Blush - Jamie Brenner Page 0,108

out. He was still a fighter.

“Are you out of your damn mind?” the baron sputtered.

“No. But you’re out of a vineyard,” Leonard said. “Get the hell off my property. Security will see you out.”

The baron climbed up one of the side ladders, shaking water out of his eyes.

“You’re ruined, Hollander,” he said. “This place is finished.”

Leonard’s response was to summon their security team, waiting for his cue nearby. Two men took the baron by each arm. He shook one of them off, muttering something about assault charges.

When he was gone, Vivian turned to her husband.

“Fifty years together, and you can still surprise me,” she said, smiling and hoping he might find some lightness in the moment.

That he might find it in his heart to continue loving her.

“You should have told me sooner, Vivian,” he said.

And then, shoulders slumped, he walked back into the house.

Forty-nine

In August, the plants stopped producing. It was the calm before the harvest storm.

Leah walked through the field, the humid morning air like soup. All around her, unseen nature clicked and hummed and chirped. A woodpecker tapped out a code on a nearby tree. Tell me your secrets, she thought.

How big was the gap between what she knew and what she didn’t know about the winery? This was the thought that kept Leah awake at night. It was a catch-22: her distance from the place was what let her see missed opportunities. But she also felt like the solution to saving it—if there was one—required deep operational understanding. The obvious solution would be to ask her father a ton of questions, but she didn’t want him to get exasperated and throw up his hands and say, “Forget it! I’ll do it myself.”

The second-best option was talking to Javier, Mateo, and the senior winemaker, Chris Kessler. And so she called a meeting at the barn.

“Can we all fit in here?” she said as they squeezed into Mateo’s office.

It was tight, but they made it work, with Mateo and Javier sitting on his desk while Leah and Chris used two folding chairs to face them. Mateo turned on a standing fan and opened the window to try to catch the breeze.

“Thanks for taking the time to meet at such short notice,” she said. “I have some questions about harvest planning.”

The three men looked at one another. “Where’s Leonard?” Chris said.

“We’re all meeting in two days. I just want to ask a few things to get myself up to speed.”

“Before we start,” Chris said, “what’s going on with the sale?”

It was a good question.

“The truth is, I can’t really speak to that. But what I can say is that no one wants to sell. So what I’d like to do is figure out what’s working and what’s not working. Because I know you’re a great team, and that’s half the battle. So tell me, what comes next? Where are we in the production timeline?”

“Soon we’ll put up the bird netting,” Javier said. “Last year, we were picking fruit by September 20. But we didn’t finish the reds until the end of October.”

“This summer was hotter, so the reds are going to get extremely ripe. Our yields are going to be high,” Mateo added.

She nodded, writing everything down in her notebook.

“The bottom line is, the window for production decision will be closing soon,” Chris said. “Leonard is going to start pulling fruit to test sugar and pH. Then he’ll decide what fruit to use for what wines and allocate tank space.”

Leah looked up. “What if we wanted to produce a rosé this year?”

Chris looked at Javier, then said, “Leonard will never go for it.”

“Let me worry about that,” Leah said. “Just humor me: What grapes would you use?”

“We could use some of our Merlot and Cab Franc and Syrah grapes.”

She nodded. “And just to clarify: What’s the timeline for getting a rosé to market? I know that if we use those grapes for red wine, they’ll be sitting in the barrels for at least a year, so we don’t see profit on them for a while.”

Chris thought for a minute. “The red grapes still have to ferment awhile for the rosé. But by December we could start blending trials to see what would make the best wine. Best-case scenario is we bottle in February and release March 1.”

That was an even faster turnaround than she imagined. Still, she knew that revenue from the amount of rosé they could produce—even if they sold it all—wasn’t enough to solve their problems. But with