Sinfandel (3 page)

“Is there a problem?” I said.

“This your property?” he asked, motioning toward my vineyard.

“Yes.  What’s the matter?”

He flashed a badge in my direction.  “I’m detective Obermeyer, San Joaquin County Sheriff’s Department.  Would you follow me?”

Before I could answer, he marched off toward the railroad tracks, then turned onto the dirt service road that runs alongside the tracks.  I jogged to catch up with him.

“Why can’t you just tell me what it is?” I said.

“Better if I show you.”

“Can I see your badge again?”

He stopped, opened the wallet and allowed me to inspect the badge to my satisfaction.

“Mind if I call the station to verify this?  You could be the Zodiac killer’s son for all I know.”

“Be my guest.”

I rummaged in my purse for my cell phone and called information and got connected to the Sheriff’s Station.  A woman answered and I asked her to describe Detective Obermeyer, since a man claiming to be him was requesting that I follow him into the woods.

“Certainly,” she said.  “Steve Obermeyer is about six feet tall, dark hair with a little gray here and there, great body, and voted best candidate for Mr. July if we ever get our annual Sheriffs’ calendar idea off the ground.”

I nodded as I listened to her description, working hard to suppress a smile. 

When I finally hung up, he said, “Satisfied?”

I nodded and continued following him along the tracks.

“That pond on your property?” he said, aiming his chin toward a pond created by a dam built by a family of beavers who had moved in long before I bought the place.  Last spring, they felled a tree across the road on the other side of the bridge and I was stranded until one of my neighbors showed up with a chainsaw and hauled it away.

“Yes.  Did the beavers break some county ordinance?”  Detective Obermeyer didn’t smile. Apparently he had no sense of humor.

We walked another fifty yards or so.  As we approached an overpass where Highway 12 crossed the tracks, I noticed some tall green plants growing under the bridge.  When we got to the plants, I stopped, suddenly aware of the problem.

“These aren’t mine,” I said.

“You realize what they are.”

“Marijuana plants?  I’ve never seen one in person, but I’ve seen pictures.”

“Whoever planted them has been watering them from that pond your beaver’s built.”

“They’re not
my
beavers.”

“From that pond on your property.  Would you know anything about this?”

Right, like I would admit to it even if I did know something about it.  “No, but I’m surprised they’re growing so well under the bridge.  You’d think they’d need more sun.”

“They get plenty of morning and evening sun.  We got a call from one of the railroad employees who recognized what they are.  I found some footprints in the mud around the pond.  Looks like the guy uses a five-gallon bucket to get the water to them.”

“I haven’t seen anyone hauling a bucket around, but he probably does it in the middle of the night… oh my God.”  I actually gasped.

“What is it?”

“A couple nights ago there was a strange pickup in my driveway at 2:30 in the morning.  I called 911 but he was gone by the time the police got here.”

“You think it’s related?”

“Could be.  He was messing around my barn.  I bet he was looking for a bucket.  I didn’t notice if any were gone, I have a bunch of them.”  I was grasping at straws, but any explanation was better than not knowing what the stranger was up to that night.

“You’d think he’d bring his own bucket.”

“Maybe something happened to his.  Handle broke or he forgot it.”

Obermeyer scanned the surrounding terrain.  The sun was getting low in the sky and the light was not good.  “I’d like to set up a surveillance point.  Can you see this pond from your house?”

I shook my head.  “No.  You’d have to be at the edge of the vineyard to see it.”

Obermeyer nodded.  “I’ll need access then.  How do I get up there?”  He pointed to the highest knoll where the last row of vines came up to the fence that surrounds the vineyard.

We walked back to our cars, only to find my not-so-upstanding neighbor, Dash Zucker, in his beat-up pickup stopped on the bridge, studying our vehicles.  I waved, just to be neighborly, and waited for him to pass before I opened my door to get in my car.

“Neighborhood watch?” Obermeyer asked.

“Something like that.” 

Detective Obermeyer followed me home.  I showed him how to get to the vineyard without letting the horses out.  I closed the gate behind him and watched his car roll slowly along the fence line until it disappeared over the first hill.

Back in the barn, the metal trash can I stored the cat food in had been knocked over and the lid popped off.  What was left of twenty pounds of cat food had been reduced to a few small piles.  With my hands on my hips, I glared at the mess, then salvaged what food I could into a bucket and took it into the house.  There wasn’t a good place to store bulk quantities of cat food in my little domicile, but for the time being I put the bucket on top of the clothes dryer on the back porch until I could find a way to outsmart the raccoons.

Feeling extra-safe knowing Detective Obermeyer was camped out at the edge of my property, just a horn-blow away if I needed him, I opened all my windows to let the cool breeze in, then sat down at my desk to start on my next challenge: sorting out the quagmire of grape and wine data given to me by Quinn Adamson.

Chapter Four

T
he discrepancies I found in the databases I was hired to make sense of were colossal.  In an effort to cut State payroll costs by eliminating data entry positions, someone had come up with the brilliant idea to let wineries upload their own grape receipt data directly to the State’s computers.  Actually, it wasn’t a bad idea, but no thought had been put into its execution.  No standards had been applied, no rules set.  I found six different spellings for Chardonnay, which to a computer, meant they were all different varieties.  Every variety suffered from the same multi-identity problem.  Among the wineries, some spelled out the names, some used abbreviations, some used acronyms, and some used cryptic codes that seemed to have no logical meaning.  Quinn Adamson had recognized the problem almost right away and managed to get a few temporary data-entry clerks hired to key in data from reports generated by the wineries, but with the massive amount of information that needed to be entered, the harvest would be long over before they finished.  My first order of business was to clean up the data and develop a recommendation.  If this information was ever going to be useful, they’d have to set some standards for the computer data they accepted.

It was a tedious process, but finally I built a translation table that would funnel the variations of each variety into single groupings. 

By midnight, I still had not seen Detective Obermeyer’s car leave, and wondered when the neighborhood “farmer” would arrive to water his crop. 

I couldn’t wait any longer to see the excitement of the drug bust.  I had to get up early to meet Pete Mercado, a grape broker who arranged the sale of my grapes this year.  Pete had agreed to take me along as he checked on the harvest of another vineyard so I could watch the whole process in action.

At sunrise, Pete honked his horn at my gate, apparently anxious to get started.  I’d just fed the horses and poured out the last of the food for the cats.  I jogged down the driveway and climbed into his pickup, a light blue Chevy.

“Mornin’,” he said, offering me a steaming cup of coffee from a local donut shop.

Smiling, I shook my head.  “No thanks.  Never developed a taste for coffee.”

He shrugged and put the coffee in one of the cup holders.  “More for me then.”  He put the truck in gear and headed down the road.  “Hey, how was Panama?”

“Wish I could tell you.  I had to cancel the cruise.”

“You didn’t go?”  He looked more disappointed than I was.

“I had to work.” 

“That’s too bad.”

Nodding, I gazed out the window at the passing farmland.  “Where’s the vineyard we’re going to?” I asked.

“Clay Station.”

“Zinfandel?” I said.

“Merlot.”

“When do you think we should start picking mine?”  In my head, I calculated the due dates for all my bills.

Pete scratched his chin and took a sip of his coffee.  “I figure the brix should be right by next week.  Hope we don’t get any rain before then.  We don’t need any mold on the crop.”

“It’s not supposed to, is it?”  I needed every penny I could get from the crop this year, and I didn’t need any delays in getting the grapes harvested.

“Rain don’t generally care if it’s supposed to or not.  It just does.”

Twenty minutes later, we pulled off of Clay Station Road and parked behind a line of grape trucks waiting to be loaded.  I climbed out of the pickup and breathed in the smell of fertile soil and ripe grapes.  The hat-covered heads of seasonal workers appeared over the tops of the vines as they reached into the foliage with sharp cutting tools and removed clusters of deep red berries.  They dropped them into buckets, and when the buckets were full, they emptied them into large tubs on trailers pulled by tractors between the rows of vines.  When the tractors reached the ends of the rows, the full tubs were dumped into the large bins of the grape trucks. 

Pete thumbed through a stack of paper.  I recognized the field tags from my days working at the winery.

“The grower fills out these field tags with all their information.  Name, variety, vineyard, block if there is one,” Pete explained.  “I just double check to make sure we didn’t get tags for some other vineyard by mistake.”

I peered over his shoulder at the green tags.  They were crisp, clean, neatly stacked and bundled with a rubber band.  By the time they got to the winery, they’d be torn, stained with grape juice and tobacco spit, and smell of stale cigarette smoke from the pickers and truck drivers who’d handle them for the rest of the day. 

Pete handed the tags to a man who appeared to be supervising the picking.  The supervisor peeled a tag off the top, wrote down the truck’s license plate number on it and handed it to a driver who was waiting in the cab of his truck.  The big diesel engine started up and rolled out onto the pavement to deliver the grapes to the winery where they’d be crushed and turned into wine.

Pete waved his arm in the general direction of the vineyard.  “We’ll be done picking this field by the end of the day, then we’ll move on to another block.  If we don’t get ‘em harvested fast enough, the brix’ll get too high and the winemakers’ll belly ache like a bunch of spoiled brats at a whining convention.”

As I gazed at the vineyard, Pete went on to explain, “Brix is the word we use to measure the sugar content of the grapes.  One brix is equal to one percent sugar.  The higher the brix, the higher the alcohol produced.  Too much alcohol can kill the yeast and other bacteria, wreaking havoc on the fermentation process.”

I already knew that, but I did think it was important to stop Pete.  “What’s the brix level of these grapes?” I asked.

“Twenty-five today.  If this weather keeps up, they’ll be too high in a few days.  I’ll never forget that year a load of Merlot came in at over thirty.  I holed up in my office for three hours till the winemakers got done screamin’.”

Pete led me down a row that hadn’t been picked yet and let me taste the grapes.  They were juicy, sweet, and still cool from the lower overnight temperatures.

“Ready to follow one of these loads to the winery?” Pete asked.

I nodded and trailed him to his pickup.  We fell in behind another full truck and followed it to Venezia Winery, a small operation on the outskirts of Lodi.  There were about thirty grape trucks lined up waiting to unload when we got there. 

Pete parked in the employee lot and led me out behind the small tasting room and through a large warehouse that was at least twenty degrees cooler than outside and smelled of damp oak wood.  We walked by barrels stacked up along two walls, passed a noisy bottling line that sounded like a roller coaster that never reaches the peak, and out to the plant where the crushers were.  The familiar smell of fermenting juice and compost wrinkled my nose.  

There was a flurry of activity as dozens of workers kept the operation moving as smoothly as possible.  Men in hardhats hollered into radios over the noise of the crushers while others rode back and forth on bicycles, trying not to run over anyone.  Pete stopped me from walking in front of a speeding forklift twice. 

One man with a clipboard kept very busy checking the field tags of each truck as it pulled into the line.  He flitted from truck to truck like one of those jugglers who constantly runs from plate to plate to make sure it doesn’t slow down enough to fall and break. 

Pete must’ve noticed me watching him.  “That’s my brother, Tommy.  Busier than a one-armed paper hanger.”

Pete grabbed two hardhats from a rack and handed me one, then led the way through a maze of equipment, hoses, catwalks, and storage tanks to the center of the action.   

“Venezia only has two crushers,” Pete said.  “That’s why there’s so many trucks lined up.  They want to put in a couple more before next harvest.”

As each grape truck reached the front of the line, it pulled onto a scale and was weighed. 

A woman with a stainless steel cup attached to the end of a long pole stood on a platform and retrieved grape samples from each bin.  The samples were used to determine the brix, rot, and MOG, which stood for “material other than grape.”  Contracts stipulated the growers had to deliver grapes within specifications and with minimal non-grape material.  It wasn’t a big problem with hand-picked grapes, but machine picking sometimes resulted in too many leaves and stems, not to mention the occasional bird nest, jack rabbit, and miscellaneous hardware like vineyard wire and wooden stakes.  If the load wasn’t up to par, the grower was charged a penalty.

“After the truck leaves the scale, it gets directed to a crusher, depending on if it has red or white grapes,” Pete said.

A truck pulled up next to one of the crushers, a big stainless steel hopper with a corkscrew auger in the bottom of it.  Each truck had four separate bins full of grapes, and a cable was attached to one side of each bin, lifting the un-hinged side up until the grapes poured out into the crusher.

“From here, they get de-stemmed and crushed,” Pete yelled over the sound of the equipment.

Suddenly, I heard a shriek and screaming from a woman behind the truck.  Then a loud BANG, the smell of gunpowder, and people scattered in all directions.  Pete and I peered around the truck to see what the commotion was about.  A man in coveralls and tall rubber boots, pistol in hand, chased a snake that had fallen out of the grape bin, firing shots into the pavement that ricocheted and threatened to punch holes in truck tires, wine tanks, and heaven forbid, people.

Pete took off after the pistol-packing worker, screaming, “It’s a damn gopher snake, Leonard!  Leave it alone!”

By the time Pete got hold of Leonard’s arm, the snake had made its escape into the vineyard and would live to see another day.  Pete eased the pistol from Leonard’s hand and walked him back to the crusher. 

Leonard kept repeating, “I hate snakes.”

Pete patted him on the back.  “I know, Leo, but gopher snakes are our friends.”

Pete handed the pistol to a man who appeared to be in charge of the operation.  “Tell the grower we’re not paying him for the snake,” he said, laughing, then took a deep breath and waved everyone to get back to work.

After a quick tour of the scale house, where Pete introduced me to the state inspector who was taking the samples from the trucks, then the lab and tasting room, Pete decided it was time to return to the vineyard.

“Would you mind stopping at Fisco on our way?  I need to pick up some cat food,” I said.

“No problem.  I need to get some boots anyway.”

Fisco was our local farm supply store where you could buy anything from animal feed to cowboy clothes.  While Pete wandered the rubber-boot aisle, I found the dry cat food and searched for some sort of raccoon-proof container.  I finally found an odd-shaped plastic box with a hinged door that could be securely closed with a metal snap, which I also bought.

Pete dropped me off at home, then he returned to the Clay Station vineyard to keep an eye on things. 

I poured a new twenty-pound bag of cat food into my raccoon-proof container and snapped the door shut, proud that I’d finally out-smarted those little masked thieves.