Summer in a Glass by Evan Dawson

Author:Evan Dawson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Sterling Epicure
Published: 2011-05-03T16:00:00+00:00

IF YOU’RE GOING TO SPEND TIME WITH TRICIA RENSHAW, YOU’RE going to spend time with her two girls. For Morgan and me, this was no problem. Morgan’s job as a photographer entails hundreds of hours spent with young children each year, and I spent my high-school and college summers directing programs at a camp on Lake Chautauqua. But if others who come into Tricia’s life are not accustomed to kids, they’re going to have to get used to it. Tricia and her daughters are an inseparable package.

It has always been this way, and Tricia’s devotion to her kids was only bolstered by the dissolution of her marriage. She doesn’t talk about it—not even with the girls, and she talks about almost everything with them. Her ex lives in another state and sees the girls on occasion, but Tricia does the parenting. She is their rock and they, no doubt, are hers.

Tricia had abandoned her pursuit of teaching French shortly after she started at Fox Run. It had been an enormous risk. While she found working in a public school district to be banal, it had at least offered a steady paycheck and the promise of long-term stability. Making wine offered daily invigoration—and a much smaller paycheck, along with the instability of an industry increasingly saturated with new wineries.

On top of that, Tricia had to answer one important question: Could she learn the science of making wine? Her instincts would carry her only so far, and she knew she could never be a head winemaker without scientific training. Not long after Peter Bell had asked Tricia to be his assistant winemaker, she began the daunting task of book learning, classes, and online coursework. It would take several years, and some nights she wondered if she could even complete the work, let alone flourish in a scientific world that was entirely new to her.

Peter Bell might not have realized it, but Tricia tried to absorb every little detail when he talked about the science of wine. She found him even more helpful than her classes.

We met Tricia and her girls on a muggy July night for dinner almost three years after she first called Fox Run. This trip took us to downtown Canandaigua, the town on the northern edge of the lake with the same name. Canandaigua lies to the west of Keuka, Seneca, and Cayuga and, at fifteen miles in length, is about half the size of Seneca and Cayuga. It is not a celebrated wine-producing lake—it’s best known for rivaling Lake Tahoe in property values.

The town of Canandaigua is charming, and especially so on summer evenings. The vivacious main street hums with the sound of farmers’ markets and open-air orchestral performances. The lake, glistening down below the sweep of the hill, hosts sailboat races and leisurely cruises. Fortunately for people like Tricia, the properties set back from the lake were nowhere near as expensive.

Tricia lived in an old house directly across the street from the historic Sonnenberg Gardens, and she

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.