Eight Hundred Grapes (52)

The History of Wine My father liked to say that to understand how to make wine, you had to understand the history of wine. And wine’s history was long and deep, moving from its quiet beginnings in the fifth century BC in Southern France to the rest of the world. A history that archeologists had constructed from the scrapings of 2,500-year-old pottery containers holding the world’s oldest wine, flavored with thyme, rosemary, basil—the Roman invasion, hundreds of years later, introducing wine across France.


It was a long time before winemaking touched down in America. Early vineyards failed in Ohio and Kentucky. California had only gotten into the game two hundred years ago, with Sonoma County housing the first commercial winery, Buena Vista Winery. John Patchett followed suit and planted the first commercial vineyard in Napa Valley. Prohibition had nearly knocked out those early efforts. The wine revolution brought it back in a broader, more organized manner, leading to the modern era of winemaking—the pioneers of the 1960s and ’70s putting California wine on the map, readying it for the blind tastings in Paris, California wines the winners, prying open the hold that French wine had on the world.

My father said the history mattered, mostly because it explained the first thing you had to understand about wine: Wine came from itself. Even wine that was supposedly indigenous to its land still utilized grape clones from Europe, mined everything that had come before to try to get somewhere better.

I found my father standing by the sorting table, a worker beside him, the two of them going through the grapes. They were picking out the whole clusters that he was going to use. When you used whole clusters, stems and all, it added something to the wine—a richness, but a tartness too. The tartness was something that my father strove for, so he wasn’t throwing much away. This wasn’t a harvest for throwing away.

“You look frantic,” he said.

“I need a job to do.”

“Let’s hurry up and give you one, then,” he said.

My father pointed at the open-top fermenters, the destemmed grapes resting inside.

“The grapes may need to be pumped.”

I got up on the ladder and looked down into the tank. The red grapes were spitting, almost bubbling, like a stew.

“They look good, don’t they?”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak, afraid everything with Ben would come pouring out.

My father motioned up at me. “I have more jobs, if you come down.”

I sat down on top of the ladder, several feet above my father, looking down at the winery below, moving along, beautifully, as if to music. It calmed me, helping me to take a much-needed breath.

“Or you can just sit there, lazy.”

“Dad, why aren’t you angry at her?”

My father’s eyes narrowed. “Careful, kid . . . I’m not going to start into this with you.”

“I’m just trying to understand.”

“Which part?”

“What are you going to do when you leave here?”

He paused, deciding whether he wanted to say it, whether he was going to tell me the truth about what he was doing or push it off. “You remember the harvest I spent in Burgundy?”

I nodded, the difficult time moving to the front of my mind: the harvest of my father’s absence, the two awful harvests that forced my father’s absence. My mother was so sad that winter without him, distracted and lonely. I was so desperate to make her happy that I initiated dance parties on Friday afternoon—the two of us jumping around the kitchen to Madonna. Though her heart wasn’t in it. She was almost dancing well, which gave her away.

My father nodded. “I’m heading back there to visit a friend.”

I was shocked to hear him say that. I wanted to ask him what friend he was talking about, but—remembering my mother’s sadness—I didn’t really want the answer.

“I’m going to travel the world. I’m starting there. I’m renting a yacht from someone who my friend knows.”

“You hate boats.”

“Who doesn’t?”

Mom. That was the answer. She loved boats. And she loved the ocean. But she wasn’t going with him. So why would he go without her? He was planning the dream trip, her dream trip. Like the sky and the rain and the soil, was this something else he thought was going to line up—that it would be enough to make her want to come back to him? If not, would he just take this other person instead?

Synchronization. You get into the wrong yellow buggy and build a life with someone. You do everything in your power to build a new one when that life falls apart.

My father climbed the opposite ladder, moving toward the top of the second fermenter, from the opposite end.

Then he motioned toward the compost piles, Bobby and Finn standing by them, ignoring each other, working on the feed. He was happy, looking at his sons. “They’ve been working all day, not saying a word.”

“Why are you smiling, then?”

“People get more work done when they don’t talk.”

He bent over the grapes, kneading them softly. Which was when I saw it, sneaking out from beneath his white shirt. A scar, white and winding, in the center of his chest.

I moved closer to him. “Dad, what is that?”

“Nothing.” He pulled up his T-shirt, blocking my view. “It’s nothing . . .” he repeated.