The Winemaker (40 page)

Josep told Mendes he would buy 225-liter barrels and stack them on both sides of the cellar, on wide shelves.

Mendes approved. “That will work for now, because you can ship the wine-filled barrels to me after a relatively short time. But wine prices will remain high for years, and the day is going to come when you will want every drop of your wine to be sold in your own bottles. When that happens you will need to put another cellar in your hill, at least the size of the one you have now.”

Josep made a face. “All that digging.”

Mendes stopped walking. “One thing you need to learn, perhaps the hardest and most important lesson. Sometimes you must trust other people to do what you want done. Once your vineyard reaches a certain size, you don’t have the luxury of doing all the work by yourself,” he said.

After breakfast, Josep saddled the livery horse, and the two men exchanged abrazos.

“Monsieur!” Marimar came hurrying from the masia with a sack containing a bottle of the good wine and a portion of tortilla to be eaten on the train. “I wish you a safe journey home, Monsieur.”

Leon Mendes bowed. “Thank you. You and your husband have fashioned a wonderful bodega, Senyora,” he said.

62

The Disagreement

Three weeks later, Josep and Maria del Mar had the first serious quarrel of their married life.

Both of them had been working hard and had spent long hours discussing the problems of the bodega and their plans for the future

They had decided to begin replanting their vineyard after the next year’s harvest. Each year for four years they would replace twenty-five percent of their vines with grafted stock, as Mendes had done in Languedoc. Josep liked the fact that this would give them this season and the following one in which to make wine from their entire production of grapes. After that, because the grafted plants would not bear a crop for four years, each year as they planted a new portion, their income would decrease by twenty-five percent. In the fourth year they would have no harvest at all, but with the new high prices for wine, they would have accumulated plenty of working capital, and they agreed to spend that cropless fourth year making improvements in the winery. That was the year in which they would have a second cellar dug, and not only the cellar—if they could afford it, they would also have a well dug somewhere on the Alvarez piece. With all the scrubbing and rinsing, to say nothing of irrigation when it was required, hauling water from the river was a constant waste of time and labor. A winery needed its own well.

What a new and unfamiliar pleasure it was to have money to do things that were necessary!

One evening Marimar returned from a walk in the village with a bit of gossip.

“Rosa and Donat are searching for a house.”

“Oh?” Josep said. He was only half listening, wondering when the bottles he had ordered would be delivered “Why do they need a house?”

“Rosa wants to put tables in the living quarters above the grocery and make a proper cafe where they can serve real meals. She’s a wonderful cook and baker. You saw how Monsieur Leon loved her pastries.”

Josep nodded absently.

After all, he was telling himself, he would not need the bottles for many weeks. A more immediate need was for him to decide which sections of the vineyard to harvest first. To crush so many grapes, it was necessary to follow a clear harvesting plan. He would have to discuss it with Marimar.

Maria del Mar broke into his meditation.

“I would like to give them the Valls house.”

“Who?”

“Rosa and Donat. I would like to give Rosa and Donat the Valls house.”

Josep snorted. “Not likely.”

She stared at him.

“Donat is your brother.”

“And his wife would have taken my land. And my house. And my vines. And my bar of soap and my drinking cup. I will never forget that.”

“Rosa was desperate. She had nothing, and she was trying to protect her husband’s inheritance. Our situations are so different. I think,” she said, “if you allow
yourself to get to know her, you will like her. She’s
interesting
. A hard-working woman with nerve and lots of different abilities.”

“To hell with her.”

“She’s pregnant also,” she said.

She waited and looked at him, but there was no reaction.

“Listen to me, Josep, we have no other relatives. I want my children to grow up among family. There are three houses on the bodega. We live in this one, and we need Quim’s house for storage. But my old house is empty, and I want to give it to Rosa and Donat.”

“It is no longer your house,” he said roughly. “I own half of it, just as you own half of this house and half of Quim’s house. And listen well:
You are not to give away things that I own.”

He saw her expression change. Her face became pinched and guarded and somehow older, a look she had worn when he had first moved back to Santa Eulália. He had forgotten about that expression.

In a moment he heard her climbing the stone steps to the bed chamber.

Josep sat there, brooding.

He cared for her so deeply. He remembered the vow he had made to himself, his promise that in act or word he would never treat her cruelly, as she had been treated by others before him. He saw that he had the power to injure her, perhaps even more than those other bastards.

As he sat there feeling rotten and self-accusitory, he replayed her words in his mind and sat straighter in his chair.

Had she really said that Rosa was pregnant,
also
?

If so, had she misspoken? Or could it be that Rosa really was pregnant
also
!

He left the chair and bounded up the stairs to go to his wife.

A few days later, on a Thursday morning, a freight wagon pulled by two pairs of horses came. Josep directed the driver to Quim’s house and helped the man carry forty-two slatwood cases of bottles inside and up the stairs. Stacked in two layers, they took up almost half of what had been Quim’s small bedchamber. When the driver left, Josep opened one of the crates and took out a gleaming and virginal bottle, identical to all the others waiting for him to fill them with wine.

He heard voices as he left the storage house. Drawn by the sound, he walked to the Valls house and found Maria del Mar with his brother. “When you go to sleep and when you wake up,” Marimar was saying, “in this masia you will hear the river sounds.”

“Hola,” Josep said, and Donat returned the greeting awkwardly.

“I was telling Rosa this morning,” Marimar said, “that it would look so pretty if we could plant more wild roses close to this house. It would be nice to do that near our house as well, Josep. Do you think you’ve already moved too many roses from the river banks?”

“It’s a long river,” Josep said. “I might have to walk a while, but there are plenty of roses.”

“I’ll go with you to dig them,” Donat said quickly.

“Rosa loves the flat pink roses,” Maria del Mar said. “She can have all of those. I want the little white ones for our house.”

Donat laughed. “We’ll have to wait until they bloom in April to tell which is which,” he said, but Josep shook his head.

“I can tell the difference. The pink ones make a higher bush. We can get them in the winter, when there is more free time.”

Donat nodded. “Well, I’d best get back to Rosa and the store. I just wanted to take a look at the row of stones that has to be repaired at the back of the house.”

“What row of stones?” Josep asked.

They moved to the rear of the house, and Josep saw and counted eight good-sized stones that lay scattered on the ground.

“I knew there was one loose stone in that wall,” Maria del Mar said. “I’ve been meaning to mention it to you, but—what caused this?”

“I think it was the Guardia,” Josep said. “They must have noticed the loose stone and removed it, then pried away the others to make certain that nothing had been hidden here. They really don’t overlook the smallest thing.”

“I’ll repair it,” Donat said, but Josep shook his head. “I’ll do it this afternoon,” he said. “I like stonemasonry.”

Donat turned to go. “Thank you, Josep,” he said.

For the first time, Josep took a good look at him.

He saw a portly, affable person. Donat’s eyes were clear, his face was calm, and he seemed to have a sense of purpose as he prepared to go back to work he enjoyed.

His brother.

Something within Josep—something small, cold, and heavy, an icy sin he had carried unknowing in his very core—melted and vanished.

“For nothing, Donat,” he said.

Coolness came to the village from far away, from the mountains, from the sea. Would the wind howl and destroy? Would it carry hail or tiny specks with wings? Autumn rain fell three times, but each time it was a mercy—gentle rain. Most days the sun still shone during the hours of light to warm away the chill brought by night, and the grapes continued to ripen.

He realized that when they replanted it would be an opportunity to make vines in large blocks of single varieties, because now he had to pay for the carelessness of his ancestors, going here, there, and everywhere in the jumbled rows to pick according to variety.

Josep wanted as much ripeness as possible in everything that was picked, but he didn’t want grapes to rot while they waited on the vine, so he planned the picking order as if he were a general going into battle.

The oldest plants with the smallest grapes seemed to ripen last, perhaps because of their terroir. These were the grapes from which he had made his blended wine, and he had a special fondness for their wizened, very old vines and would not replace them until and unless he had evidence that they were doomed. For now, he gave them a few extra days of ripening.

So it was that early one morning he began the picking by taking the fruit of ordinary vines, vines that until this very harvest had put out grapes that became vinegar each year.

He had lots of help. Donat had let the village know that during the week of harvest the grocery would be open only from midday to four p.m., and he and Rosa had joined the pickers and would tread grapes at night. Briel Taulé was there as usual, and Marimar had hired Iguasi Febrer and Briel’s cousin, Adriá Taulé, and they would pick and tread as well.

Late that afternoon Josep came down to the grape-filled trough and scrubbed his feet and legs.

Others would join him soon, and they would work in shifts, some picking and culling fruit while others were treading grapes. But for the moment he was alone, and he drank in the scene. The tank was filled with gleaming purple-black grapes. Nearby tables held tortilla and pastries from Rosa, under cloths, and cups and cántirs of water. In a crude fireplace of stone, wood waited to be ignited, and lanterns and torches were placed around the stone cistern to provide warmth and light against the dark chill when night arrived.

Francesc came, running unevenly, and watched as Josep put first one foot and then the other into the grapes.

“I want to do it,” he called, but Josep knew the grapes were piled too deep and Francesc wouldn’t be able to move.

“Next year you will be big enough,” he said.

He had a sudden rush of regret that his father had not lived to know this boy and and his mother. That his father had not witnessed what had happened to the Alvarez vineyard.

That Marcel Alvarez would never taste his wine.

He knew that he stood on his father’s shoulders, and on the shoulders of all those who had come before. For perhaps a thousand generations, as day workers in the fields of Galicia, and before that as serfs, his people had worked in the soil of Spain.

He had a sudden dizzying vision of his ancestors as a castell, each generation raising him higher on their shoulders until he could no longer hear the music of the drums and the grallas. A castell a thousand levels high.

“And Francesc is our anxaneta, our pinnacle,” he said, and he scooped up the little boy and transferred him to his shoulders.

Francesc sat with his legs dangling on either side of Josep’s head. He gripped Josep’s hair in both hands and crowed.

“What do we do now, Padre?”

“Now?” Josep took the first steps. He thought of the hopes and the dreams and the hard work that went into the grapes, the constant struggle to bring them to wine. He breathed in their scent and could feel them popping beneath his weight, sensed the vital juice as it ran free and claimed him, the blood of the grapes separated from his own blood only by skin.

“Now we walk and sing, Francesc. We walk and we sing!” he said.

The End

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I didn’t discover the glories of good wine until, already a middle-aged man. I began to travel to Spain, where I soon developed a deep appreciation of the Spanish people, their culture, and their wines.

When I decided to write a novel about them, I chose to focus on the mid-nineteenth century because it was the period of the Carlist Wars and of the phylloxera plague that destroyed vineyards throughout France and Spain. I located my fictional vineyard in the Penedès region of Catalonia because living there would offer my protagonist easy access to both Barcelona and the wine country of Southern France.