Second Generation by Howard Fast Read Free Book Online Page A

we lager it, age it six months to a year in the bottle, laying it that way with the cork down. The cork stays wet and the wine breathes and lives."
"Good heavens, it's become a religion with you."
"It tends to. Religion and wine have never been too far apart. That's how we pay our bills. Let me show you the rest of it—this is only the end product."
Jake led Goldberg from room to room, past the crushers, the fermenting vats, the storage tanks, and into the bottling plant.
"All this to make a glass of wine," Goldberg said wearily.
"This and more. Instinct and luck. Without that, you're doomed. Maybe we don't have the instinct, but we've had a lot of luck. Over here, Sam."
He led the way to the end of the bottling room, where half a dozen uncorked, labeled bottles stood. "Our tasting room," he explained. "We don't have a real one yet. We will someday. These are all the Pinot Noir. We test them as they age. Open them, and then let them breathe for a few hours." He poured two glasses of the dark red wine. "Try it."
Goldberg drank the wine slowly. The last wine he had tasted was from the bottle Gino had brought to the table in the restaurant as his gift to the diners. He remembered the raw, flat taste of it. This wine was like liquid velvet, dry, slightly nutty, with a gentle, haunting fragrance.
"I don't know much about wine," Goldberg said.
"Do you like it?"
"If I knew anything about wine, I'd say it's pretty damn wonderful."
"You bet your sweet patooties. That wine, Sam, is going to conquer the world one day."
Willis Mackenzie, chief trainer at the Menlo Circle Club, at Menlo Park on the Peninsula, was something of an expert in the mores and ordinary habits of the rich and the children of the rich—in particular as they related to horses. Horses, as Mackenzie saw it, could be grouped with liquor, gambling, and desultory sex; they were less an indulgence than an addiction, less an interest than a demanding status symbol, to the rich of San Francisco and the Peninsula what the automobile was to the upper middle class—and even more specifically so since the onset of the Depression.
To this, however, there were a few exceptions, people who loved horses passionately. Mackenzie, a tall, hard-faced man of forty-five years, separated such people from the others with a reluctant smile. He was a bitter man, who hated the people he served, who hated and resented the rich, and who desired and resented their well-kept, carefully groomed women. He put Barbara Lavette in the special category of those who loved and understood horses, and on this day, when she informed him that she wished to sell Sandy, her seven-year-old chestnut mare, he looked at her thoughtfully and then suspiciously asked her why.
"I have my reasons, Mac."
"Well, she's a damn good horse, a good bloodline on both sides. You got the papers?" he asked, wondering meanwhile how much he could pick up on the deal. A local deal was a problem. If he sold her outside the county, he could possibly pick up a few hundred.
"Right here," Barbara replied, taking them out of her purse.
"I didn't mean right now. You know there's an auction in August."
"I don't want to wait. I want to sell her now."
"Well," he said slowly, "I got a lady at Flintridge in Pasadena. She's looking for a good gentle mare."
"That would take time, wouldn't it?"
"A week or so. She'd want to see the horse."
"No. I want to sell her today."
"Well—well, now there's something, Miss Lavette. You don't just sell a horse like you sell a pair of pants. You got to find a buyer and you got to talk him around to it. You got to give him a run on the beast. No one buys a pig in the poke."
"Sandy's not a pig in the poke. I know you buy horses sometimes, Mac. What will you give me for Sandy?"
"You want to sell her to me?"
"I want to sell her today."
Mackenzie stared at her thoughtfully for a long moment. They were standing next to her car, a 1933 Ford station wagon, at the edge of the dirt road that led to the stables.