Page 136 of DATE
The taste— it was absolutely incredible.
How could wine be this good?!
Her appetite, which had been spoiled in America, had been lowered to its lowest threshold after a year here. Even eating a piece of candy was now a treat.
People were rough with meat, and the wine often had such a strange taste that it was impossible to tell if it had gone bad or if it was meant to be like that.
In fact, not succumbing to dysentery and dying suddenly in the past two years was already a stroke of luck.
Hedy took another sip of the wine, and instinctively, she took another.
This was completely different from any of the wines she had drunk at the palace before.
And… it had a faint honey-like fragrance.
Wait, could this be...
"Did you taste it?" Botticelli smiled with a squint. "I secretly took it from your wine barrel."
"Ah?!"
Seals were something that, for a painter, were no issue at all.
Even if Lorenzo himself had written a note and stuck it on, Botticelli could perfectly replicate it.
The bottle of wine Botticelli brought her was made from the oak barrel that had been charred.
This... could very well be the first barrel of aged wine in the world.
Hedy suddenly felt as though she were drinking a glass of the British Museum, shattered into pieces.
Before this, people could only drink freshly brewed wine; old wine would spoil, turn sour, and become discarded as inferior.
But because of her arrival, the method of aging wine in barrels and storing it with corks had been advanced by a hundred years. This marvelous thing, which shouldn't even have existed yet, had now been born into reality.
Even though it had only been aged for a little over a year, the taste was so magnificent it felt like a dream.
"I'm not drinking... the first glass, am I?" she instinctively asked.
This was no less remarkable than the Americans landing on the moon with the Apollo spacecraft.
"No," Botticelli laughed, scratching the back of his head. "When I went into the wine cellar earlier, I secretly tasted a little. It’s as good as expected."
Hedy sighed and showed him how to decant the wine using a wide-bottomed vessel, then they both enjoyed a glass of the fine wine together.
Sitting there in anxiety wouldn't change anything, so it was better to do something else.
"Why don’t we brew a few more barrels, and let them age a little longer?" Botticelli said, swirling his wine glass, clearly alreadylost in the scent of grapes and honey. "In two years—no, five years—let’s invite Lorenzo and Leonardo to taste this exquisite wine together."
Hedy froze for a moment, then finally smiled.
"Alright."
She took him to custom-order new oak barrels and they studied the method of charring the wood.
Fresh wine was stored in the oak barrels, three large barrels in total.
Hedy casually marked the barrels with English writing in a hidden corner, to remind herself of the different aging and opening years.
