The heat wave that had scorched California had passed, and before I knew it, September had arrived, bringing cooler air.
September was harvest season for a great many fruit trees, but Napa, where Cabernet was the mainstay, was in the period just before harvest when growers timed the peak of water stress, so it was still somewhat relaxed. The truly busy season would be from late September to mid-October.
That was why I had come out to the pear orchard in Lodi before dawn.
“Want some gloves?”
“Yeah. Wasn’t it dark driving all the way here from Napa?”
Chloe’s eyes were brimming with affection as she took a pair of cotton gloves from the office and handed them to me.
“It was fine. I drove slowly, and there weren’t many cars. What about you?”
“I slept in the office last night.”
Seeing Chloe point toward the back of the office, I felt sorry for her and stroked her shoulder.
“No bugs came out?”
“I was so tired I didn’t even have time to look for bugs.”
In truth, knowing full well that fleas were scarier than pests, I had completely rebuilt the Lodi office and designed the interior as a concrete structure. Perhaps because there were no crevices for them to live in, the inside of the office stayed pleasant, without a single bug or flea.
Even so, I knew it had to be hard for a woman to sleep alone on a makeshift cot, so I couldn’t help feeling bad for her.
“You’re keeping the door securely locked, right?”
“I’m pretty timid, so I’m thorough about things like that, okay? Let’s hurry out.”
A bluish dawn mist, cool and damp, lay low over the pear orchard. The frail saplings Chloe had sweated over and planted three years ago now had trunks that had grown fairly thick, proudly supporting the heavy golden fruit.
Perhaps because harvest was imminent, Chloe looked haggard, as though she hadn’t slept properly for days, but her eyes were brighter and clearer than ever. With a hand in a white cotton glove, she removed the bag wrapped around one of the pears hanging at the end of a branch and carefully cupped it.
It was so huge that one fruit was about the size of her face. While we had been growing them wrapped in paper, Chloe had called me several times to ask if it was normal for the pears to keep growing like that.
“Brian, will it really be okay? During the cold snap, we poured in so much water the field practically turned into a swamp, and during the heat wave, we ran the mist all day. What if the osmotic balance inside the fruit got ruined and the flavor is bland or the flesh has gone soft?”
Chloe, who had now accumulated quite a lot of knowledge, had agriculturally valid concerns. When plants are exposed to excess moisture, the fruit can grow larger, but the solid content, such as sugars and acidity, can become diluted, easily resulting in so-called watery fruit. In particular, the Niitaka pear’s strength is its abundance of moisture, but for that very reason, it is a delicate variety that quickly turns mealy if the balance collapses.
I picked up the refractometer and smiled leisurely.
“You’ve become a full-fledged farmer now, haven’t you? Don’t worry. We worked hard at the end to give them water stress, didn’t we? Look at the skin. The green tint is completely gone, and it has a clear bronze color. Those white lenticels embedded on the surface standing out like that are proof that the fruit expanded to its limit while maintaining its internal density.”
“Mm... So you’re saying it’ll be fine, right?”
“Yeah. Shall we pick one first? Come here.”
I placed my hand over Chloe’s and taught her the harvesting method again.
“Third-year saplings still don’t have a fully hardened framework. If you twist it sideways to pick it, you damage the branch’s cambium layer and ruin next year’s flower buds. You have to support the bottom of the pear with your palm and lift it gently toward the sky until it goes ‘pop.’ Like... this!”
Pop!
When I carefully cut the stem with pruning shears, a clear snap broke the silence, and the heavy fruit settled into her palm. For something harvested from a third-year tree, its size was hard to believe. It was a large fruit that easily looked over 700 grams.
“It’s heavy! This is incredible!”
“Haha, this is a real Niitaka pear. It’s not the same as just any Asian pear.”
We picked one more, then immediately headed to the makeshift table. With trembling hands, Chloe took up a paring knife and peeled the pear. The moment the skin came off, clear juice poured onto the cutting board. I collected the juice with a dropper and placed it on the lens of the refractometer.
Chloe’s eyes filled with shock when she saw the number on the digital screen.
“14.5 Brix...? Brian, isn’t this machine broken? The average sugar content for Asian pears is 11 to 12 degrees, but this one is 14.5?”
At her astonishment, I shrugged and put a slice of pear in my mouth. A crisp, refreshing crunch rang out.
“It’s not broken. Mm... how should I put it? Maybe call it a paradoxical harvest? Anyway, there are three reasons. The first is the water we poured in during the cold snap. Thanks to the latent heat of the water we filled the ground with back then, the roots didn’t freeze and kept functioning. For third-year saplings, their capillary roots developed exceptionally wide. In other words, we grew the engine that draws up nutrients twice as large as everyone else’s.”
But at my explanation, Chloe tilted her head.
“That’s strange. Back then, we filled the farm with a lot of water to overcome the cold snap. I heard pears lose sugar content when there’s too much water, and we didn’t just give them a lot of water—we filled the field with it. Wouldn’t that definitely cause a problem? More than that, can the roots not freezing and continuing to function during a cold snap really be a reason the sugar content is good? If that assumption is correct, then wouldn’t it make sense to fill the field with water every year, even when there’s no cold snap?”
“Oh, very, very sharp.”
When I admired Chloe’s question, she narrowed her eyes.
“I’m not stupid, you know.”
“Haha, sorry. First of all... it’s true that too much water lowers sugar content. But filling the field with water during the cold snap was about early root activation. Pear tree roots begin functioning only when the ground temperature rises to a certain level, like in early spring, and if the roots establish themselves early, the leaves that emerge in spring become much larger and thicker. I told you before—what role do leaves play in fruit trees?”
“Factories that make sugar.”
“Exactly. So filling the field with water during the cold snap didn’t directly raise the sugar content. It built a big factory capable of making a lot of sugar.”
“Ah...”
“But it’s possible to wonder, like you did, ‘Then wouldn’t filling the field with water every spring always be good?’ There’s one fatal problem with that. If you keep the field full of water under normal conditions, the soil lacks oxygen, and the roots can rot.”
“Waterlogging, right?”
“Right. At the time of the cold snap, I judged that the risk of waterlogging was better than the trees freezing to death. Was I going to let them all die from the cold, or take the risk of waterlogging and raise the sugar content? I chose between those two.”
Only then did Chloe fully understand what I meant.
“So in the early stage, a lot of water doesn’t matter. As long as you manage it thoroughly, right?”
“Right. The terrain drained well, and our effort to drain all the water as soon as the cold snap ended and prevent waterlogging worked on the trees.”
“Ahh... I see.”
Chloe looked at the trees with eyes that had once again grown teary, then took a crisp bite of a slice of pear. At the taste of the pear, so sweet it was almost overwhelming, tears welled in her eyes and streamed down.
Everything she had gone through over the past three years had probably flashed through her mind in that instant. Planting the saplings, preventing diseases and pests, fertilizing, protecting the young branches from winter, and this year, even the cold snap and the heat wave...
After making it through all of that, if tasting the first fruit didn’t move you with a flavor that carried all those hardships, then you probably weren’t a farmer.
“It’s so delicious...”
To others, it might have seemed strange for her to cry while saying it was delicious, but not to me. Rather, as I wiped her tears with my hand, I forcibly swallowed the emotion rising in my own throat. If I didn’t, I might end up hugging her and bawling, telling her she had worked hard.
“You did well. The trees recognized your efforts.”
“Mmm... I guess they did... But it’s so delicious.”
At first, Chloe cried from emotion, but after eating a few slices, her tears vanished completely, and she grinned, saying it was delicious. Seeing that she had calmed down, I continued my explanation.
“The second reason it could be even tastier is the concentrated nighttime mist cooling we operated during the heat wave. When nighttime temperatures are high, plants burn off the sugar they made during the day to use as energy. This is called nighttime respiration. While everyone else’s trees were consuming sugar all night because of the hot ground heat, we put our trees into a state of light sleep using cold water from 1,000 feet underground. Thanks to that, the energy produced during the day wasn’t consumed and accumulated intact in the fruit.”
Chloe nodded as if entranced by my explanation. She, too, had studied plant physiology in school, but she seemed deeply impressed by my ability to apply data so precisely in the field and create a miracle.
“Amazing...”
“Haha, isn’t it?”
“Then what’s the third and final reason?”
“What else? The thing we were frantically clinging to for two weeks.”
“Ah! You mean stem water potential, SWP!”
Having already run the cherry orchard, Chloe was familiar with using SWP readings from a pressure chamber to apply water stress and concentrate the sugar content and density of the flesh. The difference from the Niitaka pears was that we had struggled to control it even more precisely than when growing cherries.
“Right. The trees sensed a crisis in reproduction and reduced the moisture in the fruit while concentrating the solids and sugars. If the roots we grew during the cold snap created quantity, then the thirst right before harvest completed the quality. That’s how something like this was made.”
“Oh... The trees are so admirable.”
As Chloe looked around the orchard in admiration, a black sedan entered through the farm’s access road.
The person who got out of the sedan was Marcus Jensen, the director of fresh foods at Bristol Park Market, which operated about fifty high-end grocery stores across California. Famous for being demanding, he stocked his shelves only with organic produce and top-grade varieties, and he had become acquainted with Chloe that year by carrying Royal Tioga.
Since Itochu Corporation had taken most of the Royal Tioga volume and Marcus had secured only a mere ten percent, he had been waiting for the shipping season of the Niitaka pear orchard, another farm Chloe ran, and had already come running.
Chloe and I, who had known he was coming today, smiled brightly and waved at the man in his mid-forties as he approached.
“So this is the place. Lodi really is somewhere that puts me in a good mood every time I come. And this sweet scent... truly fantastic. Ah, did I mention it? Our VIP customers are already making a fuss, asking when next year’s cherry season is. But...”
His eyes widened as he approached the other whole pear beside the one we were tasting.
“It’s big, isn’t it?”
“Absurdly big. Haha... Just looking at the size, you could almost mistake it for a melon...”
“It’s a little smaller than a melon.”
“Haha...”
With an expression of awe, he cupped the pear as though stroking it.
It was a golden fruit of overwhelming size, larger than a grown man’s two palms put together. Its skin was smooth without a single blemish, and the dense lenticels showing through on it sparkled as if jewels had been embedded there. It had a presence on an entirely different level from the Western pears, like Bartletts, commonly seen in California or the small Asian pears.
Chloe skillfully peeled the pear and placed it on a plate. Clear juice trickled from the tip of the paring knife, making it look irresistibly appetizing. As if bewitched, Marcus picked up a slice of pear and put it in his mouth.
“Oh!”
Marcus’s eyes flew open. He even forgot to chew, surrendering himself to the wave of flavor spreading through his mouth.
“My God... This is impossible.”
He hurriedly swallowed the juice and shouted as if he couldn’t believe it.
“How can the flesh be this dense when the fruit is this large? Usually, large fruit is bland, but this is as cool as drinking ice water and as sweet as concentrated honey! There’s absolutely no off-flavor left on the tongue, either... Chloe, are Niitaka pears originally like this? I don’t think the ones I’ve had before were this impressive.”
Chloe glanced sideways at me, standing beside her, and replied.
“There was intense effort involved. A great deal of research, too. I think farming absolutely requires effort, and the knowledge to support it.”
Marcus, who had merely thought she was saying something nice, became so enthusiastic he looked ready to lick the juice off his fingers. He immediately pulled a fountain pen from his pocket and held out a blank contract.
“Chloe, let’s sign a contract right now. I’ll pay three times the price of Asian pears. No, four times is fine. I want to make these Niitaka pears Bristol Park’s main launch product this fall.”
His offer was extraordinary. The weakness of the low volume, since the saplings were only in their third year, instead became a powerful marketing weapon: a limited-edition premium. Twenty-five dollars, thirty dollars... the unit price of the pears soared to unimaginable numbers.
Chloe gripped my hand tightly. The nights we had spent tossing and turning through cold damage and heat waves were returning to us now as golden juice.
“I can’t wait to see how the market reacts...”
“Me too.”
This time, I was as eager to see the market’s reaction as I had been with the wine.
213 The Niitaka Pear Appears! (2)
At three in the morning, at Lodi’s pear farm, a rural farm where nothing could be seen except the moonlight and starlight in the night sky.
“Turn on the lights!”
At Chloe’s shout, dozens of powerful searchlights blazed to life across the pear farm. In front of the vast farm, which spanned eighty acres—about ninety-eight thousand pyeong, the size of forty-five soccer fields—more than a hundred people had gathered. And before them, Chloe, small and slender, stood on the back of a pickup truck, holding a megaphone as she shouted to the workers.
“Everyone, attention! We will now begin harvesting the first shipment of Niitaka pears!”
Chloe’s voice rang out through the megaphone, resounding across the entire farm blanketed in dawn mist. More than a hundred veteran workers all fixed their eyes on her. In dusty jeans with a radio at her waist, she looked every bit the charismatic farm owner.
“The most important thing in today’s harvest is not speed, but handling! Remember that a pear’s skin is as thin as paper. Anyone not wearing cotton gloves, put them on right now! Keep in mind that even a single fingernail mark will drastically reduce its market value. Since today’s wages are three times the usual rate, for every pear damaged through carelessness, twenty dollars will be deducted from your pay!”
She swept a sharp gaze over each of the crew leaders standing at the front and continued.
“The harvesting method is exactly as we trained yesterday. Support the bottom of the pear with your entire palm, lift it only fifteen degrees toward the sky, and it should come off with a snap. Anyone who yanks it off by force and damages the flower buds on the branch will have fifty dollars deducted! Understood?”
“Understood, boss!”
The workers’ answer thundered back. Even the veterans who had once scoffed at her as a young lady now called her boss and followed her, after seeing her walk around all night with a lantern during the last heat wave, checking the nozzles.
“Good. Team One, start from Section Three! Team Two, check the temperature of the pre-cooling water tank at the sorting house entrance. If it doesn’t stay at 41°F, or 5°C, radio me immediately! Team Three, stand by at the wooden-crate packing line. If anyone leaves out the ethylene absorber, you’ll be warned on the spot!”
When Chloe raised her radio and gave the signal, the workers began moving in perfect order. She climbed onto a forklift herself and scanned the flow of the entire farm from above.
“Section Four, Jack! Don’t stack the boxes too high! The weight of the pears will crush the boxes at the bottom. Stack only two layers and move them straight to the pre-cooling room!”
“Section Seven! Get more light over there! I told you, if it’s dark, you can’t distinguish the color of the pears! If they don’t have that golden sheen, don’t harvest them!”
Her instructions were precise and firm. Seventy people were assigned to harvesting alone, ten to transport, and thirty to sorting and packing. To command that many people, the charisma of the farm owner was absolutely essential.
“Brandon! Check the print condition on Label Sheet Number Three, the one that says ‘Golden Miracle’! If it’s even slightly smeared, discard it, no exceptions. We can’t put anything with so much as a speck of dust on the shelves at Bristol Park!”
“Yeah, yeah, I got it! Calm down. What, you think my eyes are just decoration?”
Brandon was supposed to be at the almond farm, but he could hardly pretend not to know when the family farm was shipping fruit. No, even if he wanted to pretend, his father Frederick would not have let him. So Brandon, who had been forced to go to bed early yesterday, had gotten up an hour ago and come all the way here, rubbing his eyes.
He inspected the boxes of pears to be shipped one by one, checking their packaging. Beside him, his father Frederick was sweating profusely as he loaded pear boxes onto the truck, leaving him no chance to rest at all.
“Ha ha, who would have thought my daughter would become such a fearsome farm owner?”
Frederick smiled warmly as he watched his daughter, who had changed completely. He had been out helping since dawn, and although his body was tired, his heart was proud and full.
When they first took over the farm, plowed under the tomatoes, and planted pear saplings, he had wondered when it would ever amount to anything. Farming might be a battle against time, but this had seemed far too distant. He had been worried because he had seen far too many cases where, when something took too long, the farmer grew exhausted or made mistakes and problems arose. And yet, seeing them produce such perfect fruit, he could not help but feel moved and amazed.
“Hmph... I could do even better than Chloe, you know?”
“Of course. I know.”
“If it hadn’t been for the cold damage and the heat wave...”
It was unfortunate, but this year’s almond crop had suffered major damage. They had barely made it through the cold damage, only to take a direct hit from the heat wave, causing the “black almond phenomenon” and greatly reducing their marketability.
The black almond phenomenon referred to a condition in which high temperatures caused the oil components inside the almonds to go rancid or the flesh to turn brown and burn. Almonds with such burnt embryos tasted bitter, and their commercial value disappeared completely. Since more than forty percent of the crop had suffered this black almond phenomenon, it was fair to say that this year’s harvest had effectively failed.
But neither Frederick nor Brandon fell into despair. That was because they had hit the jackpot with the cherry crop, enough to more than make up for the failed almonds.
“That’s right. This cold damage and heat wave were extremely harsh. But let’s think of it as a good experience. Abnormal weather like this will come more often from now on.”
Frederick patted his dejected son on the shoulder.
“I know. I think so too. Maybe next year, we’ll be able to sell them for even more than cherries.”
Unlike before, his son no longer slacked off much these days, and Frederick was proud of him. Sometimes he even invited his girlfriend to the farm and worked alongside her as a date. The sight was so lovely that Frederick had personally made barbecue for them on the farm.
“When I looked into it, almond prices have gone up again this year. The heat wave probably pushed prices up, but they say export volume itself has increased too.”
“Mm...”
Brandon kept his hands moving diligently while listening to his father.
“There’s talk that prices next year will be set around this year’s level. If that happens, even an average harvest next year will raise revenue by twenty percent.”
“I really hope so.”
“So...”
At that moment, Chloe, with a radio at her waist, approached at a brisk pace.
“Dad, that pallet over there needs to be loaded straight into the refrigerated box truck set to five degrees. If we don’t remove the field heat, the sugar content could change before it even reaches Beverly Hills.”
A normal pear harvest would end with picking them and putting them into boxes, but Brian and Chloe’s system was different. Immediately after harvest, the pears were brought into cold storage for pre-cooling, wrapped in specially coated paper with ethylene gas absorbers enclosed, and placed in wooden crates.
“You rascal, don’t worry! I’ll transport them properly. Though this is the first time I’ve seen a pear harvest carried out like a scientific sweep operation. Is it because you did what Brian said? Is that why the fruit is this big and sweet?”
“Of course. Isn’t it amazing?”
“Bring some home too.”
“No. We don’t even have enough to sell.”
“My goodness, you’ve become a full-fledged penny-pinching farm owner.”
When the first shipment truck passed through the front gate of the Lodi farm and began heading toward Los Angeles, Chloe finally returned to her father’s side and let out a long sigh.
“Haa... The reaction will be good, right?”
Frederick looked lovingly at his daughter’s face, beaded with sweat, and patted her shoulder.
“They’ll probably fall over in shock.”
“They probably will, hehe...”
A smile filled with confidence settled on Chloe’s lips.
---
Bristol Park Market in Beverly Hills, Los Angeles. This was where wealthy people with the most discerning palates in the world and Hollywood stars did their grocery shopping.
At the store entrance, in the central hall with the best natural light, an unusually large standalone display had been installed. On top of the display, draped in black silk, pears lit by gentle lighting were exhibited like jewels.
[Golden Miracle: A golden miracle forged amid the cold damage and heat wave of 2008. Niitaka Variety]
Beside the description board written in elegant calligraphy was a price tag that was hard to believe for a single pear: forty-five dollars each. People who had come out early in the morning to shop stopped in their tracks and whispered.
“Forty-five dollars for one pear? Are they insane? I know this is Bristol Park, but this is a bit much.”
A man known as the private chef of a famous Hollywood actor snorted and tried to pass by. At that moment, store director Marcus Jensen appeared in person, holding a tasting plate.
“Sir, please do not look at the price tag. Try this piece first. If you think it is inferior to any fruit you have ever eaten in your life, I will pay for your entire shopping basket today, free of charge.”
At Marcus’s confident attitude, the chef picked up a piece of pear as if intrigued and put it in his mouth.
Crunch!
A crisp sound echoed up to the store ceiling. The chef’s eyes trembled as if in a spasm. The moment he bit down, it filled his mouth like cool honeyed water that had been trapped inside an ice cave suddenly exploding.
“My God... Oh my god!”
The chef stood there blankly, looking down at the pear with an expression of disbelief. He was not savoring the taste; he was being overwhelmed by it.
“What is this? How can a pear taste like this? The flesh... the flesh is so crisp it’s like biting into sugar crystals, and the texture is truly... outstanding. What on earth is this cool fragrance? It’s like... how should I put it, frozen champagne shaved into slices?”
At his exclamation, the housewives and elderly gentlemen gathered around began picking up tasting forks one by one. Then exclamations burst out simultaneously from all over the store.
“Wow! Honey, try this! It’s not a pear, it’s like some kind of sherbet!”
“This is unbelievable. I don’t even like fruit that much, but this... I could sit here and eat ten of these.”
“Hey! Pack up two boxes of these right now. No, three boxes! I’ve decided this will be dessert for tonight’s party!”
People no longer looked at the forty-five-dollar price tag. To them, a special fruit was a means of showing off their own special status. Considering that background, this was an opportunity they absolutely could not miss.
Less than an hour after they had been displayed, the stacked wooden crates began visibly dwindling. Marcus, his face flushed with excitement, ran to a corner of the store and made a call.
---
Around lunchtime, just as Chloe, who was now clearly growing more and more exhausted, was taking out the lunchbox she had brought for herself, her cellphone rang loudly. From the speakerphone came Marcus’s voice, almost a scream.
“Ms. Chloe! Send more trucks right now! Right now!”
“What’s going on, Marcus? Is there a problem with the pears?”
“Rather than a problem... to be precise, what I mean is that this store is in complete chaos right now! The ladies of Beverly Hills are fighting each other to get the pears! In just one hour after launch, half of the first shipment is gone. We need to raise the price. No, price isn’t the issue. We don’t have enough stock!”
“No...”
“Why?”
“We’re sending them, so don’t rush me too much. They’re really selling out, right?”
Marcus, with his abundant experience, grasped the situation. She must have been preparing to sell them elsewhere if Bristol Park failed to sell them all.
“Ms. Chloe, I told you. We’ll buy them all. Not just the entire first shipment—we’ll take exclusive supply of every pear on the farm. Send them all to us!”
“For now... all right.”
The refrigerated warehouse was still piled high with pears harvested from dawn through the morning. They were pears from an eighty-acre farm, and even if each tree had barely borne ten pears, there were more than twenty thousand trees alone. That meant the amount to be shipped this year came to a staggering two hundred thousand or so.
If packed in boxes of five, that would come out to around forty thousand boxes, and it would take at least four or five full days of nonstop harvesting to make that possible.
If Bristol Farm could take in all of that, then as far as Chloe was concerned, there was no need to look for other buyers.
“Ah... I shouldn’t have called.”
Though pleased, Chloe bit her lip, feeling as if she had made some kind of mistake. She had expected things to go well, but she had never imagined it would be to this extent. She had already contacted the person in charge at another market, so now having to cancel the appointment left her embarrassed.
In truth, Chloe’s decision had been perfectly reasonable. The Grade A produce they could sell to Bristol Farm would be thirty percent at most, and the majority would have to be considered slightly inferior. She had intended to sell those elsewhere, never imagining that Bristol Farm would ask for everything.
But then—
“Boss! There’s someone outside looking for you.”
Chloe’s face twisted just as she was about to call and cancel the appointment.