The co-operative’s technical declaration for the vintage is a single sheet of A4 with eleven boxes on it, and at the bottom there are two lines: one for the producer and one for the registered oenologist.
I filled it in on the Saturday at the kitchen table with the transfer deed still lying where it had lain for four days. Eleven hundred vines. Four terraces. Yields, hectares, must weights, the lot. And then the two lines, and my own name going on the first of them, and the second one white.
I had never once looked at the bottom of that form. Serena was right about that, and it is not a thing I enjoy writing down. For two harvests a man had signed underneath me and I had never thought about it any more than I think about the wire the vines are tied to.
I put it in…
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