Page 66 of Gone With the Wine

“And partners.”

“Right. Partners in wine!” I chuckle at my own joke and eat more spaghetti, sucking in a strand through my lips.

Rosa doesn’t laugh. Jake purses his lips.

“I’m going back to the lab for a while.” I pause. “Oh. Do you want me to do the dishes? Since you cooked?”

“No. That’s not the point. Bee?—”

“Okay. Sorry I’m not around much. Let’s make a point of dinner together Saturday, okay? See you later!”

I do still have some work to do in the lab, but I am, in fact, so, so tired. As I cross the yard and walk through the trees to Bar Down, my pace is that of a ninety-year-old woman with two artificial hips and arthritis in both knees. In the lab, I flick on the light and sink onto a stool at a counter.

I stare blearily at the binders of notes with color-coded tabs, charts, and piles of sticky notes tracking all the winemaking—press fractions, punchdown schedules, fermentation temperatures—and various logbooks. There’s also a log tracking daily sanitation schedules, everything from scrubbing floors to sanitizing empty tanks and steaming barrels.

I still need to transcribe my notes and log results, study the weather forecast, calculate grape tonnage and review the Brix charts, and then plan for tomorrow. We need to know which grapes are coming in to sort them, how much red and white we’re getting, because there’s a different press process for each.

I’m trying to move away from binders and sticky notes, so I open one of the spreadsheets I’ve set up on the computer and start transcribing the audio notes I recorded on my phone this morning. My head is bent and the lab is silent other than my own voice, so when the door opens, I shriek and nearly fall off my stool. I whirl around to see Jansen standing in the door.

“Oh God.” I press a hand to my chest. “Sorry. What are you doing here?”

“What areyoudoing here?” He advances into the room, shutting the door behind him.

My voice is still droning from my phone and I reach for it and pause it. “Finishing up the stuff I didn’t get done this afternoon.”

He sighs. “Bianca. It’s eight o’clock. Did you eat dinner?”

“Yes! I did! Spaghetti with Nonna’s Bolognese sauce.”

“Okay, good. Still. You need some rest.”

I sigh. “Rosa says that, too.”

He moves closer. Alone in this space, my skin tingles even more than it does when he’s around. “Maybe because it’s true.”

I blow out a breath. “I just have to finish a few more things and then I’ll go home and go to bed.”

The air around us becomes charged at those words. I ignore it.

“Can you check the weather forecast?” I ask him.

“Sure.” He knows what to do now. He pulls up the website on his phone and makes notes about temperature, winds, humidity. We briefly discuss that and the areas still to be harvested and I make notes for tomorrow on my iPad.

“What else can I do?” he asks quietly.

I want to tell him nothing, I can handle all this. But I’m tired. And he owns the winery. So I say, “Maybe you could finish transcribing my voice notes? I’ll work on my plan for tomorrow.”

“Sure.”

We both focus on work for the next while. When he finishes and turns off my phone, he says, “Is all this absolutely necessary?”

“Yes.” I give him a wry smile. “I know it seems like a lot. Like I’m being super persnickety.”

“Persnickety.” One corner of his mouth lifts.

I watch it, mesmerized. Then I say, “Yeah. I’m a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to this stuff, but you have to be. Harvest is a really busy time. If you don’t keep good records and stay organized, the potential for major screw ups is huge. Plus we can learn from everything and do better.”

He nods. “I guess I understand that. Were you like this in Argentina?”

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