Chapter 22: Two Packs, One Line

I opened the gate.

Forty northern wolves came down the hill into a cove that smelled of burnt rum, and ninety Cornish wolves came up the quay to meet them.

For a moment both packs just stood there in the dark and looked at each other.

Then Jago's aunt pushed through to the front.

"Well, don't stand there," she said. "Have you eaten? You haven't. Nobody from the north ever has."

She fed all forty of them chips at midnight, out of the hatch.

They slept on the chapel hall floor in rows, on borrowed duvets and lilos.

I slept at Jago's cottage on top of the covers, still in his jumper, too tired to take my boots off. So did he.

We started bottling at six.

The main cellar was a black shell, so we set up in the chapel hall.

Trestle tables end to end. Casks on chocks at one end. Crates of empty bottles from the lorry driver at the other.

Cornish wolves filled. Northern wolves corked. My girls ran the labels and the counting, because nobody else was allowed to.

The cooper tasted the first glass from a fire cask and went quiet.

"What?" said Jago.

The cooper held the glass up to the window.

"The heat's gone through the oak," he said. "Scorched the inside of the staves. It's taken a smoke on it. Like a bonfire on a beach."

Jago tasted it. Then he passed the glass to me without a word.

It was the best thing I'd ever drunk.

"Burnt Quay," said his aunt, from the doorway. "Call it that."

Nobody argued.

On the Thursday I drove a bottle to the Falmouth restaurant.

The owner tasted it standing up in his kitchen. Then he sat down.

"How many have you got?"

"Two thousand. If we bottle all week."

"What are you charging?"

"Sixty-five pounds."

He didn't even blink. "I'll take two hundred."

I drove home doing the sums out loud to the windscreen.

Sixty from the bank. A hundred and fifty from the shares. Two thousand bottles at sixty-five.

Three hundred and forty thousand pounds. Not a penny over.

If we sold every bottle. And every share.

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