The Winemaker Read online

  He realized that when they replanted it would be an opportunity to make vines in large blocks of single varieties, because now he had to pay for the carelessness of his ancestors, going here, there, and everywhere in the jumbled rows to pick according to variety.

  Josep wanted as much ripeness as possible in everything that was picked, but he didn’t want grapes to rot while they waited on the vine, so he planned the picking order as if he were a general going into battle.

  The oldest plants with the smallest grapes seemed to ripen last, perhaps because of their terroir. These were the grapes from which he had made his blended wine, and he had a special fondness for their wizened, very old vines and would not replace them until and unless he had evidence that they were doomed. For now, he gave them a few extra days of ripening.

  So it was that early one morning he began the picking by taking the fruit of ordinary vines, vines that until this very harvest had put out grapes that became vinegar each year.

  He had lots of help. Donat had let the village know that during the week of harvest the grocery would be open only from midday to four p.m., and he and Rosa had joined the pickers and would tread grapes at night. Briel Taulé was there as usual, and Marimar had hired Iguasi Febrer and Briel’s cousin, Adriá Taulé, and they would pick and tread as well.

  Late that afternoon Josep came down to the grape-filled trough and scrubbed his feet and legs.

  Others would join him soon, and they would work in shifts, some picking and culling fruit while others were treading grapes. But for the moment he was alone, and he drank in the scene. The tank was filled with gleaming purple-black grapes. Nearby tables held tortilla and pastries from Rosa, under cloths, and cups and cántirs of water. In a crude fireplace of stone, wood waited to be ignited, and lanterns and torches were placed around the stone cistern to provide warmth and light against the dark chill when night arrived.

  Francesc came, running unevenly, and watched as Josep put first one foot and then the other into the grapes.

  “I want to do it,” he called, but Josep knew the grapes were piled too deep and Francesc wouldn’t be able to move.

  “Next year you will be big enough,” he said.

  He had a sudden rush of regret that his father had not lived to know this boy and and his mother. That his father had not witnessed what had happened to the Alvarez vineyard.

  That Marcel Alvarez would never taste his wine.

  He knew that he stood on his father’s shoulders, and on the shoulders of all those who had come before. For perhaps a thousand generations, as day workers in the fields of Galicia, and before that as serfs, his people had worked in the soil of Spain.

  He had a sudden dizzying vision of his ancestors as a castell, each generation raising him higher on their shoulders until he could no longer hear the music of the drums and the grallas. A castell a thousand levels high.

  “And Francesc is our anxaneta, our pinnacle,” he said, and he scooped up the little boy and transferred him to his shoulders.

  Francesc sat with his legs dangling on either side of Josep’s head. He gripped Josep’s hair in both hands and crowed.

  “What do we do now, Padre?”

  “Now?” Josep took the first steps. He thought of the hopes and the dreams and the hard work that went into the grapes, the constant struggle to bring them to wine. He breathed in their scent and could feel them popping beneath his weight, sensed the vital juice as it ran free and claimed him, the blood of the grapes separated from his own blood only by skin.

  “Now we walk and sing, Francesc. We walk and we sing!” he said.

  The End

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I didn’t discover the glories of good wine until, already a middle-aged man. I began to travel to Spain, where I soon developed a deep appreciation of the Spanish people, their culture, and their wines.

  When I decided to write a novel about them, I chose to focus on the mid-nineteenth century because it was the period of the Carlist Wars and of the phylloxera plague that destroyed vineyards throughout France and Spain. I located my fictional vineyard in the Penedès region of Catalonia because living there would offer my protagonist easy access to both Barcelona and the wine country of Southern France.

  Some elements of this novel are based on historical fact and some are invented by the author. The Carlist struggle in Spain was only too real, of course, as was the phylloxera disaster, but the village of Santa Eulália and the Pedregós River exist only in The Winemaker.

  Members of royalty are taken from history. General Juan Prim lived most of his life as a soldier and was a politician and a famous statesman when he was slain. As with the assassination of American President John F. Kennedy, there are many rumors about the plot and the people behind Prim’s killing, and there is the likelihood that neither assassination will ever be truly solved. To learn about General Prim’s murder, I went to the late Professor Pere Anguera, author of the definitive Prim biography. I tried to utilize the assassination scene as Professor Anguera recreated it for me. The details—the substitution of one horse-drawn coach for another, the lighting of matches when the coach turned into a new street, the halting of the coach by two blocking coaches, and a mob from which gunmen fired at the president of the Spanish government council—are presented as closely as possible to the historic facts that were so generously shared with me by Pere Anguera. I am grateful for his information and for his subsequently vetting the pages of this book devoted to the shooting.

  Because the real-life drama of the assassination was never brought to closure with the conviction and punishment of the killers, I felt free to add my own characters to the scene. So it is pure fiction, drawn wholly from my imagination, that young men from a village called Santa Eulália participated in the assassination mob.

  For answering many questions, I thank Maria Josep Estanyol, professor of history at the University of Barcelona.

  Accompanied by my wife Lorraine and Michael Seay Gordon, my son, the first Spanish bodega I visited in my research for The Winemaker was the Torres winery in Penedès, the region of the vineyard in the novel. It was an auspicious beginning: Albert Fornos, who spent his career as a winemaker there, gave us a splendid tour, and Miguel Torres Maczassek presided over a five-course dinner, at which a splendid wine was poured with each course.

  Michael and I made several trips into the Priorat and Montsant wine regions. Almost invariably I have found that vineyards are located in beautiful places. Tucked into a small, lovely valley we found Mas Martinet Viticultors, the bodega of the Pérez family. Sara Pérez Ovejero and her husband, René Barbier, both have fathers who have won distinction as wine pioneers, and they are busily carrying on the family tradition, making successful and delicious wines. Sara Pérez has produced several volumes in which she mounted and described the leaves of the various grape varieties so that her children were able to begin their grape-growing education early. Munching on Spanish cheese and sipping her good wine, I was an appreciative student as I went through the books with her.

  On several other occasions Michael and I drove a narrow and precarious road along the lip of a much larger valley, ultimately climbing a small but steep mountain to the village of Torroja del Priorat, where in 1984 Maria Ángeles Torra founded her family winery in a former monastery. It is managed by her sons, Albert and Jordi. Their grapevines are planted nearby, some on steep slopes, and several of their sought-after wines are made from grapes whose vines have persevered in the slate soil for more than a hundred years. I am extremely grateful to the brothers Albert and Jordi Rotllan Torra for reading the manuscript of this book.

  In June of 2006 I was awarded a special literary prize by the City of Zaragoza, and while I was in that region, author and journalist Juan Bolea provided friendship and guidance and made it possible for me to visit two vineyards. I am grateful to Juan and to Santiago Begué Gil, president of the Wine Denomination of Cariñena, for his hospitality and wine lore.

  On the Finca Aylés, a vast
estate of 3,100 acres where wine was first made in the 12th century, the winemaker Señorío de Aylés has planted 70 hectares of grapes, the end and beginning of each row of vines marked by rose bushes. I was thrilled by repeated sightings of eagles and to learn from owner Frederico Ramón that the lovely spot is designated by the European Union as a special zone for the protection of birds. I thank him for his hospitality.

  In an enormous valley that reminded me of some of the great valleys of the American West, we visited The Bodega Victoria. I am grateful to José Manuel Segura Cortés, president of the Grupo Segura Serrano, for providing a lunch of regional foods and for giving me a tour of his winery.

  Since writing this book, I have visited a number of other winemakers in various Spanish locations, and I have a great appreciation of Spanish wines and the men and women who create them.

  I am grateful to Alfonso Mateo-Sagasta, prize-winning historical novelist of Madrid, for information about village elections in the nineteenth century and for a description of the architecture and construction of the small village homes of the period.

  I thank Delia Martínez Díaz for bringing me to the city of Terrassa, where I spent time in one of the most interesting museums of my experience. Housed in the sprawling brick buildings of an early textile mill, the Museu de la Ciència i de la Tècnica de Catalunya brings a visitor into direct touch with the technological revolution. One walks through exhibits that were the guts and machinery of the early mill, and I was able to see how the advent of steam power had created jobs such as the one filled by Donat. For infinite patience in answering my questions, I thank the museum director, Eusebi Casanelles i Rahola, conservationist Contxa Bayó i Soler, and the entire staff.

  I thank Meritxell Planas Girona, a member of the Minyons de Terrassa, for answering my questions about castelling.

  Ángel Pujol Escoda answered innumerable questions about hunting and nature with sweet patience, and his wife Magdalena Guasch i Poquet told me different ways to cook a rabbit.

  In the wonderful central market of Sabadell, Maria Pérez Navarro took time from selling pork at her business, Cal Prat, to draw an outline for me and to make clear exactly where Josep and Jaumet would find the choicest cut of meat in a wild boar.

  Dan Taccini, a wonderful American creator of handmade furniture, told me how to make a door from scratch.

  For details regarding the Catholic confessional I turned to our friend Denise Jane Buckloh of Ashfield, Massachusetts, the former Sister Miriam of the Eucharist, OCD, and I thank her. I also thank Dr. Pheme Perkins, Professor of Theology at Boston College, for answering my questions about Catholic burial, sin, and penance.

  I am a writer extremely rich in family and friends.

  Lorraine Gordon has lived with me for more than 60 years and has given me sustenance that is better than food.

  My daughter Lise Gordon again was my editor, providing arguments, polishing, and superb editing skills that made this a better book.

  My son Michael is now my literary agent. He is—and was throughout the many research sojourns for this book—the very best of companions on the road, at times merry, always responsible, with a keen and reasoning mind and a strong arm.

  My daughter Jamie, my favorite photographer, is ever faithfully on call despite my lifelong discomfort in front of a camera. I am grateful for her great skill and loving patience. Jamie, Lorraine, Michael, Charlie Ritz and Ed Plotkin also read the manuscript of this book.

  My daughter-in-law, Maria Palma Castillón, never refused a research question, and I am grateful to her and to the Centre de Promoció de la Cultura Popular i Tradicional Catalana, in Barcelona, for answering questions she posed on my behalf, ranging from the tolling of church bells to the practice of hiring women to weep at funerals.

  Roger Weiss, my son-in-law, has kept my computer working. I thank him for his knowledge and his willingness to answer my calls for help.

  All of the many persons named above have helped me; but this book is mine, and if it contains flaws and mistakes, they are my own as well.

  I am grateful to Blanca Rosa Roca for publishing The Winemaker. I value my association with her, which goes back more than a quarter of a century. Under her skilled guidance, as La Bodega this novel already has been a great bestseller in Spain and Latin America. Now Barcelona eBooks and Open Road Integrated Media bring it to English-language readers everywhere, and honor me by including The Winemaker among Barcelona eBooks’ first American and international offerings.

  This novel has been a bestseller in a number of countries under the title of The Bodega, except in Germany, where with my permission the book was called The Catalan. While Europeans are familiar with the concept that a bodega is a place where wine is made and sold, in America it has become a term to describe a small grocery business. To avoid that confusion, this novel is published under the title of The Winemaker. I am happy to offer my story in the English language to each reader with affection and respect.

  Noah Gordon

  Dedham, Massachusetts

  April 23, 2012

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Noah Gordon has had outstanding international success. The Physician, soon to be a motion picture, has been called a modern classic, and booksellers at the Madrid Book Fair voted it “one of the 10 best-loved books of all time.” Shaman was awarded the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction. Both of these books, and five of the author’s other novels—The Rabbi, The Death Committee, The Jerusalem Diamond, Matters of Choice, and The Winemaker—are published in digital formats by Barcelona eBooks and Open Road Integrated Media. Gordon’s novel, The Last Jew, will also be published digitally in the near future. He lives outside of Boston with his wife, Lorraine Gordon.

  Table of Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Copyright Page

  PART ONE - The Return

  1: Going Home

  2: The Sign

  3: Cleaning the Nest

  4: The Saint of Virgins

  5: A Thing Between Brothers

  6: A Trip to Barcelona

  7: Neighbors

  8: A Social Organization

  PART TWO - The Group of Hunters

  9: The Man

  10: Strange Orders

  11: The Visitors

  12: Foraging

  13: Guns

  14: Widening the Range

  15: The Sergeant

  16: Orders

  17: Nine on a Train

  18: The Spy

  PART THREE - Out in the World

  19: Walking in Snow

  20: News

  21: Sharing

  22: Alone

  23: Wandering

  24: Fellow Travelers

  25: Stranger in a Far Land

  PART FOUR - The Alvarez Land

  26: Painted Vines

  27: Winter

  28: Cooking

  29: Hinny

  30: A Knocking

  31: Old Debts

  32: The Intruder

  33: Cracks

  34: Wood

  35: Changes

  36: A Talk With Quim

  37: Rites of Passage

  38: Harvesting

  39: Troubles

  40: What the Pig Knew

  PART FIVE - The Blood of the Grape

  41: Digging

  42: The Swap

  43: Thirst

  44: Towers

  45: Vines

  46: Small Sips

  47: Like a Brother

  48: The Visit

  49: A Trip to the Market

  50: A Decision

  51: Plans

  52: A Contest in Sitges

  53: Josep’s Responsibility

  54: A Conversation With Nivaldo

  55: The Joining

  56: Changes

  57: Extreme Unction

  58: The Legacy

  59: Talking and Listening

  60: The Guardia Civil

  61: Th
e Monsieur

  62: The Disagreement

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author