Bruno 02 - The Dark Vineyard

made more intense by the large electric fan that Joe had whirring at the edge of the vat. There was a sound of youthful laughter from the vat, and Joe, dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, played the hose over Bruno’s and Isabelle’s legs as they waited.
    Gingerly, because the top step was slippery, Bruno eased himself into the giant vat, nodding at Joe’s pretty great-niece Bernadine as she made way for Isabelle. He saw that Bondino had managed to join Jacqueline. The girl seemed delighted in his company, her arm and his intertwined as they braced on the wooden rim and their legs trod rhythmically in the purple foam. They were talking fast in English, but he noticed thatBondino’s eyes were riveted on Jacqueline’s face. Max’s girl seemed to have made a new conquest.
    Beneath Bruno’s trailing fingers, the purple froth still felt greasy rather than clear, the old telltale sign for the
vignerons
to know when the pressing was done. He felt around with a foot, looking for a whole bunch for the tactile pleasure of treading on it and feeling it burst through his toes before starting the steady tramping motion that was the approved style. Once the novelty wore off, it reminded him of marching in the army.
    Bruno had done this for years and knew the ritual, and Isabelle quickly followed his lead, holding the rim with one hand as they faced each other and moved back and forth in unison, then turned to stand sideways with both hands on the rim. He beamed at her, admiring her readiness to try anything. Isabelle grinned back at him, and then looked down to see the grape juice splashing her tanned thighs.
    “They’ll never believe this in Paris,” she murmured, and leaned forward to kiss him. “I think you set this up for my return; back to the real France. Back to my very real Bruno.”
    Bruno laughed aloud at the incongruity of it, exchanging kisses and the sweet words of lovers as they tramped up and down like a pair of old soldiers amid the rich and heady scent of the grapes. Somewhere in the back of his mind he knew that this wondrous moment would not last, that she would go back to Paris and he would stay. But it didn’t matter. She was here, and her eyes were huge as they drank him in and her hand came up to touch his face, careless of the other couple.
    “You done up there?” called Joe from the bottom of the steps. “You taught them what to do, Bruno?”
    It was time to leave the vat, but Bondino and Jacqueline kept staring at each other, glued to their respective spots.
    “Time to move on, Bondino,” Bruno said, giving him a friendly push toward the ladder. “Let someone else have a go.”
    Bruno felt the spume as Joe clambered into his vat. The consistency had changed; the slipperiness had gone and the pulp was thickening. There was no sense of anything but liquid underfoot. Joe held on to the rim with both hands, probing with a foot, and nodded.
    “That’ll do. Out you get, Bruno, and you too, Canada. We’ll leave her overnight, see how the cap is in the morning.”
    “That’s it?” asked Jacqueline, following Isabelle down the steps to where Bondino waited for her. She flashed the American a quick smile. “You don’t run off the first pressing, you just leave it all in together overnight?”
    “Always have, and I’m not changing my style now,” said Joe. “Can you take care of the hose, rinse us off as we come down the steps, and pass us one of those towels?”
    “Do you feel a little light-headed?” Joe asked when they were all down and rinsed off. “That’s the carbon dioxide coming out as the fermentation starts. That’s why I have the fan going.”
    “Do you add any yeast?” Jacqueline asked.
    “There are enough yeast spores in the walls of this barn to ferment half of all the wine in the Bordeaux. So we just leave the yeast to Mother Nature, as our ancestors have for hundreds of years. Come on, I want you to try last year’s wine, get a sense of just what you’ve been helping to make. Bring us a couple of those glasses from the table there.”
    He pulled a bottle with no label from a horizontal rack and opened it with an elderly corkscrew with a handle of olive wood. He splashed some of the wine into a glass for each of them and raised his glass.
    “To the new vintage,” he declaimed, and then emptied his glass in a single gulp, like a Russian downing vodka.
    Jacqueline was staring at the sludgy liquid in her glass. Gingerly, she put her nose close and took a very small