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Dan nodded. “I was thinking how you were the first to tell me that it takes ten years for a vineyard to become itself. That I should be patient and I would get there.”
Murray took the wine, tilting it in Dan’s direction. “I was right, wasn’t I? This has become something lovely. Don’t you think?”
Dan smiled. He knew Murray meant that. But he also knew Murray profited ten million dollars last year, which meant more to him.
Murray smiled back. “I want to make you an offer,” Murray said.
Dan shook his head, impressed by the old guy’s perseverance. “You’ve made it. I’ve gratefully declined.”
“Remind me why?”
“I can’t do what I do for a hundred thousand cases of wine.”
“Five hundred thousand.” He shrugged.
“Five hundred thousand.”
“You thought Sebastopol was going to turn into a bastion of winemaking, didn’t you? It hasn’t happened.”
“Yet.” Dan smiled. “There’s time.”
Murray took a long sip of the wine. “That’s true.”
“More people are coming out. There are two new vineyards up the road.”
Murray nodded. “Also true. I think I passed one on my way in. What is that? Five acres?”
Dan ignored his tone.
“If you’re so sure Sebastopol isn’t going to become anything, why do you want my little vineyard so badly?”
“I don’t. I don’t want it at all, really. I want your winemaking. I want you to come and work for me. You can keep control over your vineyard, which I’ll fund as a thank-you.”
Dan took a sip of his own wine, hoping that Murray couldn’t see in his eyes what that kind of money would mean to him. He would have financial security. And he could still do what he wanted. He could still make wine. He could stay in this house, with his kids, without worrying about it. But that was the thing about how Dan made wine. It wasn’t just about the wine for him. It was about the land and how he was changing it, ten years in or not. He was still getting there, and wherever he was going, he knew that Murray and his offer were going to send him in the wrong direction.
“I’m not going to do that,” he said.
“Well.” Murray tipped the wine in Dan’s direction. “There’s time for that too.”
The Terroir Has a Story
My mother loved to tell a story about the day she fell in love with my father. They were having dinner at a small Chinese restaurant before her performance that night, before he was scheduled to fly back to Northern California. Over stuffed cabbage and pork dumplings, she asked him what a winemaker did. What he actually did: If you do your job, he said, then you make good soil. She liked how he said it, even if she didn’t understand what he was saying. It took her a while to understand what he did mean.
My father believed that the most important aspect of winemaking was the soil. That his wine got better, from year to year, because his soil did. He would monitor his soil carefully, treating it with the nine biodynamic preparations. Preparations made of teas and organic compost, seven of them buried in the soil, two of them sprayed and spread over the vines. Cow horns buried deep into the soil during the winter. No chemicals, nothing added from outside the farm. This created a lot more work, but it also created a more stable ecosystem. This was what he was the proudest of, that he had made the land stronger.
My father said that this was what most people missed. If you took something out of the soil without putting it back in, the wine would suffer. The soil would suffer. You had to figure out how to get it to a better place than where it had started. My father was of the belief that, if you did that, winemaking took care of itself.
Many of the factory winemakers would disagree. After their grapes were off the vine, that was when they started intervening, making their wines do what they wanted them to do, adding chemicals and eggs and sulfites to aid the fermenting process, to refine their wines. My father didn’t add anything to the grapes. His winemaking facility was stark: a sorting table; a destemming machine; open-top fermenters. He would wait for the grapes to ferment on their own. Spontaneous fermentation. Where for fifteen to thirty days, the grapes begin the process of turning into alcohol. No help from chemicals or additives. No help from cultured yeast to make fermentation predictable. The patience it took was extraordinary. The faith it took too.
My father said this was the best part of winemaking. When the grapes you had taken such good care of did their thing, not because you were forcing them, the wine beginning to ferment because it was ready. The wine fermented because after the care you had taken with the grapes, they knew what to do. They used their own juices to move toward the wine they were meant to be.
If that sounds hokey, you should watch it happen. It was inspiring every time. The grapes sat in their tanks. My father punched them down—until, like that, the grapes revealed themselves as something new. My father able to give them the foundation they needed and step back.
Here’s why my mother fell in love with him, she said. She was sitting at the Chinese restaurant, hearing him talk of soil, about the importance of foundation. And she heard the rest. His belief, at the center of his winemaking, that with work, you can give something the strength at the beginning that it needs later on. Before it even knows how it’s going to need it.
Ben and I walked through the vineyard, Maddie a few paces ahead of us. She was quiet, focused, staring at the grapes—at certain shoots—as if she was trying to figure out which were the good shoots, which ones should get to stay.
Ben touched my wrist. “So I have a plan if you’re ready to hear it,” he said.
