Her father left her eleven hundred vines, his debt, and one clause naming the man who taught her everything.
An apprentice winemaker inherits her father's vineyard, his debt, and a clause letting his old partner buy half of it before December.
Completed · 16 chapters · 2h 39m
WarmSensual tension; intimacy fades to black.Yearning · Tender · Angsty
Death of a parent, Grief, Alcohol
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Dear Maeve,
I can tell you what the fruit in row nine was doing at six o’clock this morning to one decimal place. 23.4, pH 3.32, seeds brown all the way through. Rain at four tomorrow. The pick is mine to call, which sounds like an achievement until you are standing in the dark on your own hillside with nobody behind you whose face you can read instead of the grapes.
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.
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Probate cleared on Tuesday. Eleven hundred vines, four terraces and my father’s loan, all of it mine, and one clause in the will I had never been told about: my father’s partner may buy forty per cent of me any time before the thirty-first of December. He has had two years to mention it. He brings me coffee too hot to hold and talks about the drainage.
Here is the part I am ashamed of. For four months after the funeral I could not taste anything without crying, and I hid it, and someone noticed in a week and never said so. Two glasses on the kitchen table at nine o’clock every night for the best part of a year. Easy wines first. No commentary. A ladder, one rung a night, built by a man who let me believe I had climbed it myself.
I found out last night. I have not said thank you, and I am not going to, and I have not stopped thinking about what it cost him to say nothing for that long.
He is thirty-eight. He was my father’s best friend. He looks past me, down the row, every single time.
From The Vineyard at Lake Como
Read this if you want two people who work side by side every day and have never once touched.
Read this if you want two harvests of restraint before anybody says a word.
Read this if you want an obstacle nobody in the book is willing to say out loud.
Read this if you want money, weather and a job carrying the romance.
Enemies, rivals and forbidden love
Slow burns where the waiting is the point
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