The Merlot Murders ((Wine Country Mysteries, Book 1) by Ellen Crosby

Author:Ellen Crosby [Crosby, Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2011-01-16T23:36:08.629000+00:00

"Why didn't you put out the owls?" I asked. My mother had a huge col ection of owl statues she put along the fences that surrounded the vineyard.

They frightened the birds off. Sort of."

"Statues? I didn't know about them. Where are they?"

"The smokehouse. I'm surprised Hector didn't remember."

"We'd taken to shooting them. The crows, I mean. Until recently." He didn't elaborate. He didn't have to. "Let's get some samples from other parts of the block. I'l do TA and pH back at the house to be sure, but I don't think it's going to change anything about when we pick."

TA is titratable acidity and is a measure of the total acid in the grape juice--pH is sort of related to titratable acidity and is the third important component for determining ripeness. If the pH is too high, the grapes could be overripe. The ideal time to harvest is when there's a good balance between the sweetness and the acidity in the wine, and that could change in the space of a day.

He started the Gator. "I had a cal from Elvis Harmon. Seems our neighbor lost a calf," he said. "Got through a hole in the electric fence. I promised we'd keep an eye out for it."

"If it's been too long the foxes probably got it, poor thing."

"Or the coyotes."

"We don't have coyotes in Virginia."

"They're moving into the area. We've got coyotes, honey."

He clipped three more bunches of grapes from other vines in the Chardonnay block, then we headed out into an open field toward the larger of our two apple orchards. Quinn kicked the Gator into third gear and we roared bumpily across the hard-packed terrain.

He slowed down as we came to the orchard with its uneven rows of trees, as pleasantly untidy as the vines were orderly and wel trained. Apple-picking time began in September and stretched into October, coinciding with the harvest of our reds. A few men from the vineyard crew were sent to the orchard to pick and the apples were made into sparkling cider.

My mother, like Jefferson, believed in experimenting in the garden, and the orchards had been no exception. We had at least a half dozen kinds of apples--the usual Jonathans, Winesaps, and Red Delicious, but also the more exotic Ginger Golds, Cox's Orange Pippin, and Jefferson's own favorite, the Esopus Spitzenburg, which despite its homely name, tasted sweetly and smel ed of orange blossoms.

We passed the dry-stacked stone wal at the end of the orchard and drove down an al ee of cherry trees my mother had planted as seedlings. My favorite time of year to come to this part of the vineyard was spring, when the sprays of pale pink blooms made it look as though the tree branches were covered in a lace curtain. Some years the blossoms didn't last long and on windy days there would be a pink blizzard that stripped the trees and left a carpet of petals on the ground.

"When did you start working here?" I asked Quinn.

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