Young Wine

Gia’s wine lives in his bathroom, in a blue twenty-litre water bottle, under a towel, because the towel keeps it calm.

He trod the grapes in October in a plastic basin, with the whole courtyard watching from the balconies, and on Sunday afternoon he decided it was time. He knocked on three doors: Valiko’s, Eter’s and mine.

“Today you are not friends,” he said. “Today you are tasters.”

We sat in his kitchen. He poured the first glass through a tea strainer. It came out nearly black and smelled loud.

Valiko went first. He drank half, held it in his mouth for a long time, swallowed and looked out of the window.

“Your grandfather’s was better,” he said. “But your grandfather had a vineyard.”

Eter only wet her lips. “It’s alive,” she said, which from Eter could mean anything.

Then it was my turn. I lifted the glass to the light, the way they do on television. I turned it. I put my nose in it and breathed in slowly, with my whole face, the way a man who has smelled wine before would.

“Saperavi,” I said. “Kakheti, but the low vineyards, down by the road. Picked a week late. And somewhere in it, a pear.”

The kitchen went quiet.

“A pear fell in,” Gia said. “On the second day. Out of the fruit bowl. I didn’t take it out.”

“And a little rain,” I said.

“It rained into the basin. Once.” He sat down. “Who told you?”

I took a sip instead of answering, a careful one, the size of a teaspoon, and held it the way Valiko had, until it was warm.

“Well?” said Gia.

“Young,” I said. “Clean. It will be better on the twenty-third.”

“Why the twenty-third?”

“Because on the twenty-third it will be better,” I said.

Valiko laughed. Eter did not. Gia wrote 23 on the towel in biro, carefully, the way you write down a doctor’s appointment.

On the stairs Eter stopped me with one hand on the rail.

“The pear,” she said. “Gia’s kitchen is on the courtyard side. Your balcony looks at the street.”

“It does.”

She waited.

“It was a very loud pear,” I said.