Dying on the Vine

NINE

THE Figline Valdarno of today is basically a small manufacturing center and Florence-area bedroom community, but some of it is centuries old, and Villa Antica was situated half in, half out of the old part. Half in, half out of the city, for that matter. The buildings of the one-time convent were just within the ancient city walls, with a hundred-foot section of the wall, including a romantic and evocative watchtower, providing the back border of its formal garden. Once upon a time, Gideon assumed, this beautiful, enclosed garden had been the nun’s cloister. It had probably looked much the same then, six hundred years ago, as it did now, with four paths, bordered by well-pruned boxwoods, that intersected at its center, making four symmetrical triangles of lawn, lush and closely mowed. At the center, where the pathways met, there was an old stone fountain, now lichen-encrusted and still. Set along the outer edges of the lawns were clay olive oil jugs planted with shrubs. Lined up along the back wall was a row of cypress trees spaced a few feet apart. It was this beautiful garden that Gideon had most looked forward to seeing again, a lovely, tranquil space equally conducive to quiet contemplation or—even better—free-floating woolgathering.

But the greater part of the winery’s property extended well beyond this enclave, on the other side of the wall. Go through a truck-sized passage that had been cut through the wall’s five-foot-thick, buttressed base, and you were at the foot of row upon row of trellised vineyards that marched in gracefully arching ranks up and over and around the nearby low hills. If he remembered correctly, there were something like four hundred acres of them: mostly Sangiovese, merlot, and cabernet, but a couple of smaller areas of whites as well.

The villa building itself consisted of a large central section and two attached smaller wings that enclosed the two sides of the garden. The three wings were connected by a long, porticoed terrace that ran along the back of the central building and constituted the garden’s front border. The central building now held the winery. The north wing contained the kitchen, the laundry, and the onetime refectory, which was essentially unchanged and still used for formal tastings and occasional dinners, mostly for members of the wine club that Linda had started. The larger south wing, once the sisters’ living quarters, was now the Cubbiddus’ residence. What had originally been thirty-five airless and austere cubicles were now five spacious, splendid apartments for the family and two smaller but almost equally handsome guest suites, all with canopied platform beds; twelve-foot ceilings; eighteenth-century furniture; nameless, noseless Roman busts on marble pedestals; and age-darkened old oil paintings. The Laus were being put up in one of the guest suites, the Olivers in Cesare’s old apartment, as before.

Gideon and Julie had arrived a little after five, two hours before the reception, and with John having not yet shown up, they were on their own, and they spent the time wandering over the property on both sides of the city wall. Linda had said that nothing had changed, but something had, and in their opinion, Villa Antica was the poorer for it.

Despite Pietro’s two decades on the mainland, the old patriarch had never felt himself to be in anything but an alien culture. To ease his longing for home, he’d created a little piece of rural Barbagia right there in the heart of worldly, trendy Tuscany. The last time they’d been here, there had been a fire pit and a kiln-shaped clay oven wedged into the niche created where a buttress jutted out from the wall. The goat or lamb or hare that had been served every day at lunch had spent the preceding morning roasting there. And just outside the wall through a second passageway, this one human-size, had been a muddy, wire-fence enclosure that held six or seven primitive wooden pens. In them had been the living lambs and goats, along with chickens, rabbits, pigs, and even a couple of full-grown, small dairy cattle.

It was Pietro Cubbiddu’s homesick approximation of the Sardinian fattoria in which he’d grown up; a primitive family homestead, basic but self-sustaining. But Franco was neither a sentimentalist nor a lover of old Sardinia. The pens, like the oven, were no longer to be seen. In their place were a couple of hundred square yards of asphalt that served as a private parking area for the family and an overflow lot to use when the one in front of the villa was filled by wine-tasting visitors.

To Gideon the animals, the primitive oven, the rich farmyard stink, had all been wonderful; hands-on connections to a past not very long gone but never to return, at least not to Tuscany, and he missed finding them there. A year ago, Villa Antica had been a one of a kind, like no other winery they’d ever seen. Now there were probably ten others right there in the valley that might easily be confused with it. Gideon wondered if the same was true of its wines.

They’d walked back to the winery wing of the villa to look around there as well. The old tasting room had changed quite a bit too. For one thing, it wasn’t there any more. In Pietro’s day, it had been in one of the old chapels, a cramped little windowless place that had a claptrap trestle table as its counter—a slab of old plywood nailed to some sawhorses—with a few bottles set out for that day’s tasting. Five or six stools. No room for tables. If there were any decorative touches, Gideon couldn’t remember what they might have been. But whatever else it was, the place hadn’t been bogus funky, it was genuinely funky, a very different thing. Sans pretensions, as the French would say; nothing if not nondescript.

Under Franco, however, the chapel had been converted to a storeroom for equipment replacement parts. The new tasting room, sunlit and spacious, was housed where the old choir had been. A couple of the old stained-glass windows were still in place, but otherwise it had been completely—and expensively—redone. It was all clean lines, pale walls of flawless, satiny birchwood, and abstract copper sculptures. The slick, faux-marble tasting counter was thirty feet long, and behind it was a softly backlit, twelve-level wine rack that ran its full length. There were eight or ten small, round tables, and every one of them had people sitting at it, sipping wine and wearing astute, judicious wine-evaluation faces.

“Wow, it’s beautiful,” Julie had breathed. “And obviously, it’s doing very well.”

There was no arguing with that, but Gideon hadn’t been happy with it all the same. “I suppose so, but it doesn’t feel . . . I don’t know, real.”

“Feels real to me.”

“You know what I mean,” he’d grumbled. “It’s too smooth, too gleaming. I don’t feel as if I’m in a winery.”

“Well, where else would you be?” She’d waved a hand at the counter, the bottles, the people drinking.

“Frankly, it feels more like I’m in some yuppie bar in Rome. On the Via del Corso, maybe.”

Julie laughed. “And where would you prefer to be, in some dank, dark cellar? Maybe somewhere that looks like a setting for ‘The Cask of Amontillado’?”

Gideon had thought about that for a moment. “Well . . . yeah,” he’d said.

• • •

JULIE decided to go to their apartment and put her feet up for a while, but Gideon was still in the mood for wandering. He went down a set of stone steps to the barrel room, off-limits to the public except on organized tours, which were given only a peek at it from one end. He was hopeful that Franco wouldn’t have worked his heavy-handed, modish wizardry there, and he was right. The barrel room—the old crypt—was beautiful; just as it had been in Pietro’s day. Running the full length of the church above, well over a hundred feet, it was stone-walled, windowless, and dimly lit by dangling, unshaded bulbs. Four long rows of oak barrels ran almost from one end of the room to the other, the barrels set on their sides on adze-cut wooden trestles. The place looked the way an ancient wine cellar should: dank, spooky, moldy, and cobwebby. And it smelled terrific, a wine-lover’s idea of paradise. It had been one of Pietro’s favorite places in the villa, Gideon remembered, and at the far end a beat-up, wine-stained table and a few rickety chairs in the corner had served as a sort of family tasting room, where father and sons would meet to sample and judge the progress of their products.

To his surprise, it was in use. When he heard the drone of echoing voices coming from that direction, he looked down the corridor between the two right-hand rows of barrels, and there were Nico and Franco and some others he couldn’t make out, gathered at the old table. On the table he could see several open bottles of wine. Franco, facing in his direction, spotted him right away.

“Well, well, can that be the famous Skeleton Detective himself?” he called in English, peering down the long aisle, one hand across his forehead as if to shield his eyes from the near nonexistent light. “Come join us.” He used the hand to wave Gideon over. “We are in grave need of an educated palate and an unbiased mind, but we’ll settle for you instead.”

Franco Cubbiddu could sometimes demonstrate a dry wit, but he didn’t do “jocular” very well and was wise enough not to try it too often. A year older than Luca, he had an obvious familial resemblance to his earthy, outgoing younger brother, but he was an attenuated Luca, long and thin, with sharper features—his nose, his eyebrows, his mouth were all straight lines—and an air altogether more arid and contained. Still, as Gideon approached, Franco tried a smile—his smiles were painful to watch, seeming to overstretch dry lips that weren’t meant for the job. Then an easy wave, indicating the one empty chair. That single, magisterial gesture made it crystal clear that he was the man in charge now that Pietro was gone. This, of course, had been expected by everyone who knew them. In the Barbagia, primogeniture ruled, and in his heart of hearts, Pietro had never stopped being a Barbagian. Of course he would leave the winery in Franco’s charge (unless he’d decided to sell it, of course, which he hadn’t lived to do).

In the two remaining chairs were Luca, Nico, and a large, portly man in his late fifties with a self-satisfied, jowly face and a natural “don’t-you-try-to-pull-anything-with-me” expression on it. This was Severo Quadrelli, not a Cubbiddu relative in the technical sense of the term, but one of the family in every other. It took him a moment to place Gideon, but when he did, he nodded soberly at him without getting up. In his tightly knotted dark tie, his three-piece suit of herringbone tweed (much too heavy for a Tuscan September, Gideon would have thought), and his thumbs hooked in the armholes of his waistcoat, he looked more like an actor playing a successful lawyer—a 1930s lawyer—than a real one. His hair, elegantly graying at the temples, was neatly parted an inch to the left of the center line. And he was the first man Gideon had met in decades who wore a vest-pocket watch on a chain. A pair of pince-nez on a string would have provided the perfect finish to the image, but maybe it was too outré, even for Quadrelli. Instead, he’d opted for the nearest thing in eyewear: a pair of round spectacles with steel rims that were so thin they were almost invisible.

He’d been Pietro’s oldest friend, an upcoming young Florentine attorney when they’d met a quarter of a century ago. At that time, being fresh off the ferry from Sardinia, Pietro was trying to buy the decrepit old convent/winery that was to become Villa Antica. Quadrelli had been representing the absentee owner, a signor Cocozza, but he’d been an honest broker. When the scurrilous Cocozza tried to put over a fast one on the trusting greenhorn (Pietro, accustomed to handshakes, not contracts, had no lawyer of his own), Quadrelli had refused to go along. That had gotten him fired, and in righteous indignation he’d switched sides to energetically represent Pietro’s interests with no more than a promise of payment sometime in the future.

The promise had been fulfilled within two years. They’d become fast friends, and Severo had come to serve as Pietro’s trusted counselor, formal and informal, not only in legal matters, but in all things mainland-Italian. In time Villa Antica had prospered to the extent that Severo had given up his position with a Florence firm and taken a generous yearly retainer to concentrate solely on the winery and the Cubbiddu family as their attorney and financial manager. Julie and Gideon had met him on their visit of the previous year. At that time he had just been coaxed by Pietro into finally moving into one of the guest apartments in the villa’s residential wing, living among the Cubbiddus and taking his meals with them. One of the family, indeed.

“Ah, Linda, she tell me you come,” he said in his mellow, authoritative bass. “Is good to see you again. Welcome, welcome here.”

Interestingly, while it was Severo who had reputedly convinced Pietro that fluency in English was a must for the sons, he himself, a cosmopolitan and well-educated man, sounded like a fresh-off-the-boat Italian in an old vaudeville skit. Leenda, she tell-a me you come-a. . . .

Not for the first time, Gideon wondered if his own Italian might not be quite as smooth as he imagined.

“Thank you, signor Quadrelli,” he answered. “It’s good to be here, and I’m glad to see you again.” He spoke in English. To a self-regarding and somewhat pompous man like Severo, doing otherwise would have been perceived as a slur on his linguistic abilities.

There was a bit of friendly chatting, and then Franco, showing himself to be a busy man with many responsibilities, rapped on the table to bring them back to business. On the table were two partially emptied bottles of red wine and one full one, uncorked, along with a dishwasher rack half full of stemmed, ballooned wineglasses, a pile of cloth napkins, a pitcher of water, a basket of broken-up bread sticks, and a metal bowl with a little spat-out wine in the bottom. Eight used wineglasses stood in a clump a little away from the other things.

Franco now spoke in Italian. “Nico, si prega di versare il vino.” He gestured at the full bottle, making a pouring motion.

As Nico poured portions into each glass, Luca caught his arm to get a look at the label. “The 2010 Sangiovese grosso? What are we tasting this one for?”

Nico answered. “I’m off to the Wine Retailers Expo in Basel in a few days, and I need to know what to tell them about it. Will we be releasing it this year or not? Should I bring a couple of cases with me, or shouldn’t I?”

“I can give you the answer right now,” Luca responded. “No. It’ll need another year at least. The tannin will still be too high. It’ll be rough.”

“You’re wrong, Luca,” Franco said. “I tasted it myself this morning. In my opinion it’s ready.”

Luca raised an eyebrow. “So what are you asking us for?”

“Because I am sincerely interested in your opinions.”

“Fine, I just gave it. Not ready.”

“I suggest you taste it first, Luca. You’re forgetting something. This was the first of our wines to undergo maceration and extraction by means of the new rotary fermenter.”

Gideon was pleased to see he could follow the conversation with ease. As he’d learned, technical terms were often practically interchangeable (macerazione, estrazione, rotofermenter).

Luca shook his head. “Rotary fermenter. God.”

Except for a downturn of his mouth, Franco ignored the comment. “To begin, perhaps we should all have a little bread to clear our palates.” It was hard for Gideon to tell whether it was a suggestion or an order, but they all followed it, including him. He plucked a breadstick from the basket, chewed away, and swallowed. They looked to Franco for further commands. Franco obliged.

“Nico, you begin. And if you’re not going to be serious, then just stay out of it.”

“Franco, there’s no need to offend me. All right, let’s see what we have here.” He lifted his glass and went through as thorough a tasting routine as Gideon had ever seen. The glass was slowly rotated a couple of feet in front of his eyes, and then raised higher to study the wine’s clarity and color against an overhead bulb. “Ah.” He lowered the glass, swirled the wine, and stuck his nose as far into the glass as it would go. This was followed by an appreciative nod: so far, so good. At last, his lips were parted to admit half an ounce or so of the Sangiovese. The wine was held in his mouth while air was noisily and wetly slurped through it, then rolled around, from cheek to cheek, Finally, the metal bowl was lifted to his mouth and the wine spat into it. He gazed into the middle distance, down the long racks of barrels, sucking in his cheeks, then expanding them, then sucking them in again.

“This wine,” he began, “it’s—”

“Serious,” Franco warned again, but Gideon could tell that Nico had a performance in mind, probably for his, Gideon’s, benefit.

“. . . it’s elegant and yet . . . rustic . . . subtle yet . . . assertive . . .”

Franco sighed. “I should have known better,” he mumbled to the walls.

“. . . a big-hearted wine with overtones of leather and tobacco . . .” He was barreling along now, waving the glass around as he spoke. “. . . on a matrix of mushroom and meat—no, eggplant. But eggplant layered with—yes, cinnamon!”

They had all surely heard this kind of tomfoolery from him before, but their responses were very different. Severo sighed and looked the other way, but Luca was practically doubled over with laughter. Like old Pietro, he was easily amused, and when he was, he responded with gusto.

Not Franco. “I said that’s enough,” he said with more force. And to Gideon, with a stiff smile: “Why do I never learn?” Then he turned to Luca. “Luca?”

“No, seriously,” Nico said, laughing, “it’s all right, Franco, it’s fine. I think I should take some with me. In fact, I would say that its eloquence is matched only by the subtlety of its—”

Franco waved him down with a disgusted gesture. “Just shut up, Nico.”

Nico shrugged and poured himself a little more. “It’s really hard not being appreciated.”

“Luca?” Franco said again.

Like the others, Luca had already tried the wine, but now he poured a little more, took a piece of bread, dipped it into the glass, tossed the saturated chunk into his mouth, and slowly—very slowly—masticated.

Franco shook his long, bony head. “How you can tell what the wine tastes like with your mouth full of food . . .”

“I can do it because I’m not that interested in what it tastes like without food, Franco. For me—”

“Yes, Luca, yes, Luca,” Franco said, making it clear that he’d heard from Luca on this subject more times than he cared to. “Can we just have your opinion on the wine, please.”

Luca shrugged. “Not as bad as I expected.”

“Would you mind trying to restrain your enthusiasm?” Franco said dryly.

“No, I mean just what I said. It’s not a bad wine. You’re right, it’s not as tannic as I expected. It’s even, in its way, a fairly good wine. But I’ll be sorry to see it come out under our label, this year or any other year.”

“I don’t agree,” said Severo. “What’s wrong with it? I thought it was fine.”

“Fine? Maybe, but also impossible to tell from a hundred other Sangioveses. If I put two glasses in front of you, could you tell the difference between this and a reserve from Carrucci? Or Castello Rugate?”

“Hmm,” rumbled Quadrelli. “Well, now, I’d have to—”

“It’s those damned cement mixers. They—”

Franco’s eyes rolled ceilingward. “Not the cement-mixer speech again. We’re in the twenty-first century now, Luca, and we’re not running a little neighborhood family cantina. I have to worry about things you never have to think about: profits and losses and expenses. Efficiency. Effectiveness. Like it or not, those ‘cement mixers’ make it possible to produce our wines on a predictable, consistent schedule instead of waiting around twiddling our thumbs while nature takes its course—slow this year, quick next year. Those devices you hate so much have allowed us to speed up our production by thirty percent, do you realize that? Thirty percent! I wonder if you really understand—”

Luca put his glass on he table and made a grumpy display of shoving it as far away from him as it could go. “Fine, fine, you do what you want, signor padrone, you’re the boss, only . . . ah, Franco, I would have thought if there was one thing babbo taught us, it was to trust nature to take its course, to help the fruit become what’s in its essential character to be, not to hurry into a false maturity before its time.”

“You’re scaring me, Luca,” Nico said. “You’re really starting to sound like babbo. Are you channeling him or something?”

“And for his time, babbo was right,” Franco said, “but he was from another century—the nineteenth, really, even more than the twentieth. I would think you’d understand that, Luca. With the proper application of modern scientific principles, we can force the grapes to—”

That brought an incredulous laugh from Luca. “Force the grape! How do we force the grape to do what it doesn’t want to do?”

“We could always try using techniques of enhanced interrogation,” Nico said, pouring himself a little more of the wine.

“Now, Luca,” Severo put in, sounding like a chuckly, wise old owl of an uncle. “When Franco says ‘force,’ he doesn’t mean literally—”

“I don’t need you to interpret what I mean, signor lawyer,” Franco snapped, upon which Severo’s jaws clamped shut so hard that his teeth clacked and his jowls jiggled. His neck shrank into his shoulders (very owl-like, but no longer very avuncular) and he stared fixedly at the table, his ears slowly reddening. Apparently, thought Gideon, he wasn’t quite so much one of the family after all, not quite so much the trusted and respected consigliere he’d been under Pietro’s rule. And he still hadn’t gotten used to the new state of affairs.

“I most certainly do mean ‘force’ in its literal sense,” Franco went on. “With today’s methods we can get more from the grape than it started with. Cross-flow filtraters, rotary—”

Luca made a disgusted motion. “Look, Franco, why are we wasting our time with this anyway? You know we’re going to release it—you already said you liked it—so what are we even discussing it for? Just go ahead. It’s your show now, isn’t it?”

Gideon was getting uncomfortable. The atmosphere in the Cubbiddu household was another thing that wasn’t quite the same as it had been in Pietro’s day either. Oh, he’d seen a couple of wine and winemaking arguments among the family that were louder and livelier than this one, but the chill in the air, the edginess—that was something new.

“I’ll let that pass, Luca,” Franco said in his flattest monotone. “And now I’d be interested in hearing from our American colleague. Gideon, what do you think of the wine?”

“Ah. Well—”

He was saved by Luca, who exploded out of his chair and into English. “Jesus Christ, it’s after seven! The reception! They’re waiting for us out on the terrace! Franco, let’s go!

“Hey, don’t worry about it,” Nico said. “Linda and Maria have everything in hand, and the caterers have already set everything up. Your people are very happy, believe me. They’ve got good wine, they’ve got good food, life is good. I don’t think they’re feeling too neglected.”

But Luca and Franco were already halfway to the staircase, and Quadrelli got up too, more slowly. “I believe I’ll drop in on that myself.”

That left Nico and Gideon at the table. Nico was looking at him, an inquisitive smile on his face. He wasn’t drunk, but he was happily buzzed.

Gideon waited for him to say something. “What?” he finally asked.

“Oh, I was just waiting to hear what you were going to say. What do you think of the wine?”

Gideon picked up his glass. “Ah. Well—”

“Yeah, I already heard that part.”

“Okay, then.” He sipped, swallowed, nodded, put the glass down, and authoritatively considered the aftertaste. “Mm . . . in my opinion, I would say it’s . . . elegant yet rustic . . . leather . . . tobacco . . . eggplant under a layer of . . . of . . .”

“Cinnamon,” Nico said.

“Well, no, I was thinking dorrigo pepper and viburnum bark. And maybe a tinge of kokam seed.”

Nico laughed appreciatively and took a taste from his glass, then reached for the bottle. “Hey, we’ve got time; here, have another shot with me.” He upended the bottle over Gideon’s glass. Nothing came out. “Oops, sorry about that. Now how do you figure that happened?” He seemed honestly puzzled.