A week later, I headed once again to Deer Ridge Country Club, where Chloe lived. After driving for over an hour and arriving at her house, Chloe came outside again when she saw the car I had driven in. She was wearing a cream-colored knit top and jeans, and objectively speaking, she was pretty.
“Wait a moment.”
I took the three cases of Seracia out of the car one by one and carried them into the house. In the process, Chloe’s older brother came out to help, sticking out his lower lip in dissatisfaction, but I pretended not to notice.
“Is this it?”
After we had finished moving everything, Brandon picked up a bottle of Seracia from one of the cases and examined it with interest. Apparently, being upset that his younger sister had taken the cherry farm from him was one thing, and being intrigued by wine made from the farm’s cherries was another.
“Hahaha! You’re here!”
“You came again. Good to see you, Brian!”
Chloe’s parents, who had been in the living room, came out to greet me warmly, but when they saw the three cases of wine stacked by the entrance, everyone’s attention shifted that way.
“Honey, is this the one?”
“That’s right. Let’s have a look.”
Frederick pulled out a wine bottle and examined it in exactly the same posture as Brandon; seen from the side, father and son looked completely alike. When he saw the wording on the back of the label stating that it had been made with cherries from Harris Orchards in Brentwood, he broke into a broad smile.
“Very good. I like it very much.”
“If you like it that much, why did you ask for it for free?”
When I brought up what I had heard through Chloe, Frederick gave a slightly embarrassed laugh.
“Wouldn’t it be all right to give me one case for free?”
“No. You’re taking half the sales, and yet you ask for a whole case for free? Maybe one bottle.”
The reason I had brought three cases was ultimately because Frederick had requested to buy Seracia. Since the minimum purchase quantity was three cases, that was what he had had to buy, but even so, Frederick did not seem to think he had bought too much.
“So I bought three cases, didn’t I?”
Seeing Frederick looking satisfied as he held the wine bottle, his wife, Amelia, pointed out,
“Honestly, you want to show it off more than you want to drink it, don’t you?”
“Of course! Naturally. Once it’s officially released, I’m going to hand it out to every farm owner in Brentwood. How envious do you think they’ll be? They’ll want to make the exact same thing themselves, but there’s no winery that will turn their cherries into wine like this. They’ll probably go searching every winery in California.”
In truth, Frederick’s words made quite a bit of sense. After all, it was common knowledge that no matter how large a cherry farmer was, a farmer who earned secondary profits through a processing company made overwhelmingly more money than a farmer who simply sold cherries.
Even handing over one hundred tons of cherries to Redwood Winery would bring in only half the profit of receiving a mere twenty percent of the revenue from selling the wine.
“All right, all right. Come on in. Brandon, stack the wine cases in the pantry.”
“Okay.”
Unexpectedly, Brandon seemed to listen well to his parents; even while wearing a rotten expression, he did what he was told without much trouble.
Now that I thought about it, I had heard he had been furious because his younger sister had taken the cherry farm from him, but it was surprising that he had not rebelled by leaving home or anything and was simply enduring it. Was this normal?
“Come sit over here.”
Frederick seated me at the dining table in the living room. Then he took out a bottle of Seracia and began opening it with a wine opener.
“You don’t mind if I open the one I’m going to drink now, do you?”
“Of course not.”
“I’ve been thinking about it constantly since that tasting that day.”
“…Actually, it came out at about eighty percent of the quality I had in mind.”
At those words, Frederick’s hand, which had been turning the opener, stopped dead.
“Really? Eighty percent?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“There are several reasons, but most of them are winery secrets, so it’s difficult to tell you. In any case, that’s how it is.”
“Hah, I can’t exactly refuse to believe you… If most of them are difficult to talk about, that means you can tell me one or two, doesn’t it?”
“Hmm… The sugar content was a little low.”
At that, Frederick nodded as if he understood.
“I suppose it would be. Cabernet Sauvignon or Pinot Noir usually comes out in the mid-twenties Brix. But isn’t that something you have to accept?”
From his perspective, it was a reasonable thing to say.
“At the moment, there was nothing we could do about it.”
It was a somewhat strange remark, but Frederick decided to let that part pass for now. I was a guy with so many secrets that he did not look like he would satisfy his curiosity even if he asked, and on a happy day like today, he did not want to focus on something that could not be resolved immediately anyway.
Glug, glug, glug…
“You know the sound wine makes when it falls from the bottle? I like that sound so much. It’s like drinking in the anticipation of the wine before actually drinking it.”
He was a true drinker. I almost asked whether he was an alcoholic, but for Chloe’s sake, who was sitting beside me, I let it pass kindly.
“You really love wine.”
“Don’t you?”
“I’m only twenty years old.”
“…Now that I think about it, that’s true. But how do you make something like this?”
“Science.”
“Science?”
“Yes. Chloe’s mother may not be a good cook because she’s good at science, but surprisingly, if you’re good at science, you can become even better at cooking. Farming and brewing are the same. Even if you don’t like alcohol, if you know the exact formula, you can produce the quality you want.”
Frederick was impressed by my words.
“Amazing. And reassuring, too. In other words, you’re not relying on your own taste or senses, but strictly following something like a concrete and detailed recipe?”
“That’s right.”
“Then the quality will remain consistent in the future.”
As expected of a businessman, he picked up on the most important part of what I had said.
“More or less.”
He nodded, then took a sip of wine. After expressing his own private emotion with an indescribable expression, he poured some into Amelia’s glass, then into Brandon’s and Chloe’s as well.
“Do you have any guess as to why I made these children compete?”
“…I’m not sure. I don’t really know.”
He slowly swirled his wineglass and said,
“Children these days don’t know how to sacrifice. They don’t understand the value of time, either. They don’t understand the importance of land. All they like are pop stars, movies, dramas, and the like. And they think working on a farm is hard and unfashionable. Unfortunately, I thought our children were not very different.”
“I wasn’t like that.”
Brandon immediately cut in, but Amelia suppressed him with a blunt remark.
“You weren’t? Even though you never came out to the farm until your sophomore year of high school, no matter how much your father asked you to help?”
“Back then… I was studying.”
“What were your grades like again?”
“……”
Brandon shut his mouth, and Chloe quietly turned her head toward the window. Seeing his daughter like that, Frederick chuckled and said,
“That one was a cheerleader until middle school, too. It was only when I told her I’d cut off all her allowance if she didn’t study agriculture that I was able to send her all the way to Vintage High School. Well, since she ended up making such an excellent friend there, I suppose it was an outstanding choice.”
“As for me, I’m glad I came to know a reliable cherry supplier.”
“Heh heh. As expected, I feel like I can talk to you.”
He seemed to have some misunderstanding about me, but I stayed quiet.
“To continue, I kept finding both of them unsatisfactory. So half as a joke and half seriously, I made them compete. Only then did both of them start paying attention to the farm. To be honest, it was gratifying and satisfying. And if things had gone badly, I was really thinking of not handing the farm over to either of them.”
“Dad! That’s too much!”
Brandon complained, but Frederick instead raised his glass and said to his son,
“In any case, didn’t you each get one?”
“……”
“To be honest, I was going to sell the farm without passing any of it down.”
At that bombshell, Chloe’s family was startled.
“You never said anything like that before.”
When Amelia asked in surprise, Frederick drank his wine and said,
“I had been thinking about it. To be honest, because you showed no interest in the farm, I had a hard time of it too. I wondered whether I should keep operating it. And even now, because of development expansion, I occasionally get calls asking me to sell the land. They say they’ll give me twelve million dollars for the land. For the cherry farm alone.”
“Really?”
At the words twelve million dollars, Amelia was shocked.
“So I thought about just wrapping it up and going traveling with you. But if I devoted myself to farming, the cherry farm alone would consistently generate at least three million dollars in sales every year, so I simply didn’t want to hand it over for that paltry amount.”
At those words, I became certain that Frederick was not merely farming and selling wholesale, but handling distribution as well. And if he was involved in distribution, three million dollars really was the minimum; depending on how he did it, I thought he could have earned twice that.
And a major farm owner with two hundred acres like this possessed powerful authority in the region beyond the income he earned. In other words, it was not something that could be evaluated by money alone.
Frederick turned his head back to me and said,
“I’m especially grateful to you because Chloe, who seemed to have no interest in anything besides having fun, is now showing interest in farm work. As for the ten tons I sent you, I wouldn’t have minded not receiving a fifty-fifty profit split from the wine. The change in my daughter is worth more than that.”
“If that’s the case, then… as you wish…”
When I tried to accept his proposal without the slightest hesitation, as if I had been waiting for it, Frederick gave an awkward laugh.
“That was how I felt at the time. But now that the wine has come out this well, taking a portion of the sales is something I can’t yield on, not because of the money, but because of my own personal satisfaction. I hope you’ll let that slide.”
“Now that I look at it, Mr. Frederick, you always speak pleasantly, but you make sure to get what benefits you.”
“Hahaha! I’m not usually like that, but this time it just happened to turn out that way. I’ve never lived hearing people call me petty. Now, take out the contract.”
I placed the contract, which had been reviewed in advance by a lawyer, on the table. On the thick stack of draft contract papers, the title [Redwood Winery – Frederick Orchards Supply & Profit Sharing Agreement] was written in bold letters.
Frederick unfolded the papers with a face full of curiosity. The clauses printed in type were densely packed together. From supply quantity to quality standards, the annual unit price increase rate and payment terms, force majeure such as natural disasters, and methods of arbitration in the event of disputes…
“You want the rate of disease, pests, and mold infection to be under one percent? Isn’t that too strict? Depending on the crop conditions, you have to allow up to two percent.”
“Very well. In exchange, if it exceeds two percent, let’s apply a five percent discount to the unit price per ton.”
“This won’t be easy. And the supply price increases three percent every year? Hmm… If prices rise too much, I’ll be at too much of a disadvantage.”
“That’s fine too. If the CPI, the Consumer Price Index, exceeds five percent, let’s link it to the CPI.”
Since the price of wine would rise as well if prices went up anyway, I decided to concede that much.
After we completed all the signatures like that, Frederick burst into hearty laughter and said that he had prepared a party today, with barbecue ready in the yard. He was boasting that he would show me the taste of Texas-style barbecue when Chloe cut in.
“Dad, Brian says he can greatly increase cherry production capacity.”
At the sudden remark, Frederick looked at me.
“Really? When I heard you had given my child a tip about adjusting soil acidity before, I thought you were faithful to the basics. But you’re saying there’s a method that can make production far higher than before?”
“I don’t know about far higher, but on average, roughly twenty to thirty percent is possible.”
To be honest, Frederick could hardly believe it. Twenty to thirty percent was easy to say, but an increase in production of that scale on such a large farm was an enormous matter.
When her father looked surprised, Chloe stepped forward.
“I talked to Brian, and I asked him whether, if production increased and we offset the payment for the corresponding supply volume, he would help us.”
“Wait, so if Brian increases production on our farm, the winery gets to take the cherries for free by that amount?”
“That’s right.”
“And if there’s additional surplus?”
Chloe closed her mouth, and Frederick looked at me. I answered calmly.
“Seven to three.”
“I’m the seven, right?”
“I do have a conscience.”
“Will the cost of increasing production go up?”
“It will probably go down.”
“The cost goes down, but production goes up? Is that possible?”
“It is. If you trust me.”
As a new deal began, Frederick rubbed his hands together once, perhaps because his palms were sweating, then downed the remaining wine in one go. Then he filled his glass again with a glug, glug, glug, and said,
“You mean seven to three of the profit, right?”
“I’m not asking for thirty percent of sales either. Ultimately, you’ll have to sign a direct contract with our farm, and the term will be thirty years. Based on your current profit, we take thirty percent of the increase for thirty years.”
“Hah, thirty years… Well, let’s set that aside for now. Considering inflation, our farm’s profit isn’t much different from what it was twenty years ago. Hmm… I thought I’d be making a hundred and ten thousand dollars a year, but at this rate, it looks like you’ll be the one making that much.”
But I shook my head with a calm expression.
“That won’t be the case.”
“Hm?”
“If you do as I say, it won’t be on that level.”
“You mean the scale will get even bigger? How?”
“There are a few stages, but even just the first one or two will make it much better. And the higher the stage goes, the more sales and profits will surge.”
When I showed him by layering my two hands, Frederick swallowed. For a moment, the thought, If it’s that amazing, what about your farm? crossed his mind, but then he remembered the results we had achieved at the Harvest Fair and the quality of Seracia and Pinot Noir, and he had no words of rebuttal.
“Can I know what those few stages are?”
“The first would be soil management and fertilizer, and the second would be irrigation and pollination. Naturally, strict secrecy is required.”
“Do you think I’m crazy enough to spill secrets like this to my competitors? In any case, after getting past those first two stages?”
“…From that point on, a little risk will be necessary.”
“I’m curious, so let’s hear it.”
I became curious what kind of expression he would make.
“I’ll have you change the varieties. After that, we’ll expand the scope of distribution. I don’t care how far you allow it. Just the first stage will be enough to increase profits sufficiently. Well, it doesn’t matter if you don’t do it, either. I’m only offering this much because Chloe asked me to.”
“……”
Frederick found himself truly curious about what was inside this young Asian man’s head.