Chapter 9: A Hundred and Eight

"How long?" I said.

Augie read the thermometer on tank four.

"Fifty-eight and climbing. Above ninety, the yeast cooks and it's vinegar."

"How long?"

"Noon. Maybe."

Twenty-six tons of the Old Block.

A hundred and twenty years of vines, and one night of the whole valley on its knees.

Gone by lunch.

"Dry ice," I said.

Augie was already pulling his keys out.

"The welding supply in Santa Rosa opens at six."

"Healdsburg has the ice plant. Windsor has the grocery depot."

I turned to the crush pad.

Sixty people, purple to the elbows, half of them asleep on their feet.

"I need trucks," I said. "Anybody with a truck and a cooler."

Eleven hands went up.

Winona got on the bullhorn and sent them out in three directions.

By seven, the first truck was back from Healdsburg with four hundred pounds of dry ice in feed sacks.

We broke it with hammers on the concrete.

Augie climbed up on the catwalk and I handed the chunks up to him, and he dropped them into the must.

White fog poured over the tank rims and rolled across the crush pad.

Goldie woke up on her lugs, saw it, and screamed with joy.

"It's a potion!"

"Don't touch it, it'll burn you!"

"It's a BURNING potion!"

By eight, the trucks from Santa Rosa and Windsor were back.

The cellar went ninety. Then ninety-five.

Then a hundred and four at eleven, and the air shook over the gravel.

Every hour I climbed the ladder with a thermometer.

Seventy-two.

Seventy.

Sixty-eight.

At noon a man from the next valley drove up with a borrowed chiller on a flatbed and fixed it to the spliced glycol line.

At one, the tanks read sixty-four and holding.

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