The Bordeaux Betrayal by Ellen Crosby

behind that cloud bank. When it moves away, you’ll see it.”
    I set my cane down and sat next to him, leaning against the weather-coarsened wood. He pulled a cigar out of his jacket pocket, unwrapped it, and rustled in another pocket for matches. I watched the familiar ritual as his match flared and he bent his head, puffing until the cigar was lit. The tip glowed like a mini-moon and I breathed in the familiar scent of his tobacco.
    He sat back as the clouds slowly moved off and the enormous moon, the color of a ripe wheel of Leicester cheese, hung in the sky above our heads.
    “It’s gorgeous,” I said.
    “Yup.” He stretched his legs out in front of him and crossed them.
    “You know in France, they used to care for the grapes according to the phases of the moon,” I said. “Planting, picking, pruning. Maybe we should try it some time.”
    “The French also believe it’s bad luck to have women around at harvest.” He looked at me and puffed on the cigar. “I don’t suppose you’d like to try that sometime?”
    I tucked my feet under me and wrapped my arms around my knees. “You are such a Neanderthal, you know that?”
    He laughed. “I just don’t buy into that crap, that’s all. Give me science any day. Speaking of which, I’ve been thinking about the Cab blend.”
    “You think about it nonstop.” But to tell the truth, so did I. Until we got the grapes picked and into the barrels, I’d be as restless and preoccupied as he was.
    “Damn lucky for you that I do,” he said. “I want this year to be out of this world. We could screw up everything else, but you know how much rides on this one.”
    I didn’t expect him to sound so somber. Most of the time he acted like he had a grace and favor relationship with St. Vincent, the patron saint of winegrowers, who whispered in his ear. But I understood what he meant. Of all the wines we produced, Cabernet Sauvignon was our most valuable—the one whose sales really paid the bills at the vineyard.
    “It’ll be great,” I said. “As long as we aren’t picking too late. If we get an overnight freeze while that wine is still sitting in the vats, there goes fermentation until next spring when it warms up again.”
    “If we pick early there’ll be too much acid,” he said. “You want people getting heartburn when they drink our wine? It’s a nightmare to fix wine with too much acid.”
    “You’re still talking like a Californian,” I said. “Out there you never had to worry about high acidity. If you pick too late your only problem is that the alcohol content goes through the roof.”
    His cigar glowed serenely in the dark. “High alcohol content’s easier to take care of than too much acid.”
    “Sure,” I said. “You just add water to rehydrate the yeast.”
    The minute I said that, I regretted it. I glanced over at him but he was still staring straight ahead, watching the sky. His profile looked like it had been cast in steel.
    “I was talking about stuck fermentation,” I said.
    “I know you were.” But he sounded brusque and I knew it was because I’d indirectly brought up Le Coq Rouge. “Adding water is not the only way to deal with it, either. You can use a glycol heater.”
    “I know.”
    Too bad I hadn’t mentioned that instead, though my comment could have hit a nerve for any winemaker. We all wrestled with the dilemma of how much to fiddle with a wine to fix it or improve it, and still consider it the “original” wine. California had problems when their grape sugar stopped converting to alcohol, known as stuck fermentation. In Virginia we had the opposite problem. Our alcohol content was often too low so we added sugar to boost it, a practice known as chapitalising. Both processes meant we were tinkering with the wine—but no winemaker considered them fraudulent.
    So if that was okay, was it also acceptable to top off bottles from an outstanding year with a bottle of the same wine from a less stellar year? It was only a