Throwback Thursday: ‘Good for Grapes’ by Kelly Robson

The wine industry, as featured author Kelly Robson tells us, is ‘a very geeky world! Grape growing and winemaking are incredibly complex, and the people involved are hugely passionate. It’s also a world of romance, land, and money, where you can lose a fortune very quickly. These are all great elements for drama.’

And in ‘Good for Grapes’, our featured story for Pulp Literature Issue 23, Summer 2019, we get all that and more — the full bouquet, you might say!

So uncork a bottle of your favourite libation, pull up a deck chair, and take a sip of summer with this excerpt from Issue 23.

Good for Grapes

by Kelly Robson

Simon wouldn’t have set foot in Canada again if the harvest hadn’t been late. He’d badmouthed the Okanagan all over the world, from Coonawarra to the Cape, calling it a shithouse of overpriced land, badly managed vines, and wannabe winemakers who had no business being anywhere near a ferment. Threw it off, every time.

Nothing did more damage to wine than amateurs with money.

But California was early and BC was late, and when Simon got the email from High Bench Estates, he had just finished laying a Rockpile Cabernet into new French oak barrels and he was planning to hit a Nicaraguan beach for a few months before Australia called him home to a hot February. But he had expenses, two of them, living with his ex in Melbourne. He’d emailed back with a jacked-up fee, and High Bench still wanted him.

So instead of surf and beer and stoned girls, he got a flight north and a long ride on a stinking Greyhound toward a valley full of no-hopers and vinifera trying like hell to ripen through frost.

Simon hunkered down in the back seat of the bus and tipped airplane bottles of rum into a travel mug. Just past Hope, the mountain pines turned from green to red. He probably wouldn’t have noticed if the hippie kids in the next seat hadn’t freaked out over all that dead forest. Pine beetles, apparently, killing trees by the millions. He listened to them whine about climate change for a minute or two, then plugged in his earbuds.

The French oak back in Rockpile cost over three grand a barrel. A few pennies too much to pay for wood, but Rockpile was a professional operation from rootstock to shoot. Simon had worked twenty-hour shifts coaxing the juice through a textbook ferment, and after a couple of years in those barrels, it’d bottle okay. The winery investors would be happy.

His ex had been happy, too, when he sent her the money he wouldn’t be spending in Nicaragua. And High Bench — well, if the old man was going to put Simon through the wringer again, he’d just better hand over a fat cheque with a smile on his face.

 

When the Greyhound turned off the highway, Simon punched a text into the cheap burner he’d picked up at the Vancouver airport. The red truck was waiting for him. He remembered its antique fenders and peeling paint better than the two vineyard grunts leaning on the bumper. Huey and Dewey, he thought. Interchangeable. Both tanned deep brown but for the pale sunglass rings around their eyes and the white baseball cap stripes above their eyebrows.

Simon eyed the cuts and nicks knotting their forearms. “How they hanging?”

“Looking good,” said Huey. “The Merlot was ready to come off three days back, but they said to wait.”

Two minutes off the bus and it was already amateur hour. “Who made that call? Not the old man. His Honour would never wait to put it in steel.”

Huey opened his mouth to answer but Dewey shoved an elbow in his ribs.

Simon tried again. “He didn’t wait for winter last time. Nothing shy about him. Thought he could get a ferment from green grapes just by throwing in a pack of yeast.”

Dewey grunted and tossed Simon’s bag in the back of the truck.

Simon watched the rows climb past the truck window as they wound up the bench. The Cabernet Sauvignon on one side was throwing out suckers and cordons and big fat watery clusters, just like he expected. Bad farming, sloppy grapes.

The Cabernet Franc on the other side was only four or five years old. Nothing like the gnarled century-old Barossa vines he’d cut his teeth on, but they looked okay. Probably managed by a community college viticulture grad, doing it by the book. That would be fine until the owner decided he needed a higher yield. Then the kid would get canned and the vines would go to shit.

It was decent land, though. The slope coasted down to the lake, steep enough to create a nice breeze. Put it a thousand miles south and they might be able to make a bottle or two worth drinking.

To find out what happens next, pick up your copy of Issue 23, Summer 2019 here!

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Kelly Robson is an award-winning science fiction, fantasy, and horror writer. Many of her stories have been selected for year’s-best anthologies and have been translated internationally. Kelly grew up in the foothills of the Rockies, competing in rodeos and gymkhanas. From 2008 to 2012, she wrote the wine and spirits column for Chatelaine. After twenty-two years in Vancouver, she and her wife, fellow writer AM Dellamonica, now make their home in downtown Toronto. You can find her on Twitter as @kellyoyo.