Sonoma Rose: An Elm Creek Quilts Novel (24 page)

“Making wine?” Rosa guessed.

Dante grinned and shook his head. “Not yet. Instead of buying picks and pans and surefire maps to secret mother lodes, he bought a few acres of arable land and grew fresh vegetables to sell to the miners.”

Eventually, Dante told them, his grandfather saved enough money to buy thirty of the acres the family cultivated to that day. He cleared the land, cutting down enormous redwood trees and tall oaks. He wrestled stubborn stumps from the ground with chains and horses, and he carved furrows in the soil with a plow borrowed from a sympathetic countryman who had settled in the Sonoma Valley a decade earlier. His parents had grown Zinfandel and had made their own wines in their small village in the hills above Rome, and when Dante’s grandfather observed how well grapes thrived in the soil and climate of Sonoma County, he built trellises, bought cuttings from the Franciscan priests at the Mission San Francisco Solano de Sonoma, and cultivated more than a thousand grapevines. In the years that followed, he planted more vines, built himself a sturdy redwood cabin in a picturesque walnut grove by a cool, fresh creek, married the kindest and wisest daughter of his generous neighbor, and created wines of such magnificent flavor and depth
that they were coveted by the finest hotels and restaurants in the growing metropolis of San Francisco, sixty miles to the south.

“When my grandfather was ready to retire, my father took over the vineyard. In time he added twenty acres to the property and built this house.” Dante gestured appreciatively to the four walls around them and ceiling above. “Our vineyard thrived, but not without toil and hardship. The worst trial struck in 1892.”

“A plague of phylloxera,” said Giuditta with a shudder, crossing herself as if to ward off another such disaster.

“A voracious, relentless pest,” said Dante with distaste. “A louse that feeds on the sap of grapevine roots, poisoning them with every bite so they cannot heal. Starved of nourishment, the vines become stunted and deformed and prone to fungal infection. My grandfather—and most of the other winemakers throughout the valley—were forced to tear out their vines and replant resistant stock, at an enormous cost.”

“Not only in money but also in time,” Giuditta added, crossing the kitchen to stand beside her husband’s chair. “Grapevines need at least three, perhaps as many as five, years to establish themselves and come to full bearing. In all that time, there could be no harvest, no crush, no winemaking. As you can imagine, it was quite a setback, but the Cacchione family endured it.”

Dante inhaled deeply, his mouth twisting into a bitter, angry frown. “To think my father and grandfather saw our winery through that hardship, only for me to lose it now, all because of a stroke of a Washington bureaucrat’s pen.”

“You haven’t lost it yet,” Giuditta reminded him earnestly, placing a hand on his shoulder. “And we won’t.”

Dante patted her hand. “From your lips to God’s ears,
cara mia
.” To Lars and Rosa, he added, “You have to understand,
even when the debate grew heated, none of us thought Prohibition would come to pass. It was all politics, just so much noise and chatter, the Wets and the Drys and their ceaseless arguments.”

“Early on, the Drys insisted that Prohibition was necessary due to the wartime emergency,” Giuditta said, sitting down beside her husband. She gestured for Rosa and Lars, still standing by the counter, to join them at the table. “To conserve grain for the soldiers.”

“Apparently no one told them grapes are not grain,” said Dante in disgust.

“When the Great War ended, we thought that would be the end of it,” Giuditta continued. “No war, no wartime emergency, no need to conserve grain—or grapes. We couldn’t have been more wrong.”

“As for the temperance movement, we didn’t consider ourselves the target of their complaints. They condemned saloons and all the vices they spawned, not—” Dante gestured to his own kitchen table, his dark eyebrows drawing together. “Not what we do here, providing a family with a good glass of wine to enjoy with their supper. How could our livelihood, our tradition, our craft, go from being a time-honored profession to a criminal act in a single day?”

Giuditta patted his hand and regarded him with affectionate sympathy. “When the law passed,” she explained to Rosa and Lars, “we were taken aback, but we assumed Prohibition might last a few months, perhaps a year at most, and then lawmakers would see the folly of it and everything would return to normal.”

“That was where you went wrong,” said Lars dryly. “I try
never to assume too much common sense on the part of lawmakers.”

Dante let out a dry laugh. “That wasn’t the only place we went wrong. Our customers, though, they knew better. In the weeks leading up to the moment the act would become law—” He shook his head, still amazed by the memory. “People desperate to buy wine came at us like—like ants on a watermelon at a picnic. Like bees on a honeycomb.”

“They wanted to go into Prohibition with fully stocked wine cellars,” said Giuditta. “Local folks bought all they could afford, or as much as they could carry off in their cars and wagons.”

“The roads between the Sonoma and Napa valleys and San Francisco were choked with delivery trucks,” Dante added. “They sped off to hotels and restaurants and homes of the wealthy with full loads and returned empty. It was a mad dash just to keep up, and the whole time we kept one eye on the calendar. We sold as much wine as we could as the deadline approached.”

“And all the while,” Giuditta said, shaking her head at their folly, “we hoped and prayed that something would happen at the last minute to spare us—the wartime emergency would be declared over, or common sense would prevail, something.”

Rosa knew well that deliverance had not come. She thought back to the beginning of Prohibition—January 17, 1920—and remembered wondering if Lars, whom she had not seen in six and a half years, would at last find the sobriety that had eluded him when they were young and in love. Later, on the rare occasions when she had considered the new law, she had felt relief for the families who would be spared the tragic consequences of alcoholism and wistful regret for herself and Lars, for whom Prohibition had come too late. But by that time she had already lost John Junior and Angela, gentle Maria was approaching her first
birthday, and she was six months pregnant with Pedro. John had turned bitterly cruel, and she and her mother and the children had been reduced to furtive visits on the mesa. She could be forgiven, she hoped, for not sparing much worry for the unfortunate winemakers whose lives had been overturned by Prohibition.

“What about the wine you couldn’t sell before the law went into effect?” asked Lars, with a note of irony Rosa suspected the Cacchiones did not know him well enough to detect. “What happened to it? Did you have to break open the casks and pour the wine out onto the ground?”

Even as she observed Dante wince at the very thought, Rosa remembered the barrel of wine at the harvest dance and knew that Lars was well aware that the Cacchiones had not destroyed all of their wine. Dante and Giuditta exchanged a look, and after a long moment, Giuditta nodded, agreeing to an unspoken question from her husband. “Come,” Dante said, abruptly rising. “I’ll show you.”

Quickly they finished their coffee and followed Dante and Giuditta outside. They crossed the yard, where the two brothers still wrestled with engine parts beneath the hood of the truck and the younger children ran and shouted beneath the walnut trees. They followed a cobblestone path to the low, elegant redwood building Rosa had glimpsed through the foliage as they had gone by in the wagon on their way to the cabin the previous day. Passing beneath one of the archways, they entered through the front double doors into a single large room where all manner of winemaking implements and trellises in need of repair sat idle, although someone apparently cared about them enough to make sure they did not gather dust. Dante led the way down a broad staircase into the cool depths of a cavernous room that
seemed larger than the structure above it. The tan earthen walls of the subterranean cavern were smooth and straight, curving elegantly where they bowed to meet the high ceiling. They were lined with large oak barrels arranged on their sides upon thick, solid shelves, but as Rosa drew closer, she saw that they were trapped behind a cage of chicken wire that ran from the floor to the ceiling.

Dante swept his arm in a broad arc. “This, my friends, is what happened to our wine.” He strode across the floor and struck a heavy padlock that bound two sections of the wire barricade together, sending it swinging back and forth with a rasping complaint as it scraped against a sharp, protruding edge. “Prohibition officers took inventory of our wine before locking us down, and each year we have to pay for a federal permit to keep our wine in storage. You might say we’re buying the privilege of not profiting from our years of backbreaking labor and patience.”

Frowning thoughtfully, Lars tested the thickness of the chicken wire with his fingers. “Padlock or no, this shouldn’t be too difficult to get around.”

“Perhaps not,” said Giuditta, tucking a loose strand of dark hair back into her bun with a sigh, “but agents come around from time to time, unannounced, to check that not a single gallon has gone missing. If they discovered we’d broken the law, we would lose everything.”

“We might lose everything anyway,” said Dante grimly.

“We won’t,” said Giuditta, more firmly than before. She walked along the row of entrapped barrels, marking off several dozen with the span of her hands. “These casks contain our finest quality wines,” she told Rosa and Lars. “These vintages can age for ten to thirty years, becoming ever more palatable and
therefore more valuable. This is our long-term investment. Our future lives within these casks.” She turned to the remaining barrels, the vast majority. “These barrels—well, worrying over them has given me many a sleepless night. Their quality will last three to eight years, but after that, the wine will turn. It will be sour and utterly worthless, unsuitable even to make vinegar.”

“What about those barrels over there?” asked Rosa, indicating a few barrels shelved on the far wall, unencumbered by wire.

“Empty.” Then Dante promptly corrected himself. “Empty of wine. Since we can’t fill them with new wine, we fill them with water instead, to prevent the wood from going bad.”

“So then you do have some hope,” Rosa said, “that someday you’ll be allowed to make wine again.”

“Some of your friends continue to make wine now,” remarked Lars. “I met one of them last night—Paulo Del Bene. He makes sacramental wines for churches and synagogues. Couldn’t you as well?”

Dante folded his arms over his chest and shrugged as if he had considered doing so many times. “Perhaps if I had followed my good friend Paulo’s example early on I could have, but we don’t make the type of wine churches and synagogues prefer. It would be an enormous expense to replant my stock and wait years for the vines to mature. I’ve already replaced some of my Zinfandel vines with Alicante Bouschet. The wine they make isn’t as good, but the skins of the berries are thicker and so they’re less likely to bruise or rot during shipment. I can’t tear out those vines, since those are the grapes that are selling, and it would break my heart to uproot my best Zinfandels. The older those vines get, the deeper into the earth their roots go. They draw up minerals from deep within the earth and give my wine
its magnificent flavor.” He shook his head. “I can’t uproot any more vines to plant something new. I just couldn’t.”

“Dante would also have to apply for a special license through the Prohibition Department and receive approval from the church,” said Giuditta. “Paulo Del Bene and the bishop are good friends, so that wasn’t an obstacle for him.”

“Obstacles,” said Dante. “I’ll give you obstacles. Winemakers with sacramental wine permits already produce more wine than the entire country’s churches could possibly use, and they all have a head start on us. Even if we started today, the effort would likely bankrupt us before we earned a single dollar from sacramental wines.”

Lars shook his head in sympathy. “Doesn’t sound like you have a lot of options.”

“I don’t want options. This is the wine I make,” said Dante with fierce, protective pride, spreading his arms as if he would embrace all the barrels arranged before them. “This is the wine my father and grandfather made. This is what I know.” He fixed Lars and Rosa with a piercing, challenging look. “You tell me. How can my life’s work suddenly be wrong when it was never wrong before?”

Rosa had no words for him. She could only shake her head in helpless, stricken sympathy.

“Scores of vineyards in the Sonoma and Napa valleys have closed since that law was enacted.” Dante gazed at the wire-bound casks as if they were a beloved burden. “Thousands of grape growers and winemakers have lost their livelihoods. But it’s not only us. Think of it—jobs for migrant pickers are scarce. Brewers, bottle makers, coopers, hops growers, wagon drivers, deliverymen, and on and on—all have been thrown out of work. We may be next.”

“We won’t be,” said Giuditta softly, but with less conviction than before. “We’ll find a way.”

Rosa wished she could offer them words of comfort, but they needed help, not cheerful platitudes. Lars was right. The Cacchiones had indeed been hiding something—their uncertainty, their fears, their precarious toehold on the edge of bankruptcy.

“You understand now, don’t you?” asked Giuditta, taking her husband’s arm. “Our harvest dance last night wasn’t a celebration of our abundance, although of course it’s always proper to be grateful for one’s blessings. It was a commemoration of our very survival. We’re still here. Despite the attempts to ruin us, we’re still here, and we’ll still be here when this madness ends.”

Dante’s eyes shone as he placed his hands on her cheeks, gazed at her with naked admiration, and kissed her full on the lips. It was such a tender, intimate moment that Rosa had to look away.

“Ma,” a young man shouted down the stairs from above.

Dante and Giuditta separated. “Yes, Mario,” Giuditta called back.