A large truck arrived at the farm.
“It’s here, it’s here! Did you check the count?”
Dad, who had been up preparing since dawn, had a face brimming with delight.
“Yes, I confirmed five thousand bottles.”
“Good. You worked hard. I’ll check the invoice and bring it out.”
Beside me, Armando and Jacob had collapsed, utterly exhausted. They, too, had been out since dawn moving boxes.
Of course, Mom and I hadn’t been idle either. For days on end, we had repeated the process of filling bottles with the vinegar from the tanks and capping them. Even though we used semi-automatic bottling equipment, it still required human hands, so Mom had suffered quite a bit.
“All ready?”
John Anderson, who had gotten down from the truck before I knew it, looked at the mountain of boxes piled up in front of the farm and smiled with satisfaction.
“Yes.”
“You’ve worked hard. All three hundred bottles sold out in a single day, and I guess Bristol Farms thought this would work too, because they’ve been pressing me to get it to them as quickly as possible. They said the response at the food and beverage event was excellent.”
“Ah...”
Just then, Dad, who had carefully checked whether there were any problems with the bottles inside the boxes, came over and shook hands with John.
“We’re counting on you.”
“I’m the one who should be saying that.”
Together with me, my friends, and Dad, he loaded the boxes of vinegar onto the truck and immediately wrote us a check for 17,500 dollars. This was fifty percent of the payment, and for large transactions over ten thousand dollars, we always demanded a fifty percent advance payment.
At first he had looked reluctant, but when Dad argued that, given the difficult circumstances, he couldn’t be sure John would receive payment at the end of the month and hand all that money over to us, John eventually agreed to the fifty percent advance payment.
“Where is it going? Macy’s department store, by any chance?”
John Anderson checked the invoice, which served as proof that we had delivered the goods, then nodded.
“That’s right. I heard a thousand bottles are scheduled to go to Macy’s alone.”
“That many?”
“They seemed to think high-end food ingredients could move quickly.”
“What a shame. If we’d gotten organic certification too, we could have charged twice as much as this.”
“Organic? Don’t tell me you’re trying to get organic certification?”
“Yes.”
At my calm answer, he stared at me with a dazed expression before asking,
“Do you know how difficult and picky that is?”
“We’re already farming organically.”
“You are?”
“Yes. We submitted the application, and an inspector should be coming before long.”
“...You’re moving along step by step, aren’t you?”
Impressed, he patted my head and climbed into the truck.
“Maybe it’s fortunate that it was your family who took over my farm.”
“...Drive safely.”
After the truck carrying the vinegar left, I turned around and spoke to my collapsed friends.
“You worked hard. I’ll pay you generously. Let’s go eat.”
But their faces were somehow ambiguous.
“We’re eating meat! Not Korean food, meat!”
Only after I shouted did the two North American bastards, who didn’t know what was good, get up.
“What are you talking about? I liked it.”
“Would you believe me if I said I’d been waiting for lunchtime since dawn?”
I took the two guys, who were telling obvious lies, back home. After we washed up and came out to the yard, Dad was heating the charcoal. Since grilling meat over charcoal was a common culture in the United States too, it wasn’t that hard to get charcoal.
“Just wait a little!”
Perhaps because we had earned a large sum of money, Dad and Mom’s faces were full of vitality.
“Where’s Mom?”
“She’s in the kitchen washing vegetables.”
“Got it.”
I sat my friends at the table, went inside, helped Mom wash vegetables, and carried out rice, salt, ssamjang, and other things. When the two friends saw vegetables piled like a mountain on the table when we were supposed to be eating meat, their eyes darted around.
“Why this...?”
“We’re going to eat it. You guys can just eat the meat.”
Before long, the charcoal was hot, and the meat went up on the grill, beginning to make a delicious sizzling sound.
“Meat is great. It’s incredibly cheap. I bought five kilograms, and it was only 250 dollars. Even though it’s prime grade.”
Dad was beaming, saying he had bought good meat for cheap.
“It’s definitely nice that meat is cheap in America.”
“Now, your friends eat it like steak, right? Try some.”
When we cut the well-grilled meat into suitable pieces and set it out, Jacob and Armando began devouring it like men possessed. Our family, meanwhile, grilled the meat a little thinner, cut it with scissors, placed it on a plate, and ate.
At first, my friends didn’t understand why we had brought out vegetables, and when they saw me put ssamjang on lettuce and eat it, they found it strange.
“What kind of sauce is that?”
“If you dip it, it’s decent enough.”
“Really? It looks spicy.”
“It’s not spicy at all. If you think that’s spicy, you’re not even a man.”
Perhaps provoked by those words, Jacob copied me, putting meat on lettuce and dipping it generously in ssamjang. Then he slowly brought it to his mouth and bit off half.
“You’re not supposed to bite it in half! In one bite. In Korea, if you bite a wrap in half, people say you’re an uncultured bastard.”
“......”
In the end, Jacob stuffed it all in at once, and satisfaction gradually appeared on his face.
“This sauce... is incredible.”
“Eat it in moderation. The Korean market is far away.”
After seeing Jacob’s attempt, Armando tried the same thing, and the two of them ended up polishing off half a tub of ssamjang.
When we were about comfortably full, Armando asked,
“Is it okay not to go to Chloe’s farm?”
“They finished the pest control, didn’t they? There’s no real reason to go. If they ask for help with the harvest, I can go, but it’s a busy time for me too, so I don’t have much leeway. I can’t skip school either.”
For the sake of getting into college, I couldn’t neglect my studies.
“She seemed kind of anxious.”
“She’ll do fine. And she’s anxious because it hasn’t been long since she started farming hands-on herself. From what I saw, the harvest shouldn’t be a big problem.”
I was curious about the result too. Chloe had to win so we could put cherry wine into the tanks that would soon be empty.
“If Chloe wins, are you going to make cherry wine now?”
“Probably?”
At that moment, Dad, who had been quietly listening, asked,
“Cherry wine? Who’s Chloe?”
“Ah... She’s a friend from school, and she runs a cherry farm. Her dad made them compete over who would inherit the farm. The side with the larger harvest wins, and I helped her a little. In exchange, if she wins, I’m supposed to get cherries at cost.”
“How much?”
“It was about one ton, but her father must have liked my advice, because he apparently mentioned two tons.”
“Hmm... That’s not a huge amount, is it?”
“Probably not? I can’t ask for ten tons at cost, no matter how much I helped...”
“That’s true.”
This time, Jacob cut in.
“Is one ton a small amount?”
“When you make wine, you usually count the minimum in units of a thousand bottles, you know? It’s just about enough to make that much. Roughly 1.3 tons?”
“But once your farm finishes harvesting, you have to make wine too, don’t you?”
“Cherry harvest season is May and June, right? But our harvest season is from late September to October.”
Jacob, who now knew quite a bit about farming, tilted his head.
“That’s on the late side.”
“Cabernet Sauvignon itself is originally harvested later than other varieties. And in regions with high temperatures and lots of sunlight, they harvest in mid-September, but in our area, where the coast isn’t far away, we have to harvest later. Especially if you’re in the highlands, harvesting in mid-October is actually right.”
“Ah...”
“Anyway, if that happens, the tanks will be empty for five months, so if the timing works out, we can run cherry wine through once. If Chloe loses, then there’s nothing we can do.”
“That’d be a shame. Couldn’t you have made more vinegar?”
“The previous farm owner sold off all the grapes that were still marketable. And the parts that were so mushy they couldn’t be used at all couldn’t even be used for vinegar, so they were thrown away, which greatly reduced the amount. I’m disappointed I couldn’t make more too.”
“Then if you made all the grapes from your farm into vinegar, how much could you have made?”
I did a rough calculation in my head before answering.
“Probably over fifty thousand liters?”
At the words fifty thousand liters, my parents were even more surprised than my friends. The vinegar stored in the winery tanks had been twenty thousand liters.
“Fifty thousand liters?”
“My goodness, then that’s more than twice as much?”
My parents, who had been happy enough with the thought that we would earn 140,000 dollars now, gaped at the thought that we might have earned close to 300,000 dollars.
But I chuckled and said to them,
“If we make it into wine, we can earn at least twice as much as what you’re calculating in your heads.”
Mom grabbed my hand tightly.
“Mom is so proud of our son.”
In truth, Mom had supported my becoming an accountant. Like most parents, she had been extremely satisfied by the idea of her child working a white-collar job. But only later did I realize that this meant I would be living off the lives of Dad and Mom, who worked on the farm.
“I’m sure you’ll be proud, but because of your son, there’ll be a lot more work.”
“Mom isn’t tired at all.”
“Dad isn’t tired either.”
Just as emotion was about to seep into my chest, Armando’s sorrowful voice rang out.
“I’m a little tired, though. The boxes were pretty heavy. Ah... my shoulders...”
“...I was going to pay you anyway. Your day wages...”
I gave each of my two friends 200 dollars for their morning’s work and sent them home. Jacob and Armando said it was very satisfying pay for the work they had done and even asked me to call them again next time.
Then I packed a few more things and entered the farm with my parents.
“We’ve strengthened the soil and fertilized it well, so what comes next?”
Dad, who had studied a lot, answered immediately.
“We have to water it.”
“That’s right. Sunlight and water are essential for plants to grow. But most fruits are sensitive to water. Simply watering them well may be good for growing the fruit, but it won’t necessarily make them taste good.”
“Really? Mr. John Anderson had it set so the water would come out at the right times, so we’ve been doing the same. Is there a problem?”
“It’s not so much that there’s a problem, but that it would be good to take a few additional measures to make good wine. If you give the vines a bit of stress through water deficiency, strangely enough, they accumulate anthocyanins and tannins in the grape skins. And those two components are key elements of wine.”
“Oh, really?”
I stood in front of a grapevine and pointed at the drip irrigation hose.
“That releases water according to a set time, right?”
“That’s right.”
“From now on, before we water, we need to check whether the vines are thirsty.”
Mom, who had been listening, lifted the sun cap that women often wore and asked,
“How do we check?”
I showed them the large bag I had brought and took a silver foil pouch out of my pocket.
“From now on, we’ll need these two things.”