Second Generation by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online

up demand that way. It might just work if we could convince the big wineries to do it, but we're too small to make much difference. We're going to have a valley meeting next week and propose it, but who knows? Anyway, I'll practice on you and mother."
"I've seen it," Sarah said. "Take Sam. I'll help Clair inside."
Jake led Goldberg off toward the stone winery buildings, the children trailing curiously. He pointed up at the sloping hillsides. "There are our newest plantings. Pinot Noir. Of course you might say that Zinfandel is endemic to this valley and it's what we're famous for. But I tasted Pinot Noir in France that was like the wine of the gods, and Clair and I decided that we'd produce a wine as good or better, and by golly, I think we have. You'll taste it later. We started with five hundred vines, and now we've got the best stand of Pinot Noir in the valley. Come back at the end of the summer when the grapes are ripe, and you'll have a treat, Sam. We don't irrigate up there. Some of the growers do, but for my money, you get a better grape if you make the vines fight for moisture. If you irrigate, the vines are loaded with grapes, and for your greed there's a poorer quality." Jake paused. Goldberg was regarding him in amazement. "What is it, Sam?"
he asked.
"Your passion, sonny. I'm astonished."
"Why? Wine is a passionate thing. God Almighty, Sam, do you remember how we scrimped and starved and worked to have this place? It's my whole life. It's like I know every vine up there on that hillside by name and number and character."
Trudging alongside them, young Adam said, "He does, Mr. Goldberg."
"You've inoculated them," Goldberg observed dryly.
"Higate has. I sometimes try to think of what it means to grow up in a place like this and have Clair for a mother."
"You have a pretty damn good mother of your own."
"I'm not selling her short, Sam, only making a point. It's too hot to climb the hill and look at the vines. Come in here," he said, indicating the entrance to the largest of the stone buildings.
As he stepped out of the hot sun, the cool darkness blinded Goldberg at first, and he paused to let his eyes adjust and to breathe deeply of the cold, sour-smelling air.
"That's the smell," Jake said. "At first it's strange. Then it becomes a kind of perfume. What do you drink, Sam?"
"Scotch whiskey."
"Of course. How long is it since you tasted a really fine wine?"
"I suppose the last time Jill and I were in France. Nineteen twelve. I'm not a wine drinker, Jake."
"You will be. Careful here." Followed by his three children, who were apparently fascinated by the very fat, bespectacled man who ambled after their father, Jake led the way down a set of stone steps into a cavernous cellar. There were rows and rows of wine—in bottles, in small kegs, and in large barrels. The air was cool and damp and heady with the musty smell of wine.
"The aging room. Over there"—pointing to the big barrels—"the sacramental wine. That's our bread and butter, Sam, if you can think of it that way. That's how we started and survived during Prohibition, first with old Rabbi Blum's synagogues and then with the churches. Now we produce about twenty thousand barrels of sacramental wine a year, port and Malaga, we call it, and not a bad imitation of the real thing. It's good, decent wine, if you like sweet wine. I don't. We don't grow the grapes for this stuff. We buy them down in Fresno. You'd think, with an assured market for twenty thousand gallons, we'd make money."
"Do you?"
"Not a nickel. Oh, we did make money back in twenty-eight and twenty-nine, but this Depression knocked the bottom out of prices. We break even. Come back at the end of the summer, and you'll find twenty men working here and in the fields. We meet the payroll and we're satisfied."
He pointed to the racks of bottled wine. "That's the Pinot Noir, the love of my life. That is wine," he said slowly, almost reverently, Goldberg thought. "We do about a thousand gallons a year, and