Wine forged in the confinement of wood and darkness emerges with character, carrying the stain of all it has endured.
—From the notes of Alessia Alighieri
30
ALESSIA
Matteo is dying. No matter what I do, that reality plays in my mind.
I’m angry with him, so I haven’t gone to him or even called him.
How dare he not tell me? In what world does it make sense that I find out about how ill he is from Davide Fontana?
I know, I know, I shouldn’t be petty, but I’ve been dealing with way too many people letting me down, and I have earned the right to be as small as I wish.
It’s been two days since I came back from Florence, and I have ignored calls, voice, and text messages from both Alba and Nico. I deleted them even before I listened to or read them.
I am angry, and I’m holding on to it.
The result is that I can’t sleep.
So, at ten at night, after a day that started at six in the morning, I find myself in the cellar, which smells different once the wine is down.
Damp stone and oak mingle with the faint tang of spent yeast.
Gone are the green urgency of new fermentations and the frantic hiss of carbon dioxide rushing free—what remains is sugars spent and yeast settling like ghostly dust on barrel heads.
The room exhales.
The tanks, heavy with liquid, rest.
Barricato—when the wine rests in barriques and over time, the French oak allows it to breathe slowly, deepening the flavors with whispers of toast, vanilla, spice, and smoke, while the tannins soften and the wine gathers quiet strength and structure.
This is the phase no one romanticizes.
There are no bright photographs or clinking glasses—only the hush of taut discipline, of vigilance, the steel-trap restraint of knowing nothing can be rushed.
I like it here.
But then, I love winemaking as a whole. You have to love it to endure the heartbreak it can bring—bad weather, disease, a rogue fermentation, a cracked barrel—so that all the care and work you’ve poured in can be undone in a single season.
My boots give a hollow echo against the flagstones.
The barrels stand in regimented rows, sentinels of French oak: tight-grained and as my father said, expensive. Each bears a chalk inscription—parcel, clone, date—etched in dusty white strokes.
Inside, the wine is still finding its boundaries, restless and alive. Too much meddling now would bruise it; too little would let it wander. I know in my bones how to strike the right balance.
Unlike with my marriage, apparently.
I’m avoiding my bed because it makes me sad to be therealone. I miss Nico there the most. So, rest has become impossible.
I replay Nico’s face when I told him I didn’t trust him and see his wounded disbelief in technicolor.
I press my palms against a barrel’s cool oak head and feel the pulse of liquid beneath my skin.
While I labored among vines to make this—stained fingers, aching back, heart bare—men I love were speaking my name in rooms I wasn’t in. Their presumption that silence was kinder has left wounds that will scar.
At least my father never pretended to see me as an equal. Papà’s cruelty is honest. Nico’s, by contrast, was coated with concern, which makes it worse.
