Chardonnay Charade A Wine Country Mystery

Chapter One Some days I wish my life ran backward, because then I'd be ready for the catastrophes. Or at least I'd know whether there was a happy ending. I own a small vineyard at the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in Atoka, Virginia, where our winters are cold, our summers hot, and spring is the blissful season of growth and renewal. But not this year. On what should have been a balmy May night, a warm air mass moving up from the Gulf of Mexico looked like it was going to smack into arctic winds sweeping down from Canada, causing temperatures to plummet below freezing. A week before Memorial Day, and Jack Frost nipping at our nose like early March. The weather forecaster on the Channel 2 news at noon recommended bringing tender young plants indoors for the night, "just to be sure." A fine idea, unless you had twenty-five acres of tender young grapes. A lot of science and math go into making wine, but most people don't realize it's also a hell of a crapshoot, meaning a hearty dose of guessing and finger-crossing figure into the equation, too. Mother Nature can always pull a fast one when you least expect it, and suddenly you're scrambling -- like we were this afternoon. Normally I play it safe with my money and my business. Last fall, though, an unexpected financial windfall landed at my feet and I did something I swore I'd never do. I spent it. The money would go into clearing more acreage and planting new vines come spring. Literally a bet-the-farm gamble, since we were trying grapes we'd never grown before. I'd expected Quinn Santori, my winemaker, to be as gung-ho about the decision as I was. Of the two of us, he was the risk-taker. Imagine my surprise when he made a case for planting less and using some of the cash to install wind turbines. Quinn had moved here from Napa eighteen months ago and he was still hard-wired for California, where turbines, which protect the grapes from late-season frosts, were common. I'd lived in Virginia for most of my twenty-eight years and we got that kind of killing frost once in a blue moon. And since my family's name was on every bottle of wine that left this vineyard, we did it my way. For the past few months we'd cleared land and plowed new fields. Thank God we hadn't started planting yet. Quinn never said "I told you so" once we heard that weather forecast, but he came close. My father had hired him shortly before he died last year and it had been a marriage of convenience. Leland needed someone to work on the cheap, freeing up money for his gambling habits and low-life business deals. Quinn wanted to make a new start in Virginia after his former employer's decision to add tap water to his wines -- boosting production for a black market business in Eastern Europe -- had earned the ex-boss free room and board at a California penitentiary. When I took over running Montgomery Estate Vineyard nine months ago, I quickly found out that Quinn had a macho streak as wide as the Shenandoah River, a problem with authority, and a habit of speaking his mind with a candor polite folks would call unvarnished. If you happened to be a woman and also his boss, you would call it mouthy. "Now that we've got our back to the wall thanks to you," he said, "the only way we're going to save our old vines is if we move that freezing air away from the grapes. Since we didn't install turbines, we'd better get a helicopter in here. Expensive as hell, but beats waking up and finding we've got a few acres of frozen grapes we could use for buckshot." I closed my eyes and wondered how much "expensive as hell" cost -- not that it made any difference. If I couldn't hire a helicopter, we'd kiss about forty thousand dollars' worth of wine goodbye in one night. At least we were only talking about the whites, since they were farthest along. "I'll get someone," I said. "Don't worry." "You'd better," he said, "because I lCrosby, Ellen is the author of 'Chardonnay Charade A Wine Country Mystery', published 2007 under ISBN 9780743289924 and ISBN 0743289927.