The Winemaker (30 page)

To keep from impeding one another, they walked in a line. Soon Briel began to sing a song about a thieving magpie that stole olives from a farmer’s wife. The rhythm of the music helped them walk, and when the youth’s song was done, Maria del Mar began to sing tunelessly about the new moon shining on a woman who yearns for her lover. She didn’t do the song well, but she was brazen and sang it through, several verses, and after that Briel sang again, another song about lovers, but not a romantic song as hers had been. He sang of a fat boy whose sexual excitement caused him to faint each time he prepared to make love. The beginning of the song was very funny, and the three of them were laughing, but Josep thought Briel was a fool and disrespectful to Maria del Mar.

“Enough singing, I think,” he said drily, and Briel fell silent.

When Josep reached the end of the tank and turned, he saw that Maria del Mar was smiling at him just a bit mockingly, as if she could read his mind.

It was early morning before Josep thought the grapes thoroughly crushed. In the first gray light, Maria del Mar lifted her sleeping son and carried him home, but Josep and Briel still had work. A pailful at a time, they moved the trodden must to one of the
new high oak vats. Then they hitched the hinny to the wagon and brought water from the river and carefully sluiced out the treading tank.

When Josep fell into bed the sun was high and he had only a few hours of sleep before they had to begin to pick the Garnacha.

On the third day, when they harvested the Cariñena, they were exhausted and Briel had a painful stone bruise on the ball of his left foot; by the time they began to tread grapes in the tank the youth was in pain and limping badly, and Josep sent him home.

Worse, Francesc could not sleep and was running about in the dark. Maria del Mar sighed.

“My son must sleep in his own house tonight.”

Josep nodded readily. “There is less than half the volume of Cariñena grapes than we had of Ull de Llebre or Garnacha,” he said. “I can mash them by myself.”

Yet when she carried the little boy home, he faced the long night ahead with less than pleasure. The sky was moonless. It was very quiet; far away, a dog barked. The day had been slightly warmer but there was a cooling breeze that he welcomed, because he had been told that air movement carried natural yeasts into the tanks, helping the fermentation process turn the grape juice into wine.

Reaching down, he took a handful of the sweet mash and chewed as he began to plod. Overtired, he walked sullenly by himself in the satin darkness, his mind closing down so that he was barely conscious, his world diminished to six paces up, one pace across; six paces back, one pace across; six paces up…

A long time passed.

He wasn’t conscious of her approach, but Maria del Mar was there, stepping carefully into the mash.

“He is finally asleep.”

“You could have slept also,” he said, but she shrugged.

They walked together in silence until they collided while making a turn.

“Jesús,” he said. He reached out only to help but in a moment found himself kissing her.

“You taste like a grape,” she said.

They kissed again for a long time.

“Mirimar.”

His hand spoke to her and she gave a slight shudder.

“Not here in the must,” she told him. When he helped her out of the tank, he was no longer tired.

46

Small Sips

The next morning, after the juice and the must had been stored, they sat at her table. Josep knew just enough about coffee to recognize that her brew was bad, but nevertheless they drank several cups as they talked.

“After all, it is a natural need,” Maria del Mar said.

“Do you believe the need is the same for a woman as for a man?”

“The same?” She shrugged. “I am not a man, but…a woman has a great need also. Did you think otherwise?”

He smiled at her and shrugged. “You have no one at the moment, nor do I,” Josep said. “So…It’s good we are able to give one another comfort. As friends.”

“Only, not too often,” she said shyly. “Perhaps we should wait until the need builds very strongly, so when finally we are together…Well…You understand?”

He looked at her dubiously and sipped his coffee.

Maria del Mar went to the window and peered out.

“Francesc is climbing his trees,” she said.

They agreed it was an opportunity. Because, after all, it might be some time before it would happen again.

Now Josep allowed himself to become extremely nervous, because he had placed his livelihood in nature’s hands and had to wait for the mysterious process by which grape juice was transmuted into wine. There were several vital things he had to do to help things along. Everything in the must that wasn’t juice—the skins, the seeds, and the
stems—were repeatedly buoyed up to the surface of the liquid to become a cap, and the cap soon dried. Every few hours Josep drained off liquid from the bottom of the tank and climbed a ladder so he could pour the juice over the floating solids, and now and again he would use a rake to push the cap down, mixing it with the body of the liquid.

He did these things over and over again, throughout the day, and sometimes when he awoke in the middle of the night, he would go to the tanks and perform the rituals in the dark, almost in his sleep.

The weather stayed cool, slowing what was happening to the grape juice, but when a week had passed, Josep began drawing a few ounces from each vat twice a day and tasting it.

He was moody and skittish, poor company, and Maria del Mar left him alone.

She had always lived with grapes, and no one needed explain to her that now timing was everything. If Josep should interrupt the process too soon, it would mar the coloration of the wine and its ability to age, and if he waited too long, it would become poor, flat stuff. So she hovered in the background and sternly kept Francesc in his own vineyard.

Josep waited, each day interminable, wetting the caps and punching them down, tasting samples again and again, the sips revealing to him the growing strengths in the juices and their differences.

When the pressings had been in the vats for two weeks, the sugars in the juice had become alcohol. If the weather had been hot the Ull de Llebre mash would have grown too strong, but cool temperatures had kept the alcohol moderate, and the sweetness that remained was fresh and appealing. The Ull de Llebre lacked acidity but his Garnacha
was tart and lively, while the Cariñena had a green, almost bitter power that Josep knew was a necessary ingredient in any wine that could be expected to age well.

Fourteen days after he had placed the juice in the vats, he sat at his kitchen table early one morning with three filled bowls in front of him, and an empty bowl, a pitcher of water, a large glass, a very small glass, and a paper and pen.

He began by half-filling the small glass with Ull de Llebre and pouring it into the large glass, to which he added a similar measure of Cariñena and another of Garnacha, mixing them with a spoon. Then he took a sip, swished it around in his mouth at length, and spat it into the empty bowl. He sat reflectively for a moment before he rinsed his mouth with water and made a note of his reaction to the blend.

He forced himself to wait, to allow his mouth to lose the taste of the sampling, going outside and busying himself with small jobs, and then came back and blended and sampled another combination, this time mixing only Garnacha and Cariñena.

Every few hours he would taste another blending, reflect on it, and make a brief note, each time replacing the wine in the bowls so that overexposure to the air would not give him false information.

By the morning of the seventeenth day of fermentation, he knew the wines were ready and that he would place them in barrels that afternoon. Three sheets of paper on his table held his notes, but he knew many more combinations were possible. To begin the day he made a new mixture, sixty percent Ull de Llebre, thirty percent Garnacha, and ten percent Cariñena. He took a sip, swirled it in his mouth, and spat it out.

He sat for a moment, and then he made the same mixture and repeated the exercise.

He waited a bit longer before repeating exactly what he had just done twice, with a single exception—the third time he could not bring himself to spit.

Other mixtures had shown promise, but this wine seemed to fill his mouth. Josep closed his eyes, tasting the same flavors of berries and plums he had found in previous samples. But also black cherries, a lick of stoniness, a whiff of sage, a sniff of the wood of the vat. Scents he remembered, and tiny traces of sweetness and tartness that he was meeting for the first time. This mixture had a new wholeness, and he allowed it to play softly along the lining of his cheeks, slip under his tongue and slide over it, so that a little trickled down his throat and teased warmly.

When he swallowed, the drink bloomed fully as it went down, so that he sat and closely studied his rising pleasure. The taste played on and on in his mouth after the liquid was gone.

The scents rose into his nose and stayed, and Josep began to tremble as though something bad had happened, as though he were full of fear, as though he were not newly realizing that he had made
wine.

He sat late at the table, just looking at the wine as if by studying it in the bowl he could learn secrets and wisdom. It was rich and dark, scarlet-red, the color gifted by the thick grape-skins that had soaked for two-and-a-half weeks in the fermenting juices.

He thought it beautiful.

And was tormented by an overwhelming need to show it to someone.

If only he could fill a bottle with this wine and present it to his father, he thought…Perhaps he should bring it to Nivaldo.

But he poured wine into his coffee-stained cup and carried it through the rows of vines to Maria del Mar’s threshold, where he tapped carefully, lest he waken the child.

Finally she opened the door, blinking crankily, her eyes concerned and her hair wild from the pillow, and he followed her to the oil lamp on her table before he gave her the cup, because he wanted to see her face as she drank.

47

Like a Brother

Josep made a small, hot fire and held each of the empty l00-liter barrels over it in turn, searing and toasting the interiors as he had seen winemakers do it in France. The blended wine filled all fourteen of the small 100-liter barrels, as well as two of the four 225-liter barrels that he owned. From time to time he would have to take wine from one of the large barrels and top off the small casks, for the new oak drank liquid like a thirsty man, and air in the barrels would spoil the wine. After the three large vats were drained, Josep and Briel took the must to the village press and squeezed out another half-barrel of wine. Added to some of the unblended wine from the trodden grapes, the second pressing gave him nearly a barrelful of ordinary wine that didn’t have the quality of the blend but still was far better than any of the wines his father had made.

He and Briel had just begun carrying the barrels into the cellar when Donat came walking in from the road, and Josep greeted his brother easily but with some inner wariness, because he knew the purpose of the visit.

“Let me give you a hand,” Donat said.

“No, you sit and rest. You’ve come a long way,” Josep told him. In fact, even the larger and heavier barrels were best handled by one man at each end, and a third man would only get in the way. But Donat trailed after them as they lugged a cask, examining the details of the cellar.

“This cellar has been a fair amount of work. Wouldn’t Padre be amazed to see it in his hill!”

Josep smiled.

Donat pointed to the half-finished stone lining of the earthen wall. “I could give you a hand with that work if I could get away from the job for a few days.”

“Oh, no thank you, Donat, I enjoy the work with the stones. I just do a little bit now and again,” Josep said.

His brother dawdled and watched as they carried in the rest of the barrels, then the visit took a good turn, when Josep drew a pitcher of the blended wine and they carried it to Nivaldo’s.