“Is it?” he asked, looking puzzled.
“It’s not?”
“Honestly, I hardly notice. It’s the…” He paused. “The other side that interests me.”
Looking at him, Abby had the distinct feeling he wasn’t telling the truth.
“The other side?”
“Outside. Where I grow my grapes.”
“But in here… This room. This is where people would come to taste wine? Buy it, too?”
“Yes. And back there, for making wine.”
Abby took a turn around the big, empty room. “Through there?” she asked.
“Yes. That’s the barrel room. In those barrels, the wine ages before bottling. Beyond that, where we first came in, are the tanks where the wine becomes…well, wine. And through that door, outside—not toward the tractor, but straight through—is the porch. Under the overhang is where the grapes are crushed and destemmed. That is where the real work happens. In a winery anyway. Harvest and crush. No sleep.”
“Luc, this is…” Abby shook her head. She felt the huge hole in her vocabulary.
“I didn’t make this,” he said with a shrug, although there was something like pride on his face. “Come,” he said, opening the door into the barrel-filled room and letting out a waft of pungent, earthy air. It smelled like blood and dirt, like this man’s soul: wood and minerals and the mountain and something too human to describe.
She followed Luc between the rows of barrels to the other end of the room, where he gathered two stemmed glasses and a long instrument also made of glass.
“I thought you weren’t a winemaker. Just a farmer, you said. That’s it.”
“I’m not a winemaker.”
“Then what’s this?”
Shrugging, he said, “An experiment. Here, I show you.”
He handed the glasses to Abby and led the way to the barrel closest to the door. It had what looked like a small, round, plastic cork in the center. Slowly, carefully, Luc worked it out of the hole, which was ringed in purple. Once it was open, he slid the long glass implement inside, finger raised. She watched as he expertly pressed his finger to the dropper, lifted the entire mechanism from the hole, and put it over a glass, emptying the contents by lifting his finger again. He stuck the top back in, screwed it down, pounded it a few times, and moved to a barrel on the other side of the room to do the whole thing over again, into the second glass.
“What is that?”
“It’s called a wine thief.”
“Because it steals from the barrels?”
“Precisely.”
“This must all be so…scientific.”
“Yes?” He smiled. “There is some chemistry. Making wine is temperature dependent. Fermentation and aging and so on. But there is some alchemy involved, too, I think.”
“Alchemy?”
“That mysterious blend of things. You know, like”—he sniffed—“the air. Mountain air versus flatlands. Instinct, earth. Not particularly precise.” He waved his hand in the air. “Maybe Mother Nature or Bacchus or—”
“Bacchus?”
“The Roman god of grapes. Wine andeu—how do you say—débauche?”
“What’s… Oh. Debauchery?” Abby asked with a jolt of excitement. “There’s a god of debauchery?”
“Of course. In Greece, he was Dionysus.” He paused, eyes on Abby’s. “There are gods for everything.”
