Dead on the Vine: (Violet Vineyard Murder Mysteries #1 (A Cozy Mystery)) (36 page)

Chapter 2

As I have said, Dimitri
Pappos was more than just a snobbish and opinionated wine critic; he was also half-owner in Star Crossed Wine Cellars & Auctions where he was partnered with a Napa Valley native named Blake Becker. And I, along with dozens of other vineyard owners, was a client. 

Earlier that year I had begun storing half of my wine library – a hoard of past vintages of Violet Vineyard cabernet that stretched back to our first vintage in ’92 - with Star Crossed. It had been a difficult decision to make - those bottles are more than just a link to my past; they are an important way to gauge how the wine matures over years of bottle aging - which is the hallmark of any truly fine red wine - but after my wine cellar was vandalized last year, I felt I had to do something to better protect it.

With approximately two cases of every vintage from ’95 forward, and a handful of bottles from the three years prior to that, I decided to split it all down the middle, keep half of it in the wine cellar at Violet and entrust the other half to Blake Becker and Dimitri Pappos. I had been well satisfied with this arrangement and the care and stewardship provided by Star Crossed. So satisfied in fact, that Blake Becker had convinced me to sign an agreement to consign fifty cases of my 2009 Vintner’s Reserve to their next auction.

That had been another difficult decision. Auctions entail a certain amount of risk. A case might sell cheap or not at all, but it could also sell for a great deal more than wholesale prices if a bidding war erupted. In the end I had decided to take the risk for a single auction and to keep my fingers crossed.

Unfortunately, the auction contract hadn’t limited the business side of my duties as much as I had hoped. Blake Becker had insisted I attend a small tasting in Napa where he intended to unveil the 2009 Vintner’s Reserve to a few of his auction clients. I could ill afford to miss it - I needed every cent I could get out of the upcoming auction - but I was not a happy camper as I dressed in low heels and a simple black dress that Friday night.

My day had begun
well before dawn. I had spent it in the rows checking the Brix sugar content and rearranging the foliage to either shade grape clusters that were getting too much sun or to open up the leaf cover to expose those that were under-ripe. After ten hours and twenty acres of that, I was dead tired, and not just from the work. I was also experiencing the pre-harvest jitters. This was the most agonizing time of the year for me, gauging when to harvest. Too soon and the sugar content, and thus the alcohol content, would be too low. Pick too late and the opposite could happen. Or worse, weather could damage the crop. And, thanks to the excited babble of the meteorologists on the Weather Channel, the weather was my biggest concern as a tropical depression slowly brewed itself into a major storm with a trajectory aimed at northern California. A day or two of rain at the end of the season can ruin an entire crop. The moisture-deprived grapes will greedily suck up that water and swell, diluting their sugars and their flavor.

By 6:00PM, I was dragging as I packed up a bottle of the 2009 Vintner’s Reserve and climbed behind the wheel of my Jeep for the drive down into the Valley.

The Wine Presser’s Assistant
was a new restaurant in downtown Napa. The parking lot was almost empty when I made the turn off Main Street and drove under a portico covered in native grape vines. The young man at the podium seemed unfazed as he took my dusty Jeep and wedged it into the lot’s front row, between a Porsche and a Mercedes convertible. Napa is still essentially a farming community, after all. He probably wouldn’t have batted an eye if I had pulled up on a tractor.

The restaurant itself was beautiful, stone and cedar and glass with a subdued earth-tone color palette. The lighting was muted, most of it reflected back from the framed California landscapes dotting the walls, each one spotlighted by a fixture recessed in the ceiling. The tables were covered in white damask, and candles burned at the center of each. In the far corner a small fire burned in an oversized fireplace. In short, it looked like seventy percent of the restaurants in the Valley. Understated wine-country chic.

I approached the hostess stand, where two impossibly beautiful young women - both of them far better dressed than I was in my simple black dress and my mother’s pearls - were smiling my way. Beyond them, the dining room was almost empty, just three tables in use, but by 9:00PM, I knew it would be wall to wall with the bold and the beautiful. I hoped to be well on my way home by then.

“Blake Becker’s party,” I began and then I spotted Blake, tall and broad with a mop of fair hair, standing at the back of the restaurant, almost filling a wide doorway set in the back wall. He waved at me and I waved back. I smiled at the girls and kept moving, squinting at the outfit Blake was wearing as I made my way through the empty tables. From a distance, in the darkness of the room, he looked like he was wearing a penguin costume, but as I neared I saw it was an old fashioned tuxedo with tails that almost dragged the floor. He had a red carnation in his lapel and a yellow cravat. He looked ridiculous, but I wasn’t sure if that was accidental or done for a laugh.

I had known Blake his entire life. His parents’ orchard had been just a mile west of my parents’ vegetable farm. Back then neighbors meant more than they do today, especially in a rural farming community. Barn raisings were a thing of the past - I’m not that old - but at times of trouble your neighbors pitched in without being asked and doors were rarely locked. I had spent many hours on the Becker farm. I had even babysat Blake a few times when I was in high school and he was in grade school. He had been an unusually somber and quiet child. While most of the farm kids his age were half-wild, barefoot and dirty - myself included - Blake was always fussily neat and pressed in dress pants and a long-sleeved shirt. He rarely joined any game, and made few friends, but, while Blake was standoffish, no one seemed to dislike him. He was just so shy and unpretentious he faded into the background.

But that shyness was a thing of the past. Blake had grown up into a chatty and smiling salesman with a too-firm handshake and a too-ready grin, though he was obviously still overdressing.

“Good evening Claire,” he said, and ducked in to give me a loose pat-pat-hug. “Right on time,” he said.

“I feel underdressed,” I said smiling down at the tuxedo.

He grinned. “Just a show for the clients,” he said. “They expect a little pomp.”

“Who are the other guests?” I asked, expecting that I would know some of them. I was wrong.

“It’s a very small group,” he said. “Phillip Maxwell of Decanted Magazine, Jacob and Peter Willingham of JPW Distributors - my best customers - Jasper Hinton, who owns this place,” he said waving around at the room, “you, me, and Dimitri. With a tasting like this I had to keep it small. But Jacob and Peter are steady auction buyers. And Phillip can really get a buzz started with a good review.” His eyes dropped to the dark blue cloth bag in my hand. “Is that the ’09 Reserve?”

I had never heard of Jasper Hinton, but I had heard of the other three. Phillip Maxwell’s reviews in Decanted were always amusing and full of local color, more pop-reviews than serious critiques, but that’s why I liked them. And Jacob and Peter Willingham were famous for being able to procure the rarest and most expensive wines for their clients, many of whom were actors and sports figures.

“Yes,” I replied as I handed the bottle to him. He cradled it to his chest like a newborn infant, turned, and led me into the room behind him.

This was a small dining room with exposed rock walls dotted with decoupages of wine labels plastered on the butt ends of antique half-barrels all spot-lit by more recessed lighting. A single table sat at the center of the room, a cluster of bottles poised at its center. As Blake set my bottle down, I scanned the labels of the other bottles, all California reds and whites, except for a single Magnum that sat at the center of the array. Up front I saw a 2005 HawkWood, a 2003 Cliff Face, and a 1997 Chateau Montour, three of the most sought after California reds in the world, but it was the large bottle at the center of the table that truly stunned me. It was a magnum of 1911 Château d'Yquem, the most famous and sought after
sauterne in the world.

I’m afraid I started drooling the moment I set eyes on it. The golden color of the wine seemed to collect the light in the room and I could imagine the sweet velvety taste of the aged sauterne, made from Muscadelle and Sauvignon Blanc grapes colonized by Botrytis cinerea, a fungus known as ‘noble rot’ that causes the grapes to become partially raisined and intensely sweet. 

Blake saw where I was looking and his smile broadened. “Ever think you’d get to taste a vintage that old?” he asked, but I barely looked at him. I was trying to calculate the cost of those bottles. All told, the wines on that table would have set a buyer back tens of thousands of dollars. And Blake was offering them for free. The auction business must be very profitable, I thought. And I certainly hoped it was since he’d be selling fifty cases of the ’09 Vintner’s Reserve next month.

I glanced at Blake. “Actually, I feel a little overwhelmed. This is pretty rare company.”

“Not afraid of the challenge, are you?” Blake asked.

“No,” I replied. “I’m absolutely terrified.”

Blake laughed, though I wasn’t joking. “I had originally planned this as a horizontal tasting of Valley Zinfandel and cabernet,” he said. Many organized tastings are either horizontal - multiple wines from a single vintage year - or vertical - a single wine in multiple vintage years. Blake touched the neck of the Château d'Yquem, his eyes fairly glowing. “But I just couldn’t resist bringing this. I’ve been dying to open it.”

“Extravagance,” Dimitri Pappos said with a scowl as he swept into the room, tall, gray, and dignified in a black, single-breasted silk suit and a gray tie. “You will drive us into bankruptcy, Becker.” Dimitri’s accent was French, though I knew he was originally from Greece.

Blake’s smile faltered and a flush climbed his neck. He gave me an uncertain smile, and said to Dimitri, “It takes money to make money. You’ve met Claire de Montagne?”

“Yes,” Dimitri replied. He gave me an old-world bow complete with a slight click of the heels. “And I have tasted her cabernet. A quite satisfactory wine, complete and well-rounded.”

My eyes narrowed at the ‘satisfactory,’ but I let it slide. “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Pappos,” I said, wondering if I should curtsy after the bow he gave me, but I settled for offering my hand which he took in a clasp that was dry and limp.

With the hellos aside, Dimitri approached the table and inspected the wines on display. His gaze lingered on the Château d'Yquem. He touched the bottle’s capsule – the seal of red wax over the neck and cork - then gently picked at it with a fingernail. “I have never seen a bottle in this size in a vintage this old,” he said. He looked sharply at Blake. “I can guess at the cost. I assume it will be in the ledgers? Along with the provenance?”

Blake flushed again and shook his head. “All of the bottles are from my personal cellar, Dimitri. They didn’t cost Star Crossed a penny. And the Provenance of the d’Yquem is unquestionable. It was recorked in ’79 at the Château itself.”

Dimitri snorted. “Which guarantees nothing if the bottle came from the secondary market.” He continued to inspect the bottle. “Which is why no Château in Burgundy or Bordeaux will recork a bottle of this age any longer.” Dimitri was picking at the label by then. “The fill level is suspiciously high,” he said as if speaking to himself.

I looked closer and had to concur. The level of wine in the bottle was well above the shoulder, though still several inches below the neck where the original fill line would have been, This type of loss is called ullage and is caused by evaporation impossible to completely arrest even in the most perfectly temperature controlled wine cellar.

“Was the bottle topped off?” Dimitri asked and Blake nodded. Dimitri’s only comment was an indignant sniff. Both recorking and topping off, where a bottle being recorked is filled with a similar vintage of the same wine, are practices that were once commonplace before wine counterfeiting of old vintages became such a concern. Both practices were now frowned upon, though I considered them necessary to preserve old wine. And so did Dimitri, I assumed. Recorking was one of the services offered by Star Crossed to its cellaring clients.

“I would like to see the paperwork tomorrow,” Dimitri said. “You should discuss all such purchases with me before you commit,” he added then turned his attention to the other bottles. He shook his head as he looked at each label. “Extravagance.” He muttered.

Thankfully, the other three guests arrived in a single group at that moment.

Blake made the introductions. Phillip Maxwell of Decanted Magazine was tall and spare with a large Adam’s apple and no chin. The distributors, Jacob and Peter Willingham, were polar opposites of each other; Jacob was thin and fair with sallow cheeks and a sniffly nose, while his brother, Peter, was ruddy and broad with a bristle of untamable dark hair.

We made small talk, mainly chatter about the wine being offered - everyone was suitably impressed - and then we were seated for dinner.

I was placed between Dimitri and Blake, at the head of the table. The first course was a poached salmon mousse a la crème that Blake paired with a small pour of 2010 Sauvignon Blanc from Galton in Sonoma, which was lively and well balanced with a nice long finish. Everyone commented favorably on it.