Note: According to the latest census data, Chardonnay Place is home to more wine experts per capita than any other community in the United States.
“Ech!” Stephanie turns her head away from the Riedel glass in disgust, her pink mouth pursed in a moue.
She faces so abruptly into the wind it nearly dips a strand of her carefully streaked hair in the glass.
“What’s the matter?” Glenn shouts over the engine, offering to take the glass from her.
“Not until you’ve got this thing on the ground. Both hands on the controls.”
“I wasn’t going to drink it midair.”
“What?”
“I wasn’t going to drink it—”
“This is terrible!”
What is this? The nose is all wet wool and manure and—not that she would admit this, but she thinks it—a faint aroma of women’s talcom powder. Combined with the thundering propellers of the helicopter and the veritiginous perspective of trees and fields and roads, the effect is somehow sickening. This was Glenn’s choice, this bottle. One of his rich friends made it—today, everyone is a garagiste—and as usual Stephanie wishes she hadn’t left the decision to him. Love of her life and all that, bank roll of her life and all that, but he has a way of subscribing to newspaper wine clubs without telling her. With all that money, too, and the manly accessories—helicopter, sports cars, and now a lovely little diamond of a vineyard.
But that had been her doing. Chardonnay Place was her idea, and buying Chardonnay House— Glenn has poked her.
“Town’s pretty!”
She looks out, following his pointed finger to look at the picturesque town below. She nods. The sort of place she dreamed of as a little Midwestern girl living in a—in interviews she always says it’s a simple white clapboard, no bigger than a one-room schoolhouse, neat as a pin despite the family’s relative poverty, but in her own mind and looking down on the truly tidy prosperity of Chardonnay Place, she knows it was something less than even that—
The home wine made of bananas, of weeds, of vegetables, carrot greens—undrinkable vintages bottled in Mason jars and gulped down by her parents with a vulgar satisfaction, huge quantities, with barbeque, potato chips, pretzels, de-thawed frozen garlic bread. The awful laughter, the suffocating sense that her parents might have well sent her off to be boarded in a saloon. She wanted them in AA, but she was ashamed to think of them confessing to groups of townfolk what they drank, their veggie vintages.
And now, flying over Chardonnay Place and swooping down toward the landing site of her new home—the sunlight sparkling on her ring finger, a diamond the size of a grape—it occurs to her—
But she’s distracted:
She glimpses their new home, Chardonnay House, a gorgeous American chateau on a soft low hill surrounded by elms and cypress. And she will be its chateleine and wine master. She can see herself with her hair upswept and her body draped in a black Donna Karan gown and a sparkling glass in her hand; and the guests, all wine-lovers like herself—the dream toward which she has been moving with the steady churning progress of a steamship on the sea of fate, working toward since she tasted that Chateau Rayas 1978—in bed with the man before, before, before Glenn—and a delicious flicker of ambition—
Now she knows that nose, and why it sickens her. It’s like her parents’ homemade wine.
How has it followed her here, all the way to Chardonnay Place?
“I have to get rid of this shit!”
“Stephanie, no!”
But she has already flung out the bottle and she briefly sees it turning over and over in the air, like a tossed coin trying to reach an important decision. The white-yellow wine sprinkles a rotating arc in the air, turning and turning.
“Stephanie, that could hit someone!”
“It won’t!”
“You can’t just go throwing—!”
But Stephanie has thrown so many things, many more than Glenn knows, certainly more than the press.
They are coming in for the landing. The leaves in the trees whoosh and sough in greeting.
But toward town, Zachary Potter feels a wet trickle on the front of his sky blue shirt, then on his U.S. Mail badge. A few drops also land on his mustache and drip into his mouth as he looks up at the helicopter retreating to a point near Chardonnay House.
“The new owners,” he says to himself. That millionaire, the one who made all his money off that little gizmo, and his wife, the fashion model turned wine consultant—He’s seen their pictures in the magazines he delivers, especially the pictures of her—bringing grape vines to war-torn countries in need of new industry, whirling in and out of parties, always with her hair done up with grape leaves like something of the ancient times—
Blach! Neither snow or sleet and so forth, but he has just tasted the worst sauvignon blanc in his entire life. He spits.
