Page 82 of The Wrong Vintage
“Signore, you need to be trained first,” I tease him.
He chuckles. “You sound happy, Alessia.”
He sounds exhausted, but I don’t say that. That sounds like something a wife would say, and it makes me uncomfortable even though I am technically and now Biblically his wife.
“I love this,” I confess. “You know it’s so exciting when the bins are filled, weighed, tagged by parcel, and loaded onto trucks.”
“I’ve never heard anyone this thrilled about binning grapes.”
I stop and look at the vines that go all the way down to the sea. “Everything,” I murmur, “is filled with anticipation. And the precision with which we have to work is…well, as delicious as the wine we make.”
“You make precision sound very romantic,cara.” I hear the amusement in his voice, but there is also pride. He’s told me more than once that he finds me an exemplary winemaker. That he’s never seen someone who leads as I do. It’s a balm for my ego, battered by years of hearing my father call my work and me an experiment.
“For a winemaker, precision is everything.”
I reach the cellar and look around. Soon, the sortingtables will hum with life. Hands will move fast, discarding what doesn’t belong, protecting what does.
“You’re going to be too busy for me,” he says, “and I already miss you.”
My heart stutters at his admission. “I’ll make it up to you after harvest, I promise. But….”
“But?” he prompts.
“It would be very nice if you’d hold me at night after a long day—even if I am able to sleep only a few hours.” I can’t believe how quickly he’s become so important to me. “I sleep better when you’re in bed with me.”
“It would be my honor,dolcezza.”
“Grazie, Nico.”
“Prego, mia cara.”
I can hear love and affection in his voice.
He hasn’t said the words to me, but I haven’t said them to him either. I can feel them though.
No matter what this vintage brings, what it can’t take away from me is this sense of euphoria, of finally having someone who is mine, who loves and cares for me.
19
NICO
It takes me a full week to get to Bolgheri.
Not because I don't want to be there—I do—but because everything seems determined to fall apart the moment harvest begins.
It starts in California.
One of our largest distributors calls an emergency meeting after a journalist leaks internal pricing documents showing projected increases over the next three years for our premium labels. An executive had floated the numbers in a "hypothetical" deck, which was forwarded to someone else, and by the time it hit the press, the narrative was already set, and the headlines went in the vein of:The House of Alighieri is pricing wine out of reach.
Retailers panic.
Sommeliers start talking.
Importers threaten to pause allocations unless we walk it back publicly.
Then Loire follows.
An early frost wipes out half the yield at one of the estateswe contract with, and suddenly our commitments are impossible to meet unless we cannibalize allocations promised elsewhere. Contracts, penalties, reputations—all on the line.
