The Bordeaux Betrayal (10 page)

I stared at the sampler and nodded. Ryan had brought up things that never would have occurred to me. Thank God he’d agreed to help, fee or no fee.

“How much longer should we keep accepting contributions?” I asked.

“Cut them off soon. I still have to do the write-ups and figure out which ones to do live. Then we’ve got to get the catalog to the printer.”

“Sunny Greenfield will handle the printer,” I said. “We’re using one of my mother’s paintings of the vineyard on the cover.”

“Nice. I always liked her art.” He looked around. “Hey, bartender, any chance of a drink? This is going to take a while.”

I decided against the Pinot and got a bottle of Cab. For the next two hours he checked bottles against the list I’d made, writing about each one in his notebook.

At last he threw down his pen and sat back in the chair, rubbing his eyes with the palms of his hands. “Can we call it quits here? We’ll get those last few on the next round. Plus whatever else comes in.”

“You’re in charge.”

He reached for the bottle of wine. I covered my glass with my hand, so he filled his own.

“You’ve got some nice wines. A few clunkers but I didn’t spot any outright fakes.”

“Can we talk about the Washington bottle?”

“Sure. Where is it?”

It was in a different bay, on its own. I retrieved it and set it on the table in front of him so it wasn’t in the direct beam of an overhead spotlight. The bottle, its contents dark and viscous as blood, gleamed mysteriously.

He picked it up like he was holding the Holy Grail. “Amazing.”

“You’re sure it’s real?”

“Let me give you a little history lesson.” He set the bottle down carefully. “Until the late 1600s, there was no such thing in France as a wine produced by a single château. They mingled the grapes harvested from different places, so what they produced didn’t have much connection with the land.”

“Terroir,”
I said, and he nodded.

“Château Margaux—which you’ve got here—was one of the first châteaus to make wine from vines grown solely in their own vineyard. That put them at the head of the curve in wine-making methodology and they stayed there.” He ticked off his fingers. “Two things. Glass and cork. By the time this wine was bottled, heavier glass suitable for aging wine and shipping it had come into use. Plus the French had switched from capping their bottles with a layer of olive oil and wax to using cork.”

He paused to fill his own glass with the last of the Cab. “What was I just saying?”

“Using cork instead of olive oil and wax.”

“Right. So now they could ship wine. By the eighteenth century the Portuguese—the primary suppliers of cork—had invented an elongated bottle with a short neck and a shoulder. Of course since every bottle was blown by mouth the shapes were slightly irregular.” He caressed the Washington wine from the neck down to the flared shoulder with the back of his index finger. “Anyway, the new shape meant the bottles could be stacked on their sides—instead of keeping them upright—so the corks would no longer dry out and the wine wouldn’t spoil. Good for long voyages, like crossing the Atlantic.”

He indicated the Margaux. “This bottle is perfectly consistent with what was historically available in 1790. Also, Thomas Jefferson always asked for his wines—especially his Bordeaux—to be shipped in bottles rather than casks.”

“Wouldn’t it have been cheaper to ship in casks?” I asked.

“Sure, but the odds of the wine he ordered and the wine he got being one and the same were slim to none.” Ryan drank more Cab, then pushed back his chair and hunched down so he was eye level with the broad-shouldered bottle. “If the French—especially in the south of France—hadn’t doctored the wine to fake Jefferson out and give him what he thought he’d ordered, then the men on the boats who brought the wine across the Atlantic or up the river drank their fill of his casks and topped them off with river water afterward so they were still full.”

I made a face. “That is disgusting.”

“Jefferson thought so, too.” He sat up again. “Eighteenth-century wine fraud. We’ve got no monopoly on it. Happened all the time. Which is why TJ insisted on bottles, especially for Bordeaux. And, as we know, not all of those bottles made it to Monticello or Mount Vernon. Like this one.”

“The wine in this bottle,” I said, “is not in very good condition.”

“Would you be in good condition if you were almost two hundred and fifty years old?” He brushed his finger lightly over the rough-etched lettering in the glass—1790, Margaux, and the initials, G.W. “Look at that color, though. Spectacular.”

“A lot of the wine is gone,” I said.

“Down to mid-shoulder.” Ryan said. “I don’t have a problem with that. You know you’re going to get seepage in a wine this old. The cork is slightly dry, but in excellent condition, considering.”

What he didn’t mention, though, was that the ullage—the space between the wine and the cork—was filled with oxygen. Just as too much oxygen can rust metal or turn apples brown, too much air kills wine.

“It’s a shame the châteaus didn’t keep records that long ago,” I said. “I guess we’re lucky Jefferson did.”

“Exactly.” Ryan drained his wineglass. “Here’s what you’ve got. The bottle is the right age. Mid-shoulder level is consistent with a wine that old. And here’s the clincher. When Jefferson came back to the United States after serving as ambassador to France, he wrote a letter in 1790 ordering a large quantity of Bordeaux for himself and George Washington. In that letter he specified that the shipments should be marked with their respective initials so they’d get to their proper destinations. You’re looking at one of the bottles he never got.”

I chewed my lip and stared at the initials.

“Why are you shaking your head?” he said.

I leaned closer to the bottle of wine. “I wonder what Valerie knew that we don’t.”

“Oh, for God’s sake. Are you still on about her?” He threw up his hands and accidentally brushed against the bottle. It teetered and we both grabbed for it. I caught it.

“Jesus.” He looked stunned. “Wouldn’t that have been something, knocking it over right here?”

“I’ll just put this big boy back where he belongs for safekeeping. You sit tight.”

When I returned he was rolling the balloon of his wineglass between both hands, staring into it like he was looking into a crystal ball.

“You’re absolutely sure that it’s authentic?” I said. “Stake your reputation on it?”

He smiled wickedly. “Not 100 percent sure. But there is a way of finding out.”

“What’s that?”

“We could drink it.”

“Nice try.” I swiped his wineglass and put both of our glasses on a counter for washing in the morning. “Thanks for your time.”

“You’ll get my bill.”

I walked him to his car. “How well did you know Valerie Beauvais?” I asked.

“Well enough to know what a snake in the grass she was.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “Gives me a motive for killing her, doesn’t it?”

“You need more than a motive,” I said. “What about opportunity?”

“Apparently I had that, too,” he said. “Two deputies already talked to me and they don’t like my alibi.”

“Which is?”

“Home alone in bed. I’ve got a witness but the dog doesn’t like officers of the law so he’s not talking.”

I smiled. “Did you do it?”

He looked startled. “Hell, no.” He pulled his keys out of his pocket and tossed them in the air. As he caught them he said, “Guess I got lucky. Someone else beat me to it.”

A beam of red light shone outside my kitchen window as I finished my dinner dishes. I watched it bob up and down as it moved past the rosebushes toward the summerhouse. When Quinn wanted to preserve his night vision he used a red flashlight. It was just after eight o’clock. Early for him.

Of all the surprising discoveries I’d made about my eccentric winemaker, the most unexpected was his passion for astronomy. Before he died, my father gave Quinn permission to bring a telescope to the summerhouse with its panoramic and mostly un-light-polluted view of the night sky from the valley all the way to the Blue Ridge. But Quinn and I had a falling out a while back when I thought he was turning the place into a love nest. In a fit of anger, he’d removed the telescope and his copies of
Stardate,
a magazine I once thought pertained to online dating.

Maybe he’d brought the telescope back and forgotten our tiff. I pulled on a hooded sweatshirt that had been hanging on the back of a chair and got my cane. My night vision hadn’t adjusted as well as his and I yelped when I got caught on the thorns of one of the rosebushes.

He came out of the summerhouse. “What are you doing here?”

“Impaling myself in the dark. What do think I’m doing here? I came to see what you’re looking at.” I tugged the sleeves of my sweatshirt so they covered my hands. It was cooler than I expected. “Did you bring your telescope?”

In the near darkness his face was darker shadows and planes, his eyes black pools of negative space. “I thought you didn’t want me stargazing out here.”

He hadn’t forgotten the argument.

“That was a misunderstanding and you know it,” I said.

“It’s still at my place,” he said. “Packed up.”

“You could bring it back, if you wanted.”

“Is that so?” he said. “Thanks. I’ll think about it.”

I didn’t like the way he kept staring at me. “If you don’t have your telescope, what made you come here tonight?”

“Wanted a view of the harvest moon. There’s only one each year. Tonight’s the night. Too many trees at my place for a good view.” He walked back to the summerhouse and opened the door. I heard something scraping inside. “Grab that door, will you?”

He hauled one of my mother’s weather-beaten Adirondack chairs outside and positioned it so it looked out over the valley.

“You staying?” he asked. “Or were you just checking up on me?”

“I’ll stay.”

“You don’t need to.”

“I’d like to. Unless you’d rather be alone.”

“Don’t complicate things. I asked, didn’t I?” He went back inside and got another chair.

“There are lots of harvest moons,” I said.

“Nope. There’s only one that’s closest to the autumnal equinox. That’s the real harvest moon.” He set the second chair close to the first. “Have a seat. Moon’s behind that cloud bank. When it moves away, you’ll see it.”

I set my cane down and sat next to him, leaning against the weather-coarsened wood. He pulled a cigar out of his jacket pocket, unwrapped it, and rustled in another pocket for matches. I watched the familiar ritual as his match flared and he bent his head, puffing until the cigar was lit. The tip glowed like a mini-moon and I breathed in the familiar scent of his tobacco.

He sat back as the clouds slowly moved off and the enormous moon, the color of a ripe wheel of Leicester cheese, hung in the sky above our heads.

“It’s gorgeous,” I said.

“Yup.” He stretched his legs out in front of him and crossed them.

“You know in France, they used to care for the grapes according to the phases of the moon,” I said. “Planting, picking, pruning. Maybe we should try it some time.”

“The French also believe it’s bad luck to have women around at harvest.” He looked at me and puffed on the cigar. “I don’t suppose you’d like to try that sometime?”

I tucked my feet under me and wrapped my arms around my knees. “You are such a Neanderthal, you know that?”

He laughed. “I just don’t buy into that crap, that’s all. Give me science any day. Speaking of which, I’ve been thinking about the Cab blend.”

“You think about it nonstop.” But to tell the truth, so did I. Until we got the grapes picked and into the barrels, I’d be as restless and preoccupied as he was.

“Damn lucky for you that I do,” he said. “I want this year to be out of this world. We could screw up everything else, but you know how much rides on this one.”

I didn’t expect him to sound so somber. Most of the time he acted like he had a grace and favor relationship with St. Vincent, the patron saint of winegrowers, who whispered in his ear. But I understood what he meant. Of all the wines we produced, Cabernet Sauvignon was our most valuable—the one whose sales really paid the bills at the vineyard.

“It’ll be great,” I said. “As long as we aren’t picking too late. If we get an overnight freeze while that wine is still sitting in the vats, there goes fermentation until next spring when it warms up again.”

“If we pick early there’ll be too much acid,” he said. “You want people getting heartburn when they drink our wine? It’s a nightmare to fix wine with too much acid.”

“You’re still talking like a Californian,” I said. “Out there you never had to worry about high acidity. If you pick too late your only problem is that the alcohol content goes through the roof.”

His cigar glowed serenely in the dark. “High alcohol content’s easier to take care of than too much acid.”

“Sure,” I said. “You just add water to rehydrate the yeast.”

The minute I said that, I regretted it. I glanced over at him but he was still staring straight ahead, watching the sky. His profile looked like it had been cast in steel.

“I was talking about stuck fermentation,” I said.

“I know you were.” But he sounded brusque and I knew it was because I’d indirectly brought up Le Coq Rouge. “Adding water is not the only way to deal with it, either. You can use a glycol heater.”

“I know.”

Too bad I hadn’t mentioned that instead, though my comment could have hit a nerve for any winemaker. We all wrestled with the dilemma of how much to fiddle with a wine to fix it or improve it, and still consider it the “original” wine. California had problems when their grape sugar stopped converting to alcohol, known as stuck fermentation. In Virginia we had the opposite problem. Our alcohol content was often too low so we added sugar to boost it, a practice known as chapitalising. Both processes meant we were tinkering with the wine—but no winemaker considered them fraudulent.