Dying on the Vine Read Free Page A

winemaker. (As for an “official hierarchy,” Pietro was the boss; that was about as official as it got.) It would have been better had Luca’s and Franco’s positions been reversed, Pietro knew, but what was a father to do, ignore the rightful claims to primacy of the first-born son? Not likely for most fathers, highly unlikely for Italian fathers, impossible for a Sardinian father. As a result, although he trusted Luca’s opinions more, he deferred to Franco’s whenever it was feasible.
    Surely, that must have soured Luca’s attitude toward the winery, and the knowledge that it would be Franco, the eldest, who would eventually inherit it could not have helped either—but whatever the cause, Luca’s enthusiasms had swung away from wine and toward food. Already he and his unconventional, unpredictable American wife were talking about the restaurant in Arezzo that they would one day own.
    Well, that was all right too, Pietro supposed. A chef, a real chef, was nothing to sneer at. A man could be proud of having a great chef for a son, especially a chef who truly knew something about wine. And he had no doubt that Luca would make a fine chef. Still, it wasn’t what he’d hoped for.
    And Nico? Nico liked wine, all right—a little too much, in fact—but he had never been serious enough to learn and retain something about it. Nico had never been serious enough about anything. Even now, he took no interest in the argument between his brothers, but only sat there drumming his fingers and staring smilingly into his own thoughts. Of the three, only Nico’s role in the winery had nothing to do with the production of it. Nico was their connection to the industry and to the dealers. He spent half his time on the road, like a traveling salesman. And he was extremely good at it. This very afternoon he was off to a winemakers’ conference in Hong Kong. Whoever heard of a winemakers’ conference in Hong Kong? And yet, there was no doubt in Pietro’s mind that he would come back with a suitcase full of orders. A good kid: smart, handsome as a movie star, fast with the ladies, quick with words, a born salesman. But a businessman? No.
    All these considerations had played into his decision to accept the offer from Humboldt-Schlager. He was left, as he saw it, with little choice. Tradition, of course, required that in his will, he leave the winery to Franco. But Franco was no different than anybody else; he would never change. (
Chi nasce tondo non muore quadro. He who is born round does not die square.
) With Franco at the helm, the Villa Antica that Pietro had poured so much of himself into would die with him. Once Pietro himself was gone, and without Luca’s tempering influence, Franco would turn it into something cold and passionless: a scientific laboratory, its wines perfectly uniform from bottle to bottle, made—“manufactured”—by the cold dictates of chemists and food scientists.
    And so Pietro had concluded that if his own tradition of winemaking wasn’t going to survive him anyway, what was wrong with hurrying its demise along a little—and pocketing €5.5 million from it? About his sons he felt little guilt. Franco, Luca, and even Nico were grown men now, and it was time—past time—for them to strike out on their own. They were all mature, capable men now. Hadn’t he provided them with fine educations and years of highly marketable experience? Besides, as he’d told them, with the money from the beer maker he planned on giving each of them a generous stipend of €5,000 a month for the next five years, a total of €300,000 apiece. Yes, they would find it a shock when they learned that they would be out of jobs and their home, but if €300,000 wasn’t enough to make a place for themselves in the world, what was? He had started Villa Antica with less than a hundredth of that. With the advantages they had, the advantages he’d given them . . .
    When he surfaced again, Luca and Franco were still going