Chapter 11: Kessel

"Fifteen hundred cases," Augie said. "In a good year."

"He's selling sixty thousand."

"With your grapes' name on it."

I slid off his kitchen table and fixed my dress.

My face was hot.

So were my hands, for different reasons now.

"He's going to fill those bottles from the tanker," I said. "Forty tons won't do it. He'll buy more."

"And every bottle says 1904."

"Every bottle says the year my great-great-grandfather planted those vines."

Augie picked the letter up off the floor and put it back in the junk drawer.

"So what do we do?"

We.

He said it without thinking.

I noticed.

"We make the real one," I said. "And we make it better than he's ever tasted."

The first two weeks of a red wine are the worst weeks of your life.

The grape skins float up and form a cap on top of the juice, thick as a mattress.

Every few hours somebody has to climb up and punch it back down with a steel plunger, or the wine spoils from the top.

Day and night.

Augie took the noon and six o'clock punch-downs.

I took ten at night and two in the morning.

At two in the morning the cellar smelled like bread and jam and a bonfire.

The tanks ticked and bubbled in the dark.

The first night Augie came in at two anyway, in a T-shirt and pajama pants, with two cups of coffee.

"Your shift is at noon," I said.

"I couldn't sleep."

"Why not?"

He handed me a coffee and looked at me over his.

"You know why not."

I punched the cap down hard and purple foam came up to my wrists.

He laughed at me.

After that he came every night at two.

We didn't talk about the kitchen table.

We didn't have to.

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