Louis Garraud’s fingertips trembled. As if he could not believe what he was seeing, he took off his glasses, roughly wiped them with his sleeve, and put them back on. But the scene before his eyes did not change.
Only a week ago, these were saplings burning to a sickly yellow. Those fragile lives he had been certain would perish miserably under the Bordeaux sun were now radiating a deep, vivid green.
“This... are you saying this change truly happened in just one week?”
Louis Garraud asked in a trembling voice, as though he still could not believe it. He crouched in front of one of the saplings and carefully touched its leaves. The sensation against his fingertips was firm and fresh. The chlorosis caused by iron deficiency—the inability to produce chlorophyll—had completely disappeared.
Standing beside Louis Garraud, I indifferently held out a data sheet.
“These are the chlorophyll measurements. They’ve risen 42% compared to a week ago. Looking at the data alone, it’s fair to say they’ve essentially returned to normal.”
Louis Garraud snatched the paper from my hand and read down the page. He might have spent his entire life believing in experience and tradition, but that did not mean he was a fool who completely ignored data or failed to understand numbers.
After confirming the figures printed in my hand, he furrowed his brow and said,
“How... without changing the rootstock, how did you make them absorb iron from this mass of alkaline soil? This goes beyond common sense in Bordeaux.”
His voice was full of bewilderment. A murmur broke out among the estate owners and CIVB inspectors who had been holding their breath as they watched, but I simply stood with my arms crossed, observing the commotion.
At that moment, André, whom I had come to recognize as one of Christian Moueix’s people, approached and asked,
“Just what method did you use to accomplish this?”
Meeting his reverent gaze, I answered calmly.
“First, I drilled holes through the tightly packed strata and gave the soil room to breathe. Second, I helped the grapevines absorb nutrients.”
The reason I did not explain anything more specific was simply to make things inconvenient for the other side. After all, if Christian put his mind to it, he could use the CIVB inspectors to find out exactly what changes had occurred in the soil.
Of course, even if my method spread, it would not matter much. Even if they knew how it worked, those already using rootstock resistant to limestone would have no reason to drill holes in their land. Besides, no one in Bordeaux would be bold enough to follow me—someone making a fuss about producing white wine here—and tear out all their Merlot.
When André hesitated and fell silent, I raised my voice so everyone around us could hear.
“Tradition is important. But tradition must not become an excuse to kill the vines. Well, that doesn’t mean I’m desperate to defend an AOC classification. Making white wine in Bordeaux is something no one would do if they had even the slightest intention of receiving AOC status. Even so, the reason I cooperated with the inspectors sincerely was to make it clear that my actions were not for the sake of gaining a classification, but for the sake of this land and these vines.”
At that moment, Daniel, who had been quietly watching, came to my side and held out a stack of documents to Louis Garraud. It was a “Request for Confirmation of Compliance with Farmland Management Regulations and Withdrawal of Administrative Sanctions.”
“Inspector, the week you promised has passed. It has been proven that we did not damage the terroir beneath the surface—rather, we have been managing it in optimal condition. May we consider the discussion regarding sanctions against the estate concluded?”
Daniel’s voice carried a mixture of suppressed joy and pride. Louis Garraud stared in a daze for a long while at the vineyard of Belle Époque, which had transformed into a sea of green.
It must have looked to him not like some ruined laboratory left behind by a mad American winemaker, as he had vaguely imagined, but like a sacred ground managed with more precision and science than any prestigious château in Bordeaux.
With trembling hands, Louis Garraud took out his fountain pen. In the signature section of the document withdrawing the administrative sanctions, he roughly wrote down his name.
“Brian Choi... you won. No, that terrifying knowledge of yours broke our stubbornness. I acknowledge it.”
Louis Garraud pulled his hat down low and turned away. Before leaving, he looked back one last time at one of the saplings.
“I will be watching to see whether that unclassified wine you intend to make truly contains the soul of Bordeaux.”
“By all means.”
---
While Brian was in the midst of his war with the earth in Bordeaux, France, Alexander Valley in Napa Valley was not in very good shape. Armando’s thirteen-acre vineyard had problems anyone could see at a glance.
The Cabernet Sauvignon leaves, which should have been bursting with moisture ahead of veraison, had already lost their vitality and curled in on themselves. The grapes hanging from each cluster had been sunburned brown or had shriveled black like raisins. It was the result of the vines cutting off the pathways to their fruit in order to preserve moisture.
To anyone’s eyes, it was a scene no different from a declaration of bankruptcy, but Armando was gathering the scorched remains into buckets with more vigor than usual. His voice as he encouraged the dozen or so workers was filled not with despair, but with energy.
“Let’s finish the target harvest quickly and all eat together! Lunch is Cuban sandwiches, everyone’s favorite! I packed them with meat and cheese, so you’ll be overflowing with strength. Hahaha!”
Armando’s hearty laughter rang through the dry vineyard. A woman followed a few steps behind him.
“Are you really... all right, Armando? This isn’t something you can just laugh off.”
It was Sienna, heir to Harrington Winery, a major figure ranked among the top three in Sonoma County for Pinot Noir. Lately, her routine consisted of digging through the latest viticulture papers at the university or coming here to Alexander Valley to talk with Armando about Redwood Winery.
Of course, it was not some crude approach like industrial espionage. Brian’s core knowledge was being kept strictly secure, and even if she knew it, Armando was not the kind of person who would readily open his mouth.
Her visits were born of pure intellectual curiosity and a strange sense of rivalry.
Armando, too, had as much desire to make that knowledge his own as he had respect for his friend Brian, so whenever Sienna came by, it had become their routine to clash over the theories they knew and study together.
“Yeah! I’m really fine. No, I’m actually excited!”
Armando turned his head with a broad smile on his sweat-beaded face. His coppery Mexican skin shone healthily beneath the noon sun.
“I’m more than fine. Look at this.”
He picked up one shriveled, unappealing bunch of grapes from the bucket and showed it to her. Sienna frowned.
“No matter how I look at it... they’re just spoiled grapes. The skin tissue has been destroyed by sunburn. The anthocyanin levels must be a mess too.”
“That’s right. To orthodox winemakers, this is practically garbage. The acidity is destroyed and the moisture is gone. Honestly, I was devastated at first too. I want to make wine that amazes the world, just like Brian. Everyone dreams at least once of hearing someone say, ‘Ah, Armando’s wine? It’s truly excellent.’”
Armando’s eyes, which had seemed sorrowful, suddenly shone brightly.
“But then I changed how I thought. What’s already happened can’t be undone. Once I decided to go back to the mindset I had when I first started this farm, strangely enough, these shriveled grapes with abnormally skyrocketing sugar content began to look like black diamonds to me.”
Sienna looked at him in confusion.
“Are you serious? More than half the harvest is burned.”
“Completely serious. If wine is the art of balance, vinegar is the aesthetics of concentration and oxidation. Sienna, I measured the Brix of these grapes, and they were well over 28. If they were used for ordinary wine, the alcohol content would shoot past 16%, the yeast would die, or the balance would collapse and it would become a harsh liquor. But for vinegar, high sugar content is the finest foundation for producing abundant acetic acid.”
Armando burst one grape between his fingers and showed her the thick juice. It was closer to black than purple, a liquid as viscous as honey.
“See? Even the texture is different, right? This isn’t just moisture evaporating. The Maillard reaction between the sugars and amino acids inside the grapes has already begun on the vine because of the heat. The acidity is gone, so it’s ruined as wine, but in vinegar, Acetobacter will take over that role. They’ll devour the alcohol and spit out intense acid. But what matters even more is the caramel flavor hidden inside this scorched taste.”
“Caramel flavor?”
Sienna was an expert when it came to wine, but the world of vinegar was unfamiliar to her. Armando excitedly continued his explanation.
“Yeah. Before I made wine last year, I always made vinegar, and every year, there were grapes like this—shriveling after being hit hard by sunlight—somewhere between as little as about 0.5% and as much as 2 or 3%. Especially those grapes over there, the ones that take the afternoon sun from the west head-on between two and four. At first, I was going to throw them away, but since it wasn’t wine and was just vinegar, I tried making it with them. And then they gave off a flavor different from the usual grapes. So I asked Brian about it, and he said exactly this: ‘If I were growing the best grapes for making vinegar, I’d deliberately make all of them like that.’ That was when I realized it. Ah, these are the ideal grapes for making vinegar.”
“Ha, from our perspective, they’re grapes we’d throw away completely...”
“Of course. A winery that doesn’t make vinegar wouldn’t know the value of these grapes. When grapes are exposed to extreme heat, they’re reduced by the sun like this and give off a caramel aroma, but that flavor can never be created artificially. If I make balsamic-style aged vinegar with this, the heat of Alexander Valley will be concentrated directly inside the bottle. They may be grapes that failed as wine, but as vinegar, they can become a masterpiece.”
Armando’s eyes sparkled like a boy’s as he spoke passionately. Without realizing it, Sienna held her breath and watched his lips and expression.
She had thought the old Armando was simply an ordinary immigrant youth, someone who admired women from good backgrounds and hovered around her to win her favor. But the man standing before her now did not look like someone who had sunk before the wave of a great natural disaster. He looked like a pioneer who had mounted that wave and begun sailing toward a new continent.
‘This man... truly doesn’t break.’
A strange thrill ran down Sienna’s back. She thought of the young men from illustrious families who usually hovered around her. At the slightest spell of bad weather, they would calculate insurance payouts and complain, or hide behind their fathers’ wealth and wait for a solution. But Armando’s thirteen-acre farm, which was practically his entire life, had been ruined by a heat wave, and from those ruins, with his own knowledge and passion, he was sprouting hope in the form of vinegar.
His rough, dirt-stained hands, his husky voice charged with passion, and his confident attitude as if laughing at fate’s prank—those things were silently breaking down the cold, solid wall that had pooled inside Sienna’s heart.
“Armando.”
“Yeah?”
“That vinegar you’re making... would it be all right if I helped too? I just... want to watch from the closest place as those black diamonds turn into golden liquid.”
At Sienna’s proposal, Armando’s eyes went round.
“If grape juice splatters on that pretty dress, it won’t come out.”
“I don’t care. Stains can be washed out, and if they don’t come out, I’ll just think of them as medals.”
Sienna smiled and rolled up her sleeves. Armando would never have imagined it, but that day, what he harvested was not only grapes for vinegar.