Tank Six

The top terrace came in on the Tuesday, dry, with a north wind that had been going since Sunday night and had taken the water off the leaves and out of the berries and left the skins tight as drum heads.

24.1 Brix. Acid at six point four, which is higher than the fruit we had picked before the rain, on the same hill, five days apart. The seeds went in the teeth like small stones.

Nadia tasted one at the end of the row without being invited and said nothing whatsoever, which in Nadia is a standing ovation, and then said, “You will be insufferable now,” and went back to her crate.

I was insufferable. I had three days of being right and I spent all of them on the sorting table with my sleeves rolled up, and on the Thursday night I went down to the old dairy with a jug and drew a litre and a half out of tank six and carried it up to the house, and then put it in the larder and did not do anything with it for two days.

Here is what was in tank six.

Last September, three weeks before our own pick, I drove up past Domaso to a grower at Vercana whose name my father used to say the way you say the name of a horse you didn’t back. He had a hectare and a half on a slope so steep he worked it with a winch. I bought two hundred kilos off him: a hundred and sixty of chiavennasca and forty of rossola nera, the old blending grape nobody plants any more because it gives you colour and perfume and almost no money. He charged me a euro thirty a kilo, which was robbery, and I paid it out of the five thousand euros my father left in a post office account with my name on it, and I made him write me a receipt.

I did that because it had to be mine. Not estate fruit, not estate hours, not Ettore’s tank, not Theo’s advice. If I made something good on Le Rive’s grapes, every man in this valley would say the vineyard made it. I wanted one wine that could not be given to anybody else.

I brought it down in the back of my own car in twelve plastic crates, two trips, and the second trip was at half past nine at night, and when Theo rang at ten to ask whether I wanted him to start the Monday load without me I stood on the roadside above Gravedona with two hundred kilos of another man’s grapes in the boot and said I had gone to see a friend in Colico.

I made it in the old dairy on two nights off, destemmed by hand into a plastic bin, which took four hours and cost me the skin off two knuckles. I chalked M.B. 2025 on the door of tank six and I told nobody for thirteen months.

· · ·Scene break

Ettore found it on the Wednesday of the top-terrace week, because Ettore finds everything, and because I had been an idiot and left the sample glass on the windowsill.

“There is wine in six.”

“There is.”

“Six has been empty since your father’s trial lots in 2017.” He had his hand flat on the side of the tank, the way he touches tanks, feeling the temperature through it. “A hundred and thirty litres. It is not on the register. It is not declared and it is not in the book and if the inspectors come up that path, padrona, they will not ask you nicely.”

“It isn’t estate fruit. I bought it. I’ve got the receipt and the transport document in the filing cabinet in the house and the whole lot is declared under my own name, not the company’s, because I’m not an idiot, Ettore, I’m just a coward.”

He took his hand off the tank.

“Bought from where.”

“Vercana. Chiavennasca and rossola. Two hundred kilos, last year.”

And then he did not say anything for a while, and I stood there and let a sixty-three-year-old man be disappointed in me in a cold room.

“Thirteen months,” he said at last. “I put the pump on that floor twice a week.”

“I know.”

“You could have asked me for the tank. I would have said yes and I would have said nothing, and I have said nothing about worse than this.” He picked up the sample glass off the windowsill and set it in the sink, which was the nearest he was going to come to slamming a door. “You have got into the habit of doing things where nobody can see you. It is your father’s habit and it did him no good either.”

“Ettore—“

“Show it to Rinaldi,” he said. “Not because he is owed it. Because you will keep it in the dark until you show somebody, and if you show me I will tell you it is very good, and you will know that I would have said that anyway.”

He went out to the press. That is the most he has ever said to me at one time, before or since.

· · ·Scene break

I gave it to Theo on the Saturday, at eleven in the morning, in the tasting room off the cellar, which is a whitewashed room with a north window and a table and nothing else in it, and which my father built specifically so that there would be one place on this property where you could not be lied to.

I did not tell him what it was. I put the glass down and said, “Tell me what this is.”

He looked at the glass, and then at me, and something in his face went flat and unreadable, which is what happens when Theo Rinaldi works out that something is happening.

Then he did the thing that I have not been able to stop thinking about since, which is that he took it seriously.

He did not sip it standing up and say something warm. He sat down. He moved the glass out of the window light and into the shade by the wall and looked at the rim against the whitewash. He nosed it three times — once immediately, once after swirling, and then he set it down and left it alone for eleven minutes and did not speak, and I stood by the door with my arms folded, dying.

At eleven minutes he tasted it. He held it in his mouth so long I began to count. He spat, and wrote four words in the notebook he keeps in his back pocket, and then he tasted it again.

“Right,” he said.

“Right.”

“Chiavennasca. Something else in it, ten, fifteen per cent — rossola?” He waited for my face and got it. “Rossola. Grown above five hundred metres, and it’s not from this hill, because there’s a bitterness at the back of it like wet slate that we don’t get here, and it’s not last year’s because it’s had a full winter.” He turned the glass by the base a quarter turn. “You’ve had it in glass or in steel, not wood. You punched it down too often and you left it on the skins after it was dry.”

“Eighteen days.”

“Eighteen days, four punchdowns a day, and you pressed hard at the end because you didn’t want to leave anything behind.” He said it the way you read a meter. “Marisol. The fruit in this was better than this wine.”

I had known it for seven months. I had known it since the March, when I racked it and tasted it and told myself it needed time. Hearing it out loud was still like putting your hand on something hot.

“Go on.”

“The nose is the best nose I’ve had in this room in five years. That’s not manners, that’s a fact, and the rossola’s doing most of it and you were right to buy it and nobody else in this province would have bothered.” He turned the glass again. “And then you get it into your mouth and you can feel every one of those seventy-two punchdowns. It’s dry at the sides of the tongue and it stops. It doesn’t finish, it stops. You extracted everything that was in the skins because you were frightened it wouldn’t be enough, and the thing it needed was for you to leave it alone for a fortnight and press it at eleven days and gentle.”

“So it’s overworked.”

“It’s overworked.”

“It’s the only thing I’ve made that’s mine.”

“I know,” he said. “That’s why I’m telling you.”

I went and stood at the window for a bit. Outside, the Monday’s fruit was going into the destemmer and Ettore was arguing with the co-operative driver about pallets, and the lake was doing its flat silver thing, and I made myself say the next sentence properly instead of the way I wanted to say it.

“What would you have done at day eleven.”

“Pressed it. Off the gross lees after a week, into whatever you had, and not touched it again until Easter.” He closed the notebook. “And it would have been the best wine on this hillside, and your father would have gone round to Amadei’s and been unbearable about it.”

“Don’t.”

“All right.”

I took the glass back and drank the rest of it myself, at eleven in the morning, standing up, which is a thing you are not supposed to do.

And then I asked him.

“Why do you never flatter me?”

He had got up to go. He stopped with his hand on the back of the chair.

“Everybody else does,” I said. “Ettore does it by not saying things. Amadei does it out loud. The co-operative do it because they want my fruit and the bank does it because they want their money. My father did it constantly and half of it was rubbish and I loved it. Two years, Theo. Two years of you standing at the end of a row, and you have never once told me I was good at something without also telling me what I’d got wrong in the same breath. Why?”

“Because you need one person who won’t.”

“That’s the answer you prepared.”

Which was unkind, and true, and he took it.

“Then,” he said, “because it’s the only thing I’m allowed to give you.”

The pump started up in the next room. The co-operative driver shouted something about Thursday. Theo picked up the empty glass and took it to the sink and rinsed it and set it upside down on the cloth, all of which took about nine seconds, and in those nine seconds I stood in my father’s whitewashed tasting room and turned that sentence over like a berry against the back of my teeth.

Not the only thing I’ve got. Not the only thing that’s any use to you.

Allowed.

You are allowed a thing by somebody. That is how the word works. It is a word with a second person in it, standing just out of the frame, and there were not many candidates.

“Theo.”

“The press needs doing before the Thursday load.” He had the door open. He was looking down the corridor. “You should write down what you’d change. Not in your head. Write it in the book with the date on it, so next September you’re arguing with yourself and not with me.”

He went. I stood there with a wet glass upside down on a cloth and a page of notes he had made in a notebook I had never been allowed to read, and I thought: he said allowed, and he heard himself say it, and he left the room.

I did not go after him. I went and got my father’s cellar book and wrote the date, and tank six, 2025, chiavennasca and rossola from Vercana, and underneath it, in my own hand, so that it would be there in ten years: press at eleven days. Gentle. The fruit was better than the wine.

Ettore came through at one with a pallet on the trolley and stopped when he saw me sitting there.

“Well.”

“Overworked,” I said. “Too many punchdowns, pressed too late and too hard. The nose is the best thing he’s had in that room in five years and the wine underneath it isn’t as good as the fruit was.”

He considered this.

“And you are sitting on a cold step.”

“I’m sitting on a cold step because he’s right.”

“Good,” said Ettore, and put the trolley down. “Now ask me what I would have done, since I have been waiting all week and I am sixty-three.”

So I asked him, and he said press at ten days, not eleven, and that Rinaldi has always been sentimental about the extra day, and we argued about it for twenty minutes in the corridor with the pump going, and it was the best twenty minutes I had had since March.

But when he had gone I sat back down, because the thing had not left me.

In three days I had made a man tell me the worst true thing about the only wine I had ever made, and had found I could stand it. And the only thing I actually wanted to ask him about was a single word he had not meant to use, and I already knew, in the way you know a frost is coming before the number on the thermometer has moved, that when I finally asked, the answer was not going to be about wine at all.