The light goes early in the Sierra Foothills by the end of October, and on Halloween it goes earlier than that, or it seems to, which is why I should have been on Highway 88 heading up over Carson Pass by four o’clock instead of turning down a gravel road in the Shenandoah Valley of Amador County to make one more stop. I had a long drive home to Sparks ahead of me and no good reason to be there except that I had driven past the sign for years and never gone in, and the sign said the tasting room was open until half past four, and it was ten past.
The only other car in the lot was an old Corolla with a Chico State parking sticker. The harvest had been in for weeks. Behind the building the vines went up the hill in crooked rows, old head-trained Zinfandel with trunks as thick as a man’s thigh and twisted like something wrung out and left to dry, and the leaves still on them had gone the color of rust and old blood. The wind was coming down off the ridge and taking those leaves off the top rows a few at a time and laying them against the fence at the bottom, where they had piled up in a drift.
The tasting room was in a stone building with a date over the door from the 1880s. Inside there was one long wooden counter, a woodstove in the corner that nobody had lit, and a brass bell on a spring above the door that rang when I came in and went on shivering for a while after. Next to the door stood a glass case with an old ledger in it, opened to a page of handwriting gone the brown of weak tea. The host was a young woman in a fleece vest, in her first season by the look of her, and she had a carved pumpkin on the counter with a tea light going inside it, and next to the register a paperback copy of ’Salem’s Lot lying open and face down with the spine cracked about a third of the way in. I liked her immediately for that.
She said they were closing soon but she’d pour me a quick flight if I didn’t mind, slid a printed tasting sheet across the counter, and started me on the Barbera, reading the paragraph under it the way a person reads something for the fortieth time that week, quickly and a little apologetically.
I didn’t hear the bell again. I am sure of that, because I have gone over it many times since. But when I looked up from the Barbera there was an old man at the far end of the counter, sitting on the last stool as if he had been there all afternoon. He wore a canvas barn coat buttoned to the throat, the kind that goes stiff and pale at the elbows after enough years, and his boots had the red foothill dirt dried on them almost to the laces. His hands were folded on the counter, and they were the biggest thing about him, knotted at every knuckle and brown and cracked like the vine trunks outside. He smelled faintly of woodsmoke and wet ground, which I noticed because it hadn’t rained in Amador County in weeks.
He waited, politely, until she finished the paragraph about the Barbera. Then he asked her whether anybody had told her yet how the north block came in this year.
She found the Old Vine Zinfandel on the sheet and read it to him. Estate vines planted in the 1890s, head-trained, dry-farmed, blackberry and black pepper and a long finish. He nodded through all of it, the way a person nods when a stranger reads them a letter from somebody they used to know, and when she was done he said, “That’s the vines. I asked about the year.”
She told him she had only started in September, after the picking was over, and she was sorry, she didn’t really know.
He didn’t seem to mind. He asked her whether she had grown up around there, and she said Jackson, and he asked whether anybody in her family had ever put up fruit in the fall. Her grandmother had, she said, plums mostly, and pears when there were any. He smiled at that and told her the north block was a lot like her grandmother’s plums. It faces the wrong way for a red grape, north, away from the sun, so it ripens slowest of anything on the property, and every year the crew has to stand around waiting on it while everything else is already in the tanks. Some years they waited so long the cold came down off the hills before they got to the last rows. Those years they picked at night, he said, with lanterns hung on the end posts, because the cold held the color in the skins and the sugar where it was, and nobody wanted to lose a whole year’s work to one bad frost. He talked about the top two rows, where there is hardly any soil at all, just broken rock the vines have to push their roots down through, and he said the pepper in the wine comes from there, from those top two rows. He said it the way my grandfather used to tell me which trees in the old orchard on our farm in West Gardiner made the best cider, as though it were simply a fact of the world, like where the sun comes up, and it had never crossed his mind that anybody alive might not know it.
I have tasted a lot of old-vine Zinfandel and read a lot of tasting notes about it, and nobody had ever told me where the pepper comes from. I wanted to taste it right then. So did she, I think. She had stopped looking at the sheet.
She remembered her training then and asked him what had brought him in today.
“I came to see how it turned out,” he said. “I picked that block every year.”
She picked up the tablet by the register and asked for his name, so she could find him on the member list. He told her it was Eli Cassin. She scrolled, and frowned, and scrolled again, and said she was sorry, she didn’t see him on there.
He smiled as if she had said something kind. “It’s an older list,” he said.
She poured him the Old Vine Zinfandel, a full tasting pour, and he lifted the glass and held it up toward the window, where the last of the daylight was coming in low and orange over the vines. He turned it slowly by the stem and looked at the color for a long time, the way a farmer looks at something he grew, and he didn’t drink it. Then he looked past me toward the door and said that his name was in there too, if I cared to see it.
I knew he meant the ledger. The host came around the end of the counter and the two of us bent over the glass case together like kids at a museum. It was a picking book, with the date down the left side, then the block, then the names of the men who had worked it, each line in the same careful brown hand. About halfway down the open page was a line that read Oct. 31, 1894. North block, by lantern. Under it, by itself, was E. Cassin.
I remember that the woodstove ticked behind us, the small metal sound a stove makes when it is cooling down, and that I thought nothing of it at the time.
When we straightened up, the stool at the end of the counter was empty. The bell above the door was perfectly still. His glass sat where he had set it down, full to the line, the wine catching the last of the light from the window. On the floorboards under the stool there was a small scatter of red dirt, still holding the shape of a boot heel, and the air at that end of the counter smelled of woodsmoke and lamp oil.
The host went to the window and I went with her. It was very nearly dark outside, and the wind had dropped off to nothing, so that the leaves had stopped moving on the vines. Up near the top of the north slope, low in the rows, a light was moving. It moved the way a lantern moves when somebody carries it at a slow walk, swinging a little, stopping, going on again, and in the edge of its light I thought I could see somebody bending to the vines and straightening up again, bending and straightening, the way pickers do. It went the whole length of the top row. At the end post it stopped for a moment, and hung there, and went out.
Neither of us said anything for a while. Then she went behind the counter and put her hand flat on top of the woodstove and took it away again fast, and looked at me, and didn’t say anything about that either. She closed ’Salem’s Lot without marking her page and put it on the shelf under the register. She asked me whether I knew anything about the north block. I told her I didn’t, and that he had been the one to ask.
When I left she was standing at the glass case with the tablet in her hand, copying the names off the ledger page one at a time. His glass was still on the counter. She hadn’t poured it out, and I don’t think she was going to.
I drove home over Carson Pass in the dark with the heater on high, and I kept the radio off the whole way, and I did not look at the vineyard in the rearview mirror when I pulled out of the lot, although I wanted to.
A story for Halloween. The winery, the host, and Eli Cassin are made up. The old Zinfandel vines of Amador County’s Shenandoah Valley, some of them in the ground since the 1800s, are real.
Pour Story Society comes out every other Friday with a place worth the drive, a bottle, and a few stories from the people who make it. The Vianarra newsletter goes to winery and hotel teams every Wednesday. I also run staff workshops for tasting rooms and small hotels, and host wine tastings at home, online, or for a company event.
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About the author
Patrick R. Dunn is the founder of Vianarra, a hospitality storytelling practice based in Sparks, Nevada. He trained in narrative at the University of Maine under Stephen King and folklorist Edward “Sandy” Ives, spent more than a decade as a National Park Service interpretive ranger at six sites, and led global crisis management and operational resilience teams for thirty years across four continents, through 9/11, Katrina, and Sandy. He holds WSET Level 3 and is the author of Stop Leading on Empty (Archway/Simon & Schuster). Subscribe to the Vianarra newsletter.