Nine
The first thing Sadie always noticed when she walked into the winery was the smell of sugar and alcohol. It was as if the aroma had seeped into the pores of the wood, and the building breathed it out.
It was a wide-open and welcoming space, with vaulted ceilings, shelves and shelves of bottles, and plenty of room for customers to relax and enjoy themselves. Jazz music played on the sound system. In the tasting room, couples sipped glasses of the new Hollander vintage while sitting at the steel-topped bar. Ceiling fans whirled gently overhead, and the sound of popping corks filled the air.
One of the quirkiest things about the Hollander estate was the aesthetic difference between the winery and her grandparents’ home. The winery building was a simple, elegant farmhouse—functional and subtly chic. But their house was like something out of Versailles. She’d never known which style truly represented her grandparents. Maybe the hidden journal she’d discovered would give her some insight into her grandmother.
She’d been trying to work in the library again, thinking about the journal and whether she had any reasonable right to read more of it, when her mother called her to come help with bottling.
“Gran invited us to label the new Cabernet,” Leah said. Sadie was relieved for the excuse to abandon the pretense of writing. She could use a distraction. She’d considered, briefly, telling her mother about her discovery of the book club journal, but she hesitated to admit her snooping.
She was happy to help in the bottling room. At this point, she needed a distraction from her distraction!
Sadie passed stairs that led to the second-floor mezzanine—a comfy space with armchairs, a fireplace, and wide windows with views of the vineyard—and headed to a door marked Do Not Enter. She opened it, walking into a cavernous space that held three hundred oak barrels, all imported from France. The bottling room, just off to one side of the barrels, had floor-to-ceiling windows so the elaborate machinery could be viewed in action. She remembered when her grandparents had traveled to Italy to learn how to use the equipment that enabled them to pack a thousand cases a day.
Her mother was already inside wearing protective goggles.
“We’re just waiting for Gran,” she said.
One of the assistant winemakers waved them into the room.
“Mrs. Hollander sent a message to start without her.” He handed them both a pair of sound-canceling, protective headphones. “We’re doing the Petit Verdot today.”
The bottling machinery took up most of the space in the glass-enclosed room. It was a conveyer belt that filled, labeled, and corked the bottles of wine. The area around the machine was cluttered with giant plastic bags filled with corks, reams of labels, boxes of empty wine bottles, and white cardboard cases that would be filled with the finished bottles and taken out the back door by forklift. It was a mostly automated process, but it still took a few people on the line to feed those items through the system.
“Sadie, I’m putting you in charge of corks,” the man said, motioning for her to stand near the cluster of bags.
“Okay,” she said, dutifully putting on her headphones. The senior winemaker, Chris Kessler, materialized next to her and jotted something down in a marble notebook. Sadie glanced at the pages, reading Chris’s notes about pH levels and other numerical calculations she didn’t understand, with a few comments like “no sugar addition” and “topped everything in house.” There was something uniquely compelling about winemaking. It was the magical combination of art and science. She had conveyed her appreciation once to her mother, and her mother had responded, “It’s in your blood.”
“So why did you decide not to work at the winery?” Sadie had asked. The question had been posed many years earlier. She was still waiting for an answer.
Her mother positioned herself at the end of the line, helping with the cardboard boxes. The booming apparatus was turned on, and Sadie began feeding the corks into the machine. Each bottle closure was accompanied by suction and a loud sealing sound. It was rhythmic and, now that she was committed to the activity, almost relaxing.
“Stop, stop, stop whatever you are doing!”
Her grandmother rushed into the room, waving her arms wildly. Someone hit the switch, and the machinery ground to a halt. Sadie removed her ear protectors to find out what was going on.
“Is there a problem, Mrs. Hollander?” the winemaker asked.
“Who approved these labels?” Vivian said.
The labels featured swathes of red, green, yellow, and black, like an abstract expressionist painting. The winemakers looked at one another.
“Asher,” said Chris.
Vivian marched over to the rear of the room, where a shelf was filled with empty bottles that represented each of the winery’s varietals, each marked “height standard” in black Sharpie to make sure they were filled uniformly. She grabbed the Petit Verdot bottle with the classic Hollander label in soft eggshell with simple blue lettering and walked it over to the winemaker, waving it.
“This is the label. This has always been the label.”
“I think the idea was to . . . liven things up?”
“Why doesn’t anyone listen to me?” Vivian marched back to the doorway. “Don’t do any more bottles until you hear from me. No one touch a thing!”
Sadie turned to Leah, who simply shrugged.
So much for a calm, pleasant distraction.
Vivian, still reeling from the news that the winery was in dire straits, could barely process the flagrant disregard for her opinion about the labels. Heart thumping with indignation, she fired off another text to her son. Again, no response from Asher. She searched the winery and vineyard for him. When she still failed to locate him, she went to her last resort: calling Bridget.
“Oh, hi, Vivian. He’s here with me—at the pool!” Bridget said.
Vivian somehow refrained from correcting her with “Mrs. Hollander.” It drove her crazy that the woman had never hesitated in being familiar with her. Now that there was an engagement, it was too late to course-correct.
How, oh how, had everything fallen so far out of control?
She opened the gate to let herself onto the pool deck. Sure enough, Asher was lounging on a chair, his hair and swim trunks wet, headphones over his ears. As if there was no work to be done. As if they weren’t fighting for Hollander Estates’ survival.
Bridget sat beside him in an obscene white bikini, displaying her various tattoos.
“Taking the day off?” Vivian said, walking toward them, suddenly very hot in her white blouse and skirt.
Asher pulled the headphones from his ears.
“Hey, Mom. Just an early break. What’s up?”
“A very early break, I’d say. I can see how an hour of work might be exhausting.” Sarcasm was never ideal, but neither was expressing her frustration through shouting. “I was just in the bottling room and got some surprising news about new labels. Do you know anything about that?”
Bridget, perhaps sensing the tension, jumped up and pulled on a pair of turquoise terry-cloth shorts so tiny Vivian failed to see the point. “I’m going to get iced coffee,” she announced. “Anyone else want anything?”
“No, thanks, babe,” Asher said, reaching out to squeeze her hand before they parted. He watched her walk into the house with his tongue practically hanging out of his mouth.
Vivian crossed her arms. “Asher. The labels?”
“Oh, yeah. John asked for the switch.”
“John?”
Asher nodded. “I ran it by Dad, and he okayed it.”
John Beaman was their head of wholesale. It was one of the company’s most important positions, and a very demanding one at that. They had a high turnover rate, but John had been with them for over a decade.
Leonard had recognized from the beginning that the job of their wholesale reps would be different than those in other places because of their proximity to Manhattan, the restaurant capital of the world. “We are the only wine region in the world that can send people to sell who work on the farm, too. That’s an advantage. People like to have contact with the farmer or person who helped make it,” he’d told her on more than one occasion. At the same time, no one in Manhattan had any interest in New York State wines. Their sales reps had their work cut out for them.
John and his team of reps—all men—walked into restaurants and liquor stores with bags full of samples and asked the person in charge of buying to give Hollander Estates a try. She remembered from her own days of knocking on doors that it was a job that never ended. You might get on the wine list of the best restaurant in the country and they’d be pouring your wine by the glass for a month, only to suddenly replace it with a wine from France. It was rare to have a wine stay on a list for even one full year. So when John got feedback from the field, Leonard listened. It was one of the few instances where he did.
“Last week your father told me that changing the labels was your idea.”
Asher squinted against the sun. “Yeah. But it was John who said something about needing them to be modernized.”
“We never had a problem before now.”
“I guess it’s time to try anything we can to, I don’t know, maximize revenue.”
Vivian sat on the chair Bridget had vacated. She instantly realized her mistake when water seeped into the back of her skirt. She jumped up, but she wasn’t ready to leave. She had one more question for him, one that had been burning her up since Leonard told her about the sale.
“How long have you known about the decision to sell the company?” she said. The tension in her gut told her she’d avoided asking him thus far because she didn’t want to know the answer.
Asher sighed. “A few weeks?”
The answer stung. Leonard liked autonomy when it came to the business, but she had helped build the winery. She was his wife. There was no justification for Asher knowing about this before she did.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Mom, come on. It’s not my place. Dad was still working things out—he told me he’d tell you as soon as the decision was final.”
“It never crossed your mind that I might want some say in what happens to the business I helped create?”
Asher adjusted the towel behind his back and reached for his sunglasses. When he turned back to her, she marveled at how handsome he was. She just wished his looks weren’t his only asset.
“Mom, is this really about the engagement? I’m sorry I didn’t tell you ahead of time. But I know how you feel about Bridget, and I didn’t want to argue with you.”
“The engagement is the least of your mistakes lately,” she said, patting down her hair. She could feel that the flurry of activity all day had set it askew. “But then, dealing with conflict has never been your strong suit.”
But it was hers. She walked off in search of her husband.