Blush - Jamie Brenner Page 0,87

of the office and forced herself not to look back. He’d realize he was wrong about this.

Wouldn’t he?

Forty

Leah had preached the gospel of cheese for two decades, but it felt different doing so on her home turf. The indoor tasting room filled to capacity fifteen minutes before the official start time for her wine and cheese class. When she had posted a notice about the class across both the Bailey’s Blue and Hollander Estates social media platforms and mailing lists, enough reservations had poured in that she asked her father if she could use the veranda instead.

“We can’t disrupt the whole winery for this,” he’d said irritably.

Her mother told her the real problem was that they were closing the winery the day before to give the new buyer a tour, so they couldn’t disrupt the space two days in a row.

She could have sold double the tickets if he’d let her. Baby steps, she told herself. Even though she hadn’t been able to use the largest spot at the winery, the tasting room still let her seat three times as many people as she was able to teach at Bailey’s Blue.

Sadie helped her with the forty place settings; each spot had a small cheese board featuring Capri, Kunik, Stockinghall cheddar, and her favorite, Ewe’s Blue, and the four glasses of wines she’d selected for the pairing: Sauvignon Blanc, Viognier, Merlot, and Malbec. In the center and at the end of each table, a basket of sliced crusty bread and bowls of dried cherries and chocolate-covered almonds.

Sadie had never shown any particular interest in cheese. She had always been a fussy eater, and there had been a time when Leah thought she might even become a vegan. But today, Sadie seemed as excited as Leah for the event. It was a relief because she’d been notably mopey at dinner the night before but wouldn’t admit that anything was wrong. And this was a departure from the positive changes Leah had seen in her daughter this summer.

She’d never thought of Sadie as being in a shell; she’d been too busy admiring her intellectual rigor and academic accomplishments to consider that maybe she was, in some ways, limited in her approach to life. When Sadie, at age fifteen, got an internship in the herpetology department of the Museum of Natural History, Leah had asked her what her sudden interest in frogs was. “I’m not interested in frogs,” Sadie had replied. “But it might make for a good short story one day.” Leah never thought to tell her maybe she should be working behind the counter of the cheese shop instead—not for her fiction but for her real-life experience. But now she could see a different Sadie emerging; a Sadie who didn’t mind a little sun on her face, getting her hands dirty.

If only her husband were capable of looking at the world a little differently.

In the few weeks since he’d visited, Steven made it clear that he had no interest in what was going on at the winery. Leah’s decision to remain there was an issue on which they’d agreed to disagree. It was less than ideal, but she hadn’t gotten through more than twenty years of marriage without a few of those. Besides, it was temporary. She knew she would have to go back to the city at some point, and in her mind that point was the end of the summer.

But as long as she was there, she was going to make the most of it.

Leah stepped to the front of the room and raised her glass of wine, waiting for the assembled group to notice and settle down. She started in with her welcome spiel, including the history of Hollander Estates. But she kept it brief, knowing from experience how eager people were to get to the good part: the drinking.

“Cheese and wine have so much in common. Both are made with the philosophy of terroir,” she said. “Terroir, loosely translated, means taste of a place. The wine that you are tasting today comes from grapes grown just a few steps away. Hollander wines are fermented with natural yeast that helps bring out the full terroir. Over the next hour, I look forward to exploring the tastes of this place. I’m Leah Hollander, and since I was born and raised here, I guess you could say this vineyard is my own personal terroir.”

The women smiled, and yes—the room was completely full of only women. Again, the lack of rosé rankled