After driving for more than an hour and arriving at the winery, I headed to the warehouse, where Dad, who had already been contacted, was checking the vinegar with Armando.
“You’re here?”
“They haven’t arrived yet?”
“No. What was it called… Agricultural Extension… you know the place? They said they’re coming again for another organic farming inspection and hands-on visit. They come like clockwork almost every two months.”
“That’s why organic certification isn’t easy. If they come when I’m not here, just deal with them appropriately. Be moderate when you talk about the fertilizer, and you can tell them everything about how we handle pests.”
“I know.”
Just then, I saw a refrigerated truck approaching from far off. It was a Freightliner Columbia tractor head attached to a 53-foot reefer trailer.
The vehicle pulled the trailer up near the warehouse, backed its rear toward the warehouse at a suitable spot, and came to a stop.
“I’m a little early, aren’t I?”
As soon as he hopped down from the truck, John Anderson came over with a bright expression and handed Dad the invoice first. We had already told him the order details before he came, but we had to leave a clear paper record.
“You want all of them?”
Dad was startled. The invoice listed a staggering 16,500 bottles. Before he came, we had verbally discussed 10,000, but the number had increased in the meantime. In effect, he was saying he would clean out all the vinegar in the warehouse.
“Well, it’s inconvenient for me to come all the way out here again. And on the way, I got calls from Fairway Market and Safeway too. They said rumors about Redwood Vinegar seem to be going around all of a sudden. Even though the price went up, they didn’t care at all and first asked how much stock there was.”
“Haha… well, that’s something…”
“We don’t have time, so let’s get started.”
When the warehouse door opened, cold air rushed out first, along with the sharp, distinctive scent of vinegar. On each pallet, twelve-bottle cases wrapped tightly in shrink film were stacked in layers, and the white labels were stamped in bold with [Redwood Reserve Vinegar] and the lot code.
Beep—beep—beep—
Each time the electric pallet jack backed up, its warning tone sounded, and John Anderson, who had gone inside the trailer, stacked everything neatly from the inside using a manual pallet jack.
There were more than 16,000 bottles of vinegar, but moving twenty pallets didn’t take very long. After loading all the vinegar into the trailer, John Anderson, wearing an old field jacket, smiled broadly.
“You all worked hard. Here’s the check.”
John Anderson immediately wrote out a check for the vinegar. With this, we had earned 225,000 dollars from the vinegar alone. Though it might be far less than selling wine, earning more than 200 million won in Korean money clearly reduced the burden of operating the farm and rebuilding the Silver Oak site.
When I checked the barcode on the side of a case, John grinned and said,
“Checking the case UPC? Don’t worry, there aren’t any scanning problems. If there had been, it wouldn’t have been received in the first place.”
“Haha, yes… I just took a look.”
But John Anderson, who had been smiling the whole time, suddenly looked disappointed.
“I heard you made something called cherry wine? It’s incredibly famous on the restaurant side, apparently. When people hear Redwood, they don’t talk about the vinegar at all. They mention Ceracia? That.”
“Ah… yes. We made it.”
“Then why didn’t you call me?”
For a moment, the atmosphere became awkward, but I spoke as if nothing was wrong.
“The cherries didn’t come from our farm, did they? We brought them in from the Brentwood farm. Everything made from grapes grown on our farm, we entrust to you, Mr. Anderson.”
“That’s true, but…”
If it was a cherry wine that famous, he would have been able to make much higher profits by distributing it, so he seemed quite disappointed. But that didn’t mean I intended to give up profits the winery could secure for his sake.
“We’ll be distributing wine around September. You’ll make money then, so don’t feel too bad. And a contract is a contract.”
From the start, when we signed the contract, we had specified grapes grown on Redwood Farm and processed foods made from those grapes, so there was nothing problematic contractually.
“Ahem…”
“And if you really think about it, when you handed the farm over, distributing vinegar was something you hadn’t even considered at all.”
The contract with him was for exactly two years. From the winery’s perspective, there was nothing to regret.
Perhaps realizing that, John Anderson snapped back to his senses, suddenly grinned, and spoke in a completely different mood.
“What are you talking about? I wasn’t saying that for myself. I was saying it from Redwood Winery’s perspective.”
“From our perspective?”
“Since the winery distributed it directly, you probably couldn’t make a strong claim on the price, could you? If I had distributed it, I could have gotten you a much better price. How much did you distribute it for last year? Per bottle.”
“Eighteen dollars.”
John Anderson flinched for a moment. It seemed he hadn’t imagined we had gotten that much for the cherry wine. But as if he couldn’t give up, he said,
“I’ll get you more than that. Twenty dollars wholesale. How’s that? If you consider the transportation costs and various stresses that come with distributing it yourselves, it should actually be a deal that leaves you with more than two extra dollars per bottle.”
At this point, I felt the conversation was becoming fairly reasonable. When I looked back at Dad, he gave a faint nod, seemingly quite satisfied, and I shrugged as I said,
“All right. Let’s do that.”
“Hahaha! Great. You made the right choice.”
With that, he excitedly drove the truck away from the winery. Watching the truck recede into the distance, I muttered,
“He’s impressive.”
Dad also gave a hollow laugh.
“I was surprised too. He must have been upset, but he used his head and turned the situation around… When he was a farm owner, he seemed incapable, but now that he’s doing distribution, it’s like he’s become a different person.”
“I guess so. It’s fascinating. Just now, I thought he was going to come at us ready to fight. So I thought we could just finish out exactly two years and never see him again, but he managed to extend the contract.”
“But isn’t he overreaching a bit? If he pays a wholesale price of twenty dollars a bottle, how much is he planning to make at retail?”
I personally thought he could easily get more than twenty-five dollars, but objectively speaking, it was a stretch. I didn’t even know whether he had tasted the cherry wine. Since things had turned out this way, I hoped he would also get more than twenty-five dollars and make enough money, because that would be good for us too.
---
Restaurant Lumière in downtown San Francisco.
Around five in the afternoon, when everyone was busy preparing for dinner, the sound of knife blades striking cutting boards continued nonstop on the stainless-steel worktables. In the oven, chicken stock was reducing and spreading its aroma, while off to one side, a blender was running to make salad dressing.
In the midst of it all, the owner-chef, Daniel Roca, carefully looked down at the small glass bottle in his hand. The clear liquid reflected the light and shimmered softly. Redwood Reserve grape vinegar, which he had brought from the Mondavi Institute a few days earlier.
He opened the bottle cap, dabbed a little onto the tip of a spoon, and placed it on the tip of his tongue.
“…The flavor makes no sense.”
Just then, he received a phone call. It was Jonathan Becker, who ran a shop nearby.
“Daniel, what was the name of that vinegar?”
“Redwood Reserve Vinegar.”
“Ah, here it is. It’s on promotion right now. Haha, it says the vinegar that sold out last year has finally been stocked. It definitely doesn’t seem like mass-supplied factory vinegar.”
“It isn’t. I told you to trust me.”
“Twenty-seven dollars? That’s pretty expensive for vinegar.”
“Twenty-seven dollars? That’s all? I would’ve bought it even if it were fifty.”
“It’s that good? Aren’t you exaggerating too much?”
“When you taste it, you’ll thank me.”
“All right. I’ll give it a try.”
After hanging up, Daniel gave a faint laugh. So far, he had told five owner-chefs of restaurants near San Francisco about it. Some might ask why he would share such information, but it wasn’t a product bought overseas, and hiding something sold at a large supermarket all to himself wouldn’t last long anyway.
He had learned over many years of running his restaurant that, rather than doing that, it was much more beneficial to share proactively and receive other information in return.
After hanging up, Daniel set the bottle down on the worktable with a tap.
“How many of these did we bring in today?”
“The Redwood Vinegar? The staff member said they brought ten. But if it’s Redwood, isn’t that the winery that made Ceracia, the cherry wine that’s been pretty hot lately?”
Daniel tilted his head.
“Ceracia? Why haven’t I heard of it?”
“Ah, there was talk about a cherry wine once before, and at the time, Chef, you…”
“What? Did I dismiss it?”
“Haha, yes…”
“Ah… I did that?”
As someone who always preferred proven recipes and traditional wines, cherry wine, which could hardly be called wine in the proper sense, was something Daniel couldn’t accept. That was probably why, even if he had heard about it, it had gone in one ear and out the other.
“I guess the response was good?”
“They say every restaurant that brought it in had a decent response, but rather, because supply was short, they couldn’t get more.”
“Ah! I remember. Wine Review West. It was a wine that even got reviewed there.”
“That’s right.”
“Aha… I saw that and just passed it over, but that was Redwood’s? Now I’m curious.”
“You probably won’t be able to find it at wine shops, and only a few restaurants will have it, so it won’t be easy to get.”
“Can’t be helped.”
Nodding at his sous-chef’s answer, Daniel called over Joey, the sommelier, pointed toward the wine cellar, and said,
“We have a lot of Mondavi Private stacked inside, don’t we?”
“Yes, that’s right. It’s a mid-to-low-priced line, but there were some ambiguous aspects to it, so it hasn’t moved much.”
“Starting today, pair it the way I tell you. Serve it as glass wine, but make sure the temperature and glass shape are right.”
He set the pairings exactly according to the course that Asian young man had arranged for him at the Winkler Dinner.
“Yes, we’ll do it this way.”
Daniel Roca, who had recently been feeling frustrated by the sense that sales were gradually falling, felt as though he had found a breakthrough through the Winkler Dinner, which he had attended partly to earn a little extra spending money.
---
“Back, back!”
A massive Volvo VNL 53-foot reefer trailer entered the winery again. Last time, John Anderson had come to pick up the vinegar stacked in the warehouse, but this time it was the opposite. This was work to move the cherries from the Brentwood farm into the winery.
The weight of the cherry boxes pouring out of the truck made the warehouse floor rumble. Ice packaging glittered on each pallet, and the red cherries shone so brightly in the sunlight that they were dazzling.
“They said they’ll make about five trips, twenty tons each.”
Chloe, who had come to deliver them personally along with the driver, smiled bashfully and handed me the invoice. It was an enormous quantity totaling 100 tons, but this time, rather than feeling burdened, I thought it was manageable.
“Good.”
“Let me see the newly expanded winery.”
Even from the outside, the sight of a new building added beside the existing winery had caught Chloe’s eye.
“Sure, follow me.”
I waved to the workers and led Chloe toward the new building. Until last month, it had been a space with nothing but a steel frame standing there. Now gray concrete walls had been lined with insulation, and inside, gleaming stainless-steel tanks stood in rows.
“Wow…”
As soon as Chloe crossed the threshold, her eyes widened.
Right in front of us stood five custom-made five-thousand-liter fermentation tanks I had ordered. Their surfaces were mirror-smooth from electropolishing, and digital thermometer panels were attached to their sides. Multipoint temperature sensors attached at the top, middle, and bottom of each tank were connected by cables, transmitting real-time data to a monitor.
“It really looks like a computer lab. All this is for wine?”
“That’s right. In fermentation, small differences determine the result. If the top and bottom temperatures differ, the flavor changes too. Now we don’t have to rely only on sight.”
A little farther inside stood two ten-thousand-liter tanks rising high near the ceiling. Glycol cooling lines extended along the sides of the tanks, and small lights blinked on the PLC control panel. It was a system that automatically activated cooling if the fermentation temperature exceeded the set value.
Chloe peered closely at the small valve beneath one of the tanks.
“Do you taste from here too?”
“That’s right. We draw directly from here to check the taste at intervals during fermentation. Of course, it’s a sterilized line.”
Passing through the corridor and entering the oak aging room, the rich scent of wood spread through the air. Eighty newly brought-in French oak barrels were lined up, and some already gave off a subtle glow, as if waiting for wine.
“The barrels are new too?”
“Yeah. I mixed French Allier and American white oak. I also ordered different toast levels for each barrel. I’m going to compare which one suits the cherry wine.”
Chloe ran her fingertips over the surface of the wood and took an even breath.
“I feel like I could get drunk on the scent alone.”
I smiled, passed between the oak barrels, and pointed at the newly made barrel racks.
“We’ll age some of the cherry wine coming in this time here. The rest will finish fermenting in stainless steel.”
“Then will the cherry wine quality be better than before?”
“Of course. We upgraded the existing facilities too. Now our winery has grown one step further than before.”
I smiled as I stroked one of the custom five-thousand-liter fermentation tanks.