I'll track sugar depletion curves and monitor volatile acidity.
Harvest is the most visible part of the year.
But the cellar is where vintages are either saved—or lost.
For now, I can rest a little and spend time doing things I can't when I'm busy, like FaceTime with my sisters.
Alba is so busy that she's hardly ever in one place. One time, she FaceTimed from the jet and fell asleep mid-conversation.
Toni didn't come home this summer from university. She's interning at an architecture firm in Milan.
"So…how is married life?" Alba asks.
It's been three weeks since Florence.
Three weeks since Chiara cornered me.
Three weeks since Nico asked questions he still didn't know how to ask.
And in those three weeks, something has…shifted.
Not dramatically, but enough that I trust it.
"He's…ah…he's been texting me," I tell them as I put my feet up on the long wooden table under the pergola in my backyard that bleeds into the vines stretching out in disciplined green.
It's late afternoon. The sun has cooled, and the air smells of cut grass and rosemary. Cypress trees stand like sentinels beyond the lawn. This is the best place in the whole estate—and where I normally work. I hardly ever go into the cellar that I was in charge of having built two years ago.
I pour some Franciacorta, Italy’s answer to Champagne, into my glass. I don’t make this—another competent Alighieri winemaker does, and does an impressive job. After all, some evenings you just need a little sparkle in your wine,and in mid-August, when the heat is at its peak, it’s delicious to sit in the shade and enjoy the bounty of Tuscany.
"Sexting or texting?" Toni wants to know.
I laugh.
She's in her apartment in Milan, and she looks happy. She hasn't for a while, and I have worried about her, but lately it appears she's in a better place.
"No. But things like…how's the merlot?"
"Is that sex talk for winemakers?" Toni muses.
Alba snorts.
"We…ah…well, you know what happened at the reception at the Palazzo?—"
"I still think you should've told Nico about how that bitch Chiara accosted you," Alba cuts in. "How dare she!"
"There is something so inelegant about a woman staking a claim on a man." Toni takes a long draw of beer. She's going through a rebellious phase and is not drinking wine.
"Exactly, men should claim women, not the other way around," Alba agrees. "In any case, I always feel that when women go after a man, it's some kind of hangover residue where they want things that are not good for them, like McDonald's French fries and mediocre men."
I listen to them and think about the short conversations Nico and I have been having almost every day.
It started simply when he sent me a photo from a wine shop in Paris.
Nico:Saw this shop carrying Pietra Alta and thought of you.
Me:The 2019 vintage. Very nice.
Nico:Very pricey! At a restaurant the other day, they were selling your Cab Franc for five hundred euros.
