Vintage (15 page)

Bruno hefted the rare Trevallier and ambled down to the queue at the door. The Bacchanal de Trouvé Silence was one of the more egalitarian and eclectic of Burgundy's grand wine fetes. Like Les Trois Glorieuses, the Trouvé was ostensibly for charitable purposes, with all proceeds going to a school for the deaf in Dijon. Unmarked, unlabeled barrels of first-growth wines contributed by producers and vineyards across the spectrum, from the most storied Grand Crus to the lesser appellation wines. There was no advertising or promotion of any sort. Guests simply knew to arrive on the evening of the first Monday in May at the
Château de Landreville. Who actually organized the event and what relation it had to the estate, which belonged to a reclusive telecommunications magnate who was rarely if ever seen in the Côte-d'Or, nobody seemed to exactly know. The fete sprang out of the ether like a spring mushroom in the nearby Morvan forest.

There was no guest list, and, as the barrels were unmarked, no possibility of prestige for the winemakers involved. The lots were judged by guests who tasted directly from the barrel and, if moved, simply marked a hash on the side in chalk. The barrels with the most hash marks at the end of the night were auctioned first at a somber (and hungover) event the following day, and tended to fetch the highest bids, though given the unvetted and inebriated quality of the judges, nobody took the competition too seriously.

Most interesting to Bruno about the Trouvé was the tradition of bringing one's favorite wine from his or her collection, and the best flavors of the evening tended to come from the bottle and not the barrel. The food was always sumptuous and plentiful, and its provenance was as mysterious as the party's elusive host.

Feeling a tad guilty that his estranged wife was underwriting his attendance to this exercise in overindulgence, Bruno decided to compose a postcard update in his mind as he waited in line:

My dearest Anna:

We are separated by class, station, political affiliation. We are separated by gender. By disposition. Nationality. Some of us are eccentric. Some of us beautiful . . .

Bruno caught a flash of silky brown hair in the light of a foyer chandelier. A tall, youngish woman with high cheekbones and
scarlet lips chatted with a friend, both of them in slight cocktail dresses. Bruno couldn't help but stare, and when the woman glanced back over her shoulder and caught the intensity of his gaze, she frowned and turned away, annoyed.

. . . and others among us are by turns invisible or conspicuous.

Bruno retrieved a glass from a waiter at the door and he flicked the bow of it with a fingernail to make it ring. The queue now wound through the grand house toward a double-wide staircase that descended in a spiral to the cellar. As he shuffled toward the stairs, above the reverent whispers of the guests and the sliding of shoes on marble, he heard a dull roar that grew louder as he descended. Laughter and conversation blended with chamber music.

Even when we stand shoulder to shoulder, there are walls between us. But our existence is made bearable by those few glories unique to our species: music, art, carnival, the well-laden table.

Rounding the last spiral, he was met with a blast of warm, rich, living air, a mixture of sweat, spilled wine, damp stone and oak. The cellar stretched as far as he could see in all directions. Clusters of barrels stacked six high loomed in the dim light, and threaded between them was a sea of undulating bodies, arms protruding with proffered bottles, the occasional smash of broken glass, the clink and ringing of a thousand toasts like bells in a church of some wild and accidental religion.

And in this writer's humble opinion . . . singular among such glories . . . is wine.

Bruno was swept into the throng. He felt a tug on his glass as if from a fish on a line and suddenly he saw it sparkling with a pale elixir. He held it up to the dim candlelit chandeliers to make out the slight gold-brown that told him it was likely an aged and weathered Chablis, which a swig confirmed. He hadn't even seen who his benefactor was. He elbowed through the mass and suddenly found a tiny elderly woman with a flushed face in his path. She handed him a plate with slices of truffles and a terrine of foie gras laid on lettuce. He seized it and thanked her by kissing both her cheeks while she returned the favor with a bear hug of his midsection. He spun, finding himself suddenly face-to-face with the shining-haired woman with the scarlet lips whom he'd earlier spotted and ogled.

“Are you following me?” she asked, her hostility not lessening her attractiveness in any way.

“I was about to ask you the same,” he replied. When she rolled her eyes, he whipped the plate under her nose. “Have you tried the truffles?”

The human face is a miraculous work of biological engineering, and this young woman's was that and even more. What always amazed Bruno, as a writer and observer, was the subtlety of expression. The woman's pruned and lovely eyebrows shifted ever so slightly, indicating first curiosity, and then, as she plucked and placed a translucent wafer of truffle on her glistening tongue, her throat pulsing in a swallow, the face almost magically morphed into an expression of ecstasy. She was rolling her eyes again, but in passion now rather than condescension, and Bruno savored every trip of this emotional journey, pressed close as he was so that he could feel her breath on his ear as she spoke, the rest of the crowd a blur as it surged around them.

“So, what did you bring?” she asked, gesturing to his bottle with her elbow as she slipped another slice of truffle on her tongue.

“Oh, I almost forgot.”

He raised the bottle and she gasped in awe at the label.

“Would you like to try some?”

She nodded.

Bruno wedged the bottle between his knees and wrestled it open with the corkscrew Aleksei had given him in Chicago, the one with the ill-fated accountant as the former owner. Then he held the bottle above his head and circled to be in a position to pour into the young woman's glass. There was a bustle and murmur in the mass around them.

Bruno poured a splash into the woman's glass as well as his own. They clinked and sipped the rare Trevallier.

Wine writers, critics, collectors and a thousand bloggers have intricate systems of evaluation and classification, and entire vocabularies of descriptors for wine. Butter, hazelnut, dark cherry, forest floor, tobacco, meringue. To Bruno, though, such words couldn't convey the power of wine. He was interested, rather, in the effect that it has to transform people in a split second.

The young woman sipped, swallowed and pondered. Her hazel eyes glistened. She dropped her hand to his arm, and even through his jacket sleeve, Bruno felt the electricity of her touch. Her eyes bored not into his, but through him entirely, and he knew from the flavors on his own palate what she was experiencing. It was the story of a thousand angles of sunlight dappling clusters through the manicured leaves, a hundred mornings of fog slipping down the hillsides into the stream bottoms, of the ghosts of long-vanished oceans, of uplift and erosion and the steady alluvial sculpting that created these very
few hillsides where the beautiful and finicky little fruits grow so well.

All of this . . . in a sip.

Adjectives and descriptors couldn't possibly convey the feeling of her light touch on Bruno's arm, her lips parted so slightly, and her gaze borne back through the millions of years of geology and all of human history encapsulated in that lone sip.

“I'm about to weep.” She shuddered. “Where did you get this?”

“From a good friend.”

“My name is Annette,” she said, hooking his arm and pulling him close. Where before she couldn't get away from him fast enough, now she wanted to stake a claim.

A wiry Englishman in a navy blazer and colorful cravat suddenly appeared at Bruno's other elbow, drawn in by the label. “I have to try this.”

Bruno poured. The Englishman swirled, sniffed, pondered a moment without expression. He said very simply, “This is the most extraordinary thing I've ever tasted.” Then he suddenly began belting out an absurd rendition of “La Marseillaise” in his Cockney accent.

The crowd had taken note by now, and Bruno was twirling, pouring, embracing, laughing, working them like a conductor, waving the bottle of Trevallier like a magic wand, pouring splashes in dozens of glasses with the occasional reminder for himself of the mastery by this family of a magnificent little slice of French hillside.

Across the room, a small cluster of vignerons stood apart, leaning on a stack of barrels mumbling to each other beneath the fray. They were used to quiet hours among the vines or in cellars, spending most of the time inside their own heads while
performing the thousand menial and repetitive tasks that making wine requires. While they understood the reason for all the fuss, many were still puzzled and even amused by it, and they were just as likely to be sipping a bottle of Kronenbourg beer or maybe even a half glass of homemade calvados or
marc
better suited for removing paint than human consumption, though the perfect antidote for a day of hard work. For them wine was mostly about scrubbing tanks and barrels.

Among this group in their threadbare denim, translucent plaid and frayed wool, with muddy rubber boots and only a splash of cologne or perfume or the quick application of a dampened comb showing any forethought for the evening's festivities, stood Sylvie Trevallier. She'd just made arrangements with Yves Jobert of Bouchard to borrow his bladder press next year, as he usually finished his Chardonnay a day or two before she crushed hers. The press was much larger and might shave hours off of what was already an incredibly long day.

Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed the swirl in the crowd, like a maelstrom spotted on the surface of some gaseous planet. And at its epicenter stood Bruno, looking quite different from the frumpy salesman she'd assumed him to be earlier in the day. Here he stood as the bard bowing in triumph to his audience, laughing, whispering in ears, embracing the adulation of his fans.

She caught his eye, and he, hers. He stared at her across the vast room. He raised his glass to her, and she lifted her own Kronenbourg in response. She felt herself blush for a moment in a way that she couldn't distinctly remember doing since her second year at the
lycée
. It was at once unsettling but also kind of nice. She felt a momentary flutter at the base of her stomach that she instinctively shrugged off. She turned to Yves, suddenly
remembering that she wanted to ask him about buying used barrels, since he considered them spent after only three years, while she preferred the subtlety and character to be found in the second half of a barrel's life. When she again glanced over in Bruno's direction, he had disappeared and she was surprised to find herself disappointed.

*      *      *

Bruno needed air. He staggered out into the gardens, breathing deeply the rich dark of the countryside. He was tipsy. He'd tasted his way through twelve of the barrels and sipped from a myriad of shared bottles.

He found himself in a sort of maze with fanciful figures hiding in the shadows. One was trimmed in the shape of a satyr, and the next a large, bearded figure of Bacchus not too dissimilar from himself, had he been able to transform some of his paunch into muscle.

Ahead a broad pool shimmered in the darkness, its surface rippling a reflection of stars and the crescent moon, a fountain pushing a dark column of water skyward in the center. An upright figure stood at the edge, staring across the water to the Morvan forest beyond. Something about the smart cut of his jacket suggested refinement, and Bruno wondered if it might be the chateau's enigmatic owner. But when he approached and the man turned he was shocked to meet the plastic grin of Parker Thomas.

“Bruno, it's been so long! How are you?”

“Imagine finding you here.”

“Thought I'd kick off the grand tour with the Trouvé this year. Rhinegau next, then Tuscany, Piedmont. Finally Moscow, of all places. Imagine that! You should check it out.” He
handed over a card for someone named Nikolai at
Red Square Wine Adventures
and Bruno studied it dubiously.

“Need to fill your quota of scores? Have you finished handing out all your nineties for the year yet?” Bruno snapped. The mention of Moscow made him suspicious. Was Thomas connected to the Russian in the hotel room? Bruno was a pacifist, though he wondered if anyone would notice if he drowned Thomas in the pool right now.

“You're such a stick-in-the-mud, Bruno.”

They stood a moment in silence. Thomas sucked back the last of his glass, paused, then shook his head.

“Excellent. Simply excellent.”

“Would you give it an eighty-five?”

Thomas pondered a moment. “Probably a ninety-one. But then I'm a little buzzed. And, of course, there's this setting.” He gestured out across the water. “It's bound to color my perception. Hard to trust your palate in such a setting.”

Bruno huffed.

“Believe it or not, I try to be precise about these things.”

“So you taste sample bottles at home from a brown paper bag and spit it in the sink like you're doing some sixth-grade science project? That's not what wine's all about.”

“That's where you're wrong, Bruno. That's precisely what wine's all about. I'm simply providing a service to consumers. People buy wine. It's why this all exists. It's a product. I'm not some artiste who pretends to be a poet. The wine industry is a
business
. A very
lucrative
business. It produces a product that people
enjoy
. I help them do that. How does that make me the bad guy?”

“Half the people down in that cellar are farmers. They buy their wine in bulk, filling cider jugs or stone jars. They drink it
with meals at weddings. Wine to them is a place. It's a set of values. It's their lives. They've been doing it that way for a thousand years. You can't reduce that down to mere supply and demand.”