Blush - Jamie Brenner Page 0,72
chair to look out the window, and it was all she could do not to leap over the desk and touch the back of his lustrous hair.
“I’d love to but I can’t,” he said. “Hollander doesn’t do that. We had a big offer to buy some reds and he nearly took my head off when I asked him, so I don’t think he’d let your boss buy any of our Chard. I can shoot you an email with some people to call, but I’ve got someone in my office right now . . .”
Sadie couldn’t help but overhear. She was sitting right there, and besides, she wanted to know everything about him. Everything he did, everyone he knew, what his days were like.
What his nights were like.
“Hollander doesn’t do what?” she asked when he was done with the call.
“Sell his grapes to other wineries. My buddy needs some whites.” He stood and closed his computer. “It’s time for me to get out there. Want to help?”
Did she.
They took the golf cart out to the farthest field, where the Petit Verdot was planted. She thought about the photography, and the pathos in his voice when he explained it to her. It struck her that she’d never had a serious conversation with Holden. When she tried to talk about art, or the lives of great artists like Sylvia Plath or Virginia Woolf, his eyes glazed over.
“I’m going to do a visual survey of the fruit growth so far. At the end of the summer, Leonard will give me a target date of what he wants for tonnage. I’ll weigh the fruit and count clusters, and if out of two acres he wants six tons, my father and I will go out and determine how much fruit we have out there and figure, for example, okay, we need to leave two clusters per shoot.”
He parked the cart next to the row marker and cut the engine.
“Can you hand me that clipboard near your feet?” he said.
She leaned forward and retrieved it. When she passed it to him, she said, “I’m leaving this weekend.”
“And you’re telling me this because . . . ?”
Oh, so that was how he was going to play it?
“Just FYI,” she said.
“Noted.”
She followed him into the field, where he stopped in front of the vines just a few feet in from the marker. He counted the clusters of buds on one of the plants. “These little guys are late bloomers.”
A cloud passed in front of the sun, granting merciful shade. Sadie’s skin was already a deep tan, and a smattering of faint freckles had appeared on the bridge of her nose. She didn’t have her mother’s olive skin tone, and that seemed to confirm that she was not meant for a life outdoors.
She and Mateo had absolutely nothing in common. This was pointless.
“You didn’t tell me about the other photo in your office,” she said.
He glanced at her. “You didn’t recognize what that was?”
“No. Should I?”
He shrugged. “It’s your winery.”
“It’s not mine. It’s my grandparents’.” And apparently, not even theirs for very much longer.
“It’s a photo from the Harvest Circle ceremony years ago.”
Sadie didn’t want to admit that although she had a vague recollection of her mother mentioning the Harvest Circle to her, she couldn’t remember exactly what it was. The blank look on her face must have given her away, because Mateo said, “Hollander Estates doesn’t use industrial yeast to ferment wine.”
Sadie knew that without yeast, wine was just grape juice. It was the yeast that converted the grape sugars into alcohol.
“My mother suggested to your grandfather that he try using natural flora. He liked the idea, so now on the first day of harvest every year, Leonard has Chardonnay juice pressed and puts it in a big jug. All the employees are invited to drop something in: a flower from their backyard, a shell from the beach—whatever.”
“That works?”
“Yeasts are everywhere. In the air, in plants, fruit, flowers, leaves, and rocks. So it works, but the process is very risky—we have to monitor it closely. The upside is more interesting biodiversity and no additives. Plus, the wine is, in a sense, produced from a piece of us all.”
Why did everything about the vineyard sound noble and romantic when Mateo explained it to her? It was him. He was noble and romantic.
And gorgeous. With her sunglasses covering her eyes, she could stare at him all she wanted and he wouldn’t know what she was looking at. Like the fact that