asked badly. I want that on the record. I have made it sound gentler than it was, since, when I have told parts of this to people.

“Theo. Who asked you how you were?”

He had his hands on the rim of vat one. “When.”

“After. You found him.” I heard my own voice doing the thing it does, going flat and fast because the alternative is worse. “You were up there on the top terrace at half seven in the morning and you found him and you did everything, you rang everybody, you dealt with the ambulance and the priest and the co-operative and you stood behind me at the funeral for four hours and then you came back up here the next day and ran the harvest. Everyone in Pianello said poor Marisol to me eleven times a day for a year. Who said anything to you?”

He was quiet for so long that the pump in the next room cut out and started again.

“Nobody,” he said. “It wasn’t mine to be asked about.”

“That’s not an answer, that’s a filing decision.”

Something happened in his shoulders that was nearly a laugh.

“It was ten past seven, not half seven,” he said. “He was sitting down with his back against the end post of row four, and he had his secateurs in his lap, and I knew from the bottom of the terrace. You know from thirty metres. There’s no mistaking it and I don’t know why.”

“Theo—“

“I rang the ambulance from where I was standing. They took eighteen minutes.” He still had his back to me. “And I did not ring you for twenty-two of those minutes. I sat with him on the wall and I waited, and then I rang you.”

The shed was very cold. I had the plunger handle in my hand and I do not remember picking it up.

“Why?”

“Because you were asleep,” he said, “and once I rang you, you were never going to be asleep like that again. Twenty-two minutes. It was the only thing left that anybody could give you and I gave it to you and I have never been sure it was mine to give.”

I have thought about those twenty-two minutes more than almost anything else in my life. At the time, standing there at three in the morning with a vat at twenty-nine degrees behind me, what I felt first was a kind of terrible warmth, the sort that goes straight through the middle of you and makes your eyes go hot before your head has caught up.

And about four seconds behind it, walking up the same path, came the other thing.

He had decided. On a wall, on a September morning, alone, with my father’s body four metres away, he had considered me and made a decision about what I could bear and acted on it, and had then not told me for two years.

I did not say that. I want to be honest: I did not say it because I did not want to lose the warmth. But it went in, that night, under the floor of everything, the way water goes in.

“Thank you for telling me,” I said.

“You asked.”

“Nobody else did.”

“No,” he agreed. “They didn’t.”

· · ·Scene break

We did the six o’clock punchdown together as well, because neither of us went to bed, and somewhere between four and five, with the doors propped and the candle still going on the step, I told him mine.

It came out of nothing. He said that vat three was going to be the best thing we had made in five years and that I ought to taste it warm, off the cap, before it was anything.

“I couldn’t taste anything for four months,” I said.

He stopped with the torch half up.

“After the funeral. October to February. I could smell, I could smell everything, that was the awful part. But the second anything was in my mouth my throat would close and my eyes would go and I could not get past it to the wine. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t.” I had never said this out loud, to anybody, including the doctor in Como I paid eighty euros to tell it to in a roundabout way. “I had a diploma from Turin in my bag and I could not tell a Barbera from a Dolcetto, and every time somebody handed me a glass I made a face and said something about the vintage, and I got away with it for four months because nobody on this hill ever tests the grieving girl.”

He put the torch down on the vat rim.

“I know,” he said.

“You—“

“Eight days,” he said. “You said a wine was closed. It wasn’t closed, it was oxidised, it had been open since the Tuesday, and you’d never have missed that when you were fifteen.”

I stood there in the cold with my hands on the plunger and watched the last two years come apart and put themselves back together in a different order.

Because for four months — for longer, for the best part of a year — there had been two glasses on the kitchen table every night at nine o’clock, poured before I came in, never commented on. Easy wines. A soft Valpolicella. A cheap round Barbera from the co-operative that he would never normally have had in the house. Then, sometime in the spring, two Nebbiolos from the same producer four years apart. Then two glasses of the same wine, one of which had been open for a day. Then, and I remember the night, a wine with a fault in it, tiny, a thread of volatile acidity like a nail, sitting next to a clean one, and me saying there’s something on the second one, and him saying mm, and going to bed.

A ladder. He had built me a ladder, one rung a night, for the best part of a year, and he had never once said the word palate, and if he had I would have lied to him and stopped.

“That was you,” I said.

“It was two glasses of wine.”

“Theo. Every night.”

“It was two glasses of wine,” he said, “and you were going to get it back or you weren’t, and either way you were going to need it not to be a conversation.” He picked the torch up. “Vat three. Off the cap. Before it’s anything.”

I tasted it off the cap, warm, fizzing, entirely unfinished, with the whole hillside black outside the door and the candle still burning on the bottom step, and it was extraordinary, and I could taste all of it.

“Don’t tell anyone about my father,” he said, when we were shutting the doors at six. “Ettore knows. Nobody else needs to.”

“I won’t.”

And I have not, until now. That was the first thing the two of us had that the village didn’t, and I remember thinking, walking up to the house in the grey with my hands smelling of skins: he has given me something and I have given him nothing back.

There were a hundred and thirty litres of wine in a tank in the old dairy that he did not know about, made from fruit that had never been his or my father’s, and I had, until that morning, been intending to keep it that way.