Sweeter Than Wine (19 page)

She understood now. Alice touched one of the hand-crafted barrels, as
precisely made as cabinetry. "You mean these are all sieves now?" She counted
wildly: "Ten, fifty, hundred, two hundred, four hundred..." The freckles stood out
against her paleness like tiny golden tears.

Warring emotions held him silent: he wanted her to feel the weight of her error,
but he also wanted to rescue her. "We will not know until we have tested them," he
said, compromising. "But we will have to inspect and recondition each one."
Another monumental task to accomplish before crush. And more money needed
for labor, and materials. Why couldn't he have come here sooner? Before Bill left
and let Montclair fall into ruin?

But if Siegfried had come before Bill's departure, Alice would not have been
free to marry him. What had happened had happened. The casks would need
work. The wine must have suitable containers in which to age. He must earn
Alice's trust so she would keep him.

"I didn't know," Alice said with bitter self-recrimination. The light wavered as
her hand shook.

Siegfried put the glasses in his pocket, seized the lantern, and patted Alice's
quaking shoulders with a clumsy hand. Hopefully, he said, "It will be all right. They
might be saved. And, if not, we can do without." How, he did not at present know.
But he would manage somehow. For her.

She took a long shaky breath. "I hate making mistakes!"

He let his hand drop. He knew exactly how she felt. Matter-of-factly he handed
her the wine thief. "And where is the wine we are tasting for your meeting?"

For a moment Alice held the wine thief as if she didn't know what it was for, but
then she brushed non-existent loose hairs away from her face, and straightened.
"This way."

She picked through the tumbled welter of barrels, heading deeper into the
tunnel.

Siegfried followed her to a section where the barrels were neatly stacked,
labeled with chalk symbols in a round.

youthful hand. Alice came to a halt before a large barrel labeled "B15."

"This is Bill's last vintage." Alice surveyed the massed racks of piled-high
barrels. "His Burgundy '15. Fifty acres of Montclair's best grapes; Bill promised me
it would be worth $12,000 at maturity."

Siegfried felt a tremor of new alarm. "It has been aging in oak for three and a
half years?"

Alice started at his tone and her eyelashes trembled. "What else have I done
wrong?" she asked, plaintively.

At her wounded expression, Siegfried choked on his intended brusque reply,
and turned away to twist the bung out of the nearest barrel.

Both of them were silent as Siegfried inserted the wine thief into the barrel.
The slender glass tube took a long time to reach liquid, and Siegfried's stomach
dropped as the scent of the neglected wine drifted out. He brought up the wine-
thief, and dripped acrid thickness into the glass he pulled from his pocket.

He didn't even need to taste it. With a sigh, he handed Alice the glass. Viscid
liquid dark as blood coated the sides of the glass as she tipped it toward her
mouth. Her face spasmed. "Oh, no! It's vinegar!"

"Did you not top it off?" Siegfried demanded.

Her mouth pinched, she shook her head. "Bill never told me I had to."

Siegfried took a deep breath, and spoke very slowly, enunciating each syllable
as if speaking to a child. It was the only way he could prevent himself from
grabbing her and shaking her, hard. "The wine evaporates. You must prevent it
from concentrating. And from the air come the organisms that make it into vinegar.
Making wine is like raising a child. You have to keep an eye on it every
minute."

"It's all worthless, then. Every bit of it?"

He had seen the same resolute despair in the young soldiers under his
command when they found themselves in untenable positions, facing implacable
enemies with inadequate supplies. His burst of resentment at her incompetence
faded. No one instructed her, he reminded himself.

"I think..." he said slowly, trying to find something he could say to make this
debacle an opportunity rather than a loss, "It will not be worth anything as
Burgundy, but there may be a market for good wine vinegar. And if Prohibition
goes into effect--we may be lucky after all."

She made a sound halfway between a hiccup and a laugh, and stared blindly
at the racks of tidy barrels. "I was c-counting on the income!"

"When did you expect it to mature?" He tried to make his question gentle.

The back of her hand moved across her face. "I-I wasn't sure," she admitted. "I
can't...I c-can't believe how much I don't know!"

"Alice," he said, taking her hand, feeling the telltale dampness. "You could
spend a lifetime learning about wine and still know only a little bit." He could
summon no contempt for someone who hated her ignorance as much as she did.
"Some of this wine may be usable for blending with this year's vintage. We will
have to see. We have only opened one barrel."

He thought he was consoling her, but unexpectedly, she began to cry in
earnest. Great tears welled up and spilled. Siegfried set the lantern on the floor,
and wrapped his arms around her.

She shook against him, crying as if she had never wept before in her life. He
had a handkerchief, thank God! He stroked her hair and wondered, even as she
sobbed, what the coiled braid might feel like, unfurled, cool as silk beneath his
hand.

He held her gently, all her softness pressed warm against him. The near-
soundlessness of her sobbing was like the furtive tears of duty-ridden soldiers. He,
too, had known such hopelessness.

He had retreated from the War into a numb and terrible refuge. Armored
against the misery in his soul, he had lived through a thousand nights of terror,
leaving behind as useless baggage any thought of tomorrow; leaving until
tomorrow any sign of grief for comrades lost and gone, and for his youth and
innocence blasted away in shards of shrapnel.

He rested his cheek against her hair. For the first time he mourned for his
brother Ernst, for his boyhood friend Jürgen Bauer, for his mother and father, and
even for his cousin Bill. All of them had paid the ultimate price. His own tears
fell.

"Ah-lees, " he murmured, voice thick. He was making a damp spot in her hair,
matching the one she was leaving on his shirtfront. At the thought, a half-smile
lifted one corner of his mouth. "Give me back my handkerchief."

She looked up. He bent and kissed away the tracks of tears on her cheeks,
tasted tears mingled together as their lips met. Her arms went around his waist,
drawing him closer. His heart beat in unison with hers. The kiss lasted a timeless,
blissful interval, a wordless sharing of comfort, intimate yet strangely chaste.

Alice finally stepped back from him, and taking his hand, she tucked a
moistened scrap of linen into his palm. "Your handkerchief," she said, shyly.

Siegfried reluctantly let go of her shoulders to wipe his face. When he blew his
nose, it sounded like a trumpet blast in the echoing tunnel.

She smiled tremulously, and somehow the dark, still air beneath the hill was
full of light. There was a tear streak shining on her face. His mouth tingled from
their kiss and he relished the petal softness of her skin as his thumb tenderly
brushed the moisture away.

"I-I'm sorry," Alice said, studying the uneven carved stone floor. In the lantern
light, her profile was a study in gold and shadow.

"I am not." Siegfried croaked. He cleared his throat and pushed the used
handkerchief deep into the pocket of his jeans. "Until now, I have not been able to
mourn my losses. Thank you. What you have given me is worth far more than a
tunnel full of wine."

"Spoiled wine," she said, her shoulders drooping unhappily.

"Perhaps. We will not know until we have tested it all."

She looked down the rows of barrels. There were at least four hundred in this
section, and the end of the tunnel not yet in sight. "I can't. Not tonight."

"But, Alice, there is your meeting to come, yes? We must find something to
serve the association."

She threw up her hand as if his statement were a blow. "Don't! I said I'm
sorry!"

"We must have a good wine. And we will not have time tomorrow. Therefore
we must find it tonight, correct?"

"Siegfried, we can't test every barrel here tonight," Alice protested. "I can't,
anyway. Maybe you can."

"I do not speak of this vintage," Siegfried said. "Of course there are too many
barrels here! But what about the library wines? Or Opa Roye's bottle-aged
vintages?"

"There's nothing else. I told you. This was Bill's last." She bent to pick up the
lantern and it threw wild shadows.

Siegfried felt as if the whole mountain were tilting. Against this, the neglected
'15 Burgundy was nothing.

"How could Bill have sold Opa Roye's last wine before it had finished aging?
Oh, Ah-lees, I had come to despise my poor cousin. For this, I spit on his grave!
"

"What are you talking about?"

Siegfried blinked. Had Bill never told her anything? "Come and we will see."
He headed back towards the entrance of the tunnel.

"But there's nothing else back here!" she protested.

"That, we shall see!"

Montclair

Tuesday, May 26

They walked together past the empty barrels until the sliding door to the wine
cave entrance came in sight.

"There's nothing here," Alice repeated. She felt light, hollow-boned and
breakable, not quite sure she had cried herself out. It wasn't
real
yet, the
loss of Bill's wine, the failure of his last promise to her. She would probably feel
more upset once it sank in that she had no fall-back plan any more, that this year's
crop was all that stood between her and losing Montclair. She
had
to get
that sacramental license now. Could they even make it through harvest?

She would have to go over the books carefully to make sure they could.

She wasn't paying heed to Siegfried, but she suddenly noticed he was
scrabbling at the wall behind a hulking rack of empty barrels. He pinched his
fingers together, and a sheet of rock came away from the wall.

It took Alice a moment to understand what she was looking at. Against the
rough limestone, a curtain of dirty white canvas hung from ceiling to floor. He was
lifting up a flap of the heavy cloth, revealing a shadow where a wall ought to
be.

"There's another tunnel?" Alice exclaimed, outraged.

"It was not meant to be hidden," Siegfried said apologetically. He held the
corner of the canvas up as she lifted the lantern, splashing light into the wedge-
shaped opening. The visible reaches of the second tunnel were empty and
mysterious. "I expect you have seen this tarp half a hundred times and never
noticed it."

Alice put her hand over her eyes.

* * *

For a horrible instant, Siegfried thought that she was going to cry again, but
then he heard her muffled, "Stupid! Oh, how could I be so--"

"Alice," Siegfried stopped her from heaping any more abuse on her own head.
"Why did Bill never show you this?"

"He didn't trust me," Alice whispered, her hazel eyes wide and stricken in the
lantern's yellow light. "I don't think he hated me," she continued haltingly, "but I
knew he resented--"

"Bill never hated anyone in his life." Siegfried declared. He put his hand on her
back to comfort her, feeling the delicate arc of her shoulder blade under his
fingertips. "He would not have kept this from you on purpose! Oma Tati was
always telling him he would forget his head if it were not already fastened to his
shoulders."

Alice snorted. "My Da said Bill didn't have the brains God gave bastard geese
in Ireland." She clapped her hand against her mouth, eyes wide, amazed at her
lapse.

"Indeed." Siegfried tried to suppress his grin. "And it was not your fault that the
wine Bill made went sour." He gave her shoulder a squeeze, and wanted to do
more, but she stepped out from under his hand, refusing to look at him again.

"It was, though." She shook her head as if shaking off all emotion, and asked,
very businesslike, as she peered into the black tunnel: "What's in here, then? And
how far does it go?"

"
Opa
Roye used this arm of the tunnel for his in-bottle aging. It is just as
long as the main arm." Siegfried took her arm and drew her in. It was exactly the
same as the last time he had traveled this path, during his apprenticeship. That
time with his grandfather had been the last and best moments of his boyhood, the
last days of an old man's life.

But perhaps something of
Opa
Roye lived on yet. "Good. Here are the
library wines."

"What?"

Siegfried drew Alice up to the wooden cases, which stored the bottles at a
gentle angle, their corks submerged. He found the notecard tucked just where
Opa
had left it.

For Siegfried Heinrich Wilhelm Rodernwiller, upon the occasion of his
marriage. Montclair Estates Burgundy. Bottled by William Winston Roye,
1912.

And the next case:

For the occasion of the baptism of "_________" Roye. Montclair Estates
Port. Bottled by William Winston Roye, 1911.

And the cases, gifts in anticipation of a future he would never see, went on:
more Pinot Noir for Bill's graduation and marriage, for Ernst's, for the celebration of
Opa
and
Oma
Roye's golden wedding anniversary, for more hoped-
for grandchildren. And the last stack in the series:

For Hugh Lawson Roye, on the occasion of his graduation from college.
Montclair Estates Claret. Bottled by William Winston Roye, 1905.

Alice read the cards with him. Siegfried was not surprised to see her eyes
sparkling with tears once more. He himself felt perilously close to succumbing to
sentiment.