Fifty-eight

A winemaker’s true genius reveals itself the moment he or she calls for harvest to begin.

Leah had grown up watching her father make that decision at the end of every summer, like a magician, reading the grapes for that moment. For the first time since her girlhood, she’d spent the past few weeks with him as he walked the vineyard acres, tasting the grapes, examining the skin thickness, the berry texture, all of his senses exquisitely tuned to the fruit.

If they picked too early, the tannins would be bitter. If they waited too long, the sugar levels could get too high, leaving them with “flabby” wine. While Leonard had made a few bad business decisions, mistiming a harvest had never been one of them.

He finally made the call in late September. They would begin, as always, with the Chardonnay.

Sadie arrived from school the night before and was up at dawn to work side by side with Mateo and Javier and the rest of the field crew picking the Chardonnay grapes. Harvesting the grapes was not a high-tech operation; everyone went to work with their handheld clippers and bins. They started as early in the day as possible, when it was still relatively cool. If skins accidentally broke on their way from the field to the winery, they could begin to ferment if conditions were too hot.

When the grapes were transported from the sorting table—where the team pulled out damaged grapes or leaves—to the crusher-destemmer machine, Leah and Vivian focused on final preparations for the Harvest Circle.

They’d lost count of the RSVPs, but it was somewhere between two hundred and three hundred women. Her parents’ failure to maintain a consistent customer database led to their outreach being disjointed; some customers were reached by phone, some by email, some by snail mail. Regardless of how they managed to reach people, the message had been the same: Come celebrate with us: this wine is for you.

The biggest hurdle had been convincing her father to relinquish his usual place at the ceremony.

“You’re asking me, the head winemaker, not to come to possibly the last Harvest Circle ceremony at my own vineyard? I know that you’re still upset that I didn’t welcome you into a position here when you were younger, but this is just petty . . .”

“Dad, I’m not upset. It’s not that I don’t want you there. But I need to offer a very specific experience to these customers in order to get the results we need. I’m asking you to trust me.” He had agreed. Maybe it was because the grapes were looking like the best crop in a decade and he wanted desperately to get them to market, maybe it was because his damaged ego wanted to prove the baron wrong, or maybe it was because he actually did trust her. She didn’t know, and it didn’t matter. The important thing was that he wouldn’t stand in the way of her putting the plan into action.

By dusk, the veranda was lit by candles and filled with the backdrop of her mother’s favorite album, Carole King’s Tapestry, playing over the sound system. It was as festive and lovely as Leah had ever seen it.

Peternelle’s buffet included late-summer favorites: goat cheese tarts, Brussels sprout salad, corn on the cob, steak skewers, and lettuce wedges with blue cheese. White wine chilled in silver ice buckets, and the air smelled like the fresh-cut asters and chrysanthemums from Vivian’s garden.

But appearances, as the saying went, could be deceiving. None of the guests arriving would ever guess that the entire winery was at stake. The truth was, Leah wouldn’t know until the end of the evening if they had just celebrated a new beginning or bade Hollander Estates a grand farewell.

Vivian stood at the foot of the veranda steps, greeting each guest. Her mother, always elegant, had outdone herself for the occasion, wearing a billowing Alexander McQueen dress in pale pink organza with embroidered flowers. Bridget, off to the side, photographed all the arrivals. The women showed up in waves, in groups and alone, all carrying a little piece of home to contribute to the ceremony. Leah was touched to see many familiar faces: Roya Lout from the cheese shop with her mother and her mother’s book club, women from the wine and cheese classes, Anouk the real estate agent, and many people she’d seen taking selfies with her mother on that very spot during the course of the summer. But one familiar face—both familiar and strange at the same time—stood out from the crowd: Delphine Fabron.

Leah had found her through social media, happily living in Boston with her husband—one of the restaurant wine reps she had gotten fired for sleeping with those many years earlier.

Delphine appeared on the steps of the veranda swathed in a black cashmere cape and wide-legged black pants. She wore high Louboutins, and her formerly gleaming dark hair, now a striking white silver, loose over her shoulders. The only blight on her otherworldly beauty was the creases around her mouth that signified her as a lifelong cigarette smoker. Leah remembered the days when her parents constantly admonished her not to smoke near the oak room, that the cigarettes would “blunt” the wine.

“It does not hurt us in France,” she used to say. Delphine, the rebel. Delphine, the first woman to be cast out of the winery. She herself was the second. Now they were reunited.

“Thank you so much for coming,” Leah said, leaning in to accept Delphine’s double-cheek air kiss.

“Little Leah!” she said in the same lyrical accent that had so delighted Leah as a girl. “Hearing from you . . . life is just full of surprises.”

Vivian stepped forward to embrace her. “I never stopped thinking about you,” she said.

“Nor I you,” Delphine said, still with a smile that hinted at mischief. “Read any good books lately?”

Leah and Vivian shared a look.

“Actually, we both have,” Leah said. “And we’d love to talk to you about it later.” She checked her phone. Sadie still hadn’t returned from her trip to JFK to meet Maria Eugenia’s flight. She couldn’t start the ceremony without them. More important, she couldn’t finish without them: Leah planned to have everyone take seats after the Harvest Circle ceremony. She would give a speech about offering them an exclusive chance to preorder a case of the rosé they would make from that night’s starter yeast, and conduct a Q&A about harvest and winemaking. Sadie would go around with her digital credit card reader and process any orders they might get.

She checked her phone; Sadie texted that they were still twenty minutes away because of traffic on the Long Island Expressway.

“Let’s get these bottles poured,” Leah said to her mother and Peternelle, who was one step ahead as always and had a full tray of Cabernet Franc. The air filled with the sound of corks popping, the fizz of sparkling white filling flutes, and the buoyant laughter as people greeted one another.

“A toast,” Leah said, climbing up to stand on a chair and raising her glass. “To friends, to harvest, to the next great vintage of Hollander Estates wine that will be in no small part possible because of all of you here tonight.”

Everyone raised their glasses with big smiles, unaware of how literally she meant her words.