The Sommelier's Bluff

The Willow Creek Farmers Market always affected me. Two days a year, the whole central square fills up with white tents and slow traffic and people who actually care what they're putting in their mouths. I've been pouring at this thing for five years. Forty-five years old and I still get a little buzz off it, like a grown man with a good Saturday ahead of him.

My name's Gerald Thornton. I'm forty-five. I run the wine counter at Brix & Barrel over on Delaney Street, and I've held that counter down for five years now. My wife, Raquel, is forty-two. We met thirteen years ago at a professional networking mixer in the back room of a restaurant that doesn't exist anymore. She was twenty-nine, I was thirty-two, and she told me my tasting notes were pretentious. I married her eleven months later.

Best decision I ever made. Second best was learning to keep some things from her, which sounds worse than it is. I'll get to that.

Saturday morning, early autumn, the air had that crisp apple-cider edge to it. Rosie Moody and I had our pop-up tent set up by seven. White canopy, folding tables with white cloths, thirty bottles racked behind us, twelve for tasting. Rosie's thirty-eight, works the shop floor with me, been there since she was thirty-three. Flirtatious in the way some people are tall. It's just a fact about her. It means nothing.

"Gerald, honey, we're gonna sell out of the Tempranillo by noon," she said, straightening the glasses on the table. "Should I hide two bottles in the truck?"

"Hide four. And stop calling me honey at the stall, people will think we're a thing."

She grinned at me. "We are a thing. We're the best thing at this market."

That's Rosie. All gas, no malice. Five years of working Saturdays together and not one awkward moment. I could tell her about the plan and she just nodded, like I'd asked her to watch my parking meter.

Here's the plan, and here's why I had to keep it from my wife, who is a marketing consultant and smells a scheme like a truffle dog.

Mitch Dobson.

Mitch is a wine importer, forty-eight, and we worked together at a distribution company fifteen years ago. I was thirty, he was thirty-three, and the falling-out was about a client. He took a restaurant account I'd spent eight months building and told the owner it was his list. His palate. His relationships. I found out when the owner called me to thank me for a favor I hadn't done. I've hated him with a clean, well-stored hate ever since, the way you hate a rival in a sport. It's not hot. It's cellar temperature.

Two years ago the market added a best-vendor award. Voted by the crowd, announced Sunday afternoon, blue ribbon and a full-page ad in the town paper. Mitch has won it both years, and this year he's favored again. He walks around like he's already been crowned, shaking hands, handing out little foam cups of his bargain Vermentino to every stroller in the park.

I'd had enough. So three weeks ago, without telling Raquel, I planned the counterattack. Blind tasting flights at our tent. Five dollars, six wines, two of them Mitch's own imports, poured unmarked. People would taste his stuff against real wine and figure it out on their own. No trash talk. Just truth in a glass. Rosie thought it was devious and beautiful. Raquel would have called it petty and expensive, and she would've been half right, which is exactly why she wasn't told.

The problem with keeping a secret from your wife is you get good at it, and then you're good at it all the time, and then she notices you're good at it. That's where things stood as of that Saturday morning.

* * *

We'd been pouring for two hours. The line at our tent was six deep, which I noticed with some satisfaction was about double Mitch's. Rosie was doing her thing, all smiles and patter, while I talked a couple from the county seat through a Garnacha.

"You get black cherry up front," I told them, "then it goes dusty, like a road in August. That's the vines struggling. Struggling vines make better wine. People are the same."

The wife laughed and bought a bottle. I love that part. I will never not love that part.

And then Rosie elbowed me, hard, and did a bad job of smiling.

I turned around and there was Raquel.

Forty-two years old, dark hair pulled back, jeans and the green jacket I bought her in Oregon two anniversaries ago. Arms crossed. One eyebrow doing the thing it does. She was supposed to be at a client meeting in the city until Sunday night. The client meeting was clearly over, or clearly never happening.

"Gerald," she said.

"Raquel. Hey. What are you..."

I looked at Rosie, who was suddenly very interested in restacking glasses. I looked back at my wife. Behind her, forty feet away, Mitch Dobson was watching over the top of his Vermentino cups with the expression of a man at a dog fight.

"Client cancelled," Raquel said. "Drove back early. Thought I'd surprise you." She looked around the tent, slow, like an auditor. "Looks like a real operation."

"It is. It's a market stall."

"Uh huh. When did you decide this?"

"Week or two ago. I meant to mention it."

"You meant to mention it." She picked up a tasting sheet off the table and read it. Her mouth did a small flat thing. "Blind flights. Five dollars. Two of these wines are Dobson's, aren't they. I recognize the vintage from his last catalog."

Rosie made a sound like a kettle deciding not to boil.

"Okay," I said. "Yes. They're Dobson's!"

Raquel put the sheet down. "So this whole tent, this whole sweet little civic event, is you pulling a fast one on a man you've hated since before we were married."

"That's not the whole..."

"Don't." She held up a hand. "Don't finish that sentence with a lie, Gerald. I've been watching you be cagey for three weeks. Phone face-down. Errands that take four hours. Now I walk up and you're over here giggling with..." she waved at Rosie, "...with this lovely young woman like the two of you are running a heist."

"I'm thirty-eight," Rosie said. "Ma'am."

"See, that's exactly the kind of comment that doesn't help."

I took off my baseball cap, which is what I do when I'm losing. "Raquel. It's petty. I know it's petty. I'm not going to dress it up. Mitch has won this thing twice and gloated about it to half the county, and I wanted to beat him at the one thing I'm actually good at. That's all this is. Wine and spite. No affair, no scheme with money, nothing you don't see right here."

Raquel looked at me for a while. The line behind the couple at the table was shuffling and pretending not to listen, and doing a bad job.

"Giggling," she said finally. "You don't giggle."

"I laugh," Rosie offered. "Loudly. It's an occupational hazard of working with him."

"Is that so." Raquel's eyebrow was still up, but the arm came uncrossed a little. "And what exactly is so funny at ten in the morning at a farmers market?"

Rosie looked at me. I gave her the little nod, because hiding more was how I got here.

"Mitch came by an hour ago," Rosie said. "Told Gerald his Vermentino was going to 'sweep the category.' Then he knocked over a cup of it on our table cloth. Gerald told everyone in line it was a free sample of the competition and they should come back after the blind flight to compare notes. There's a list. People are actually signing a list."

A corner of Raquel's mouth moved. Not a smile. Close. "You're running a grudge against a wine importer at a church-adjacent farmers market."

"The market isn't church-adjacent."

"Gerald."

"It's adjacent to the park," I said. "Where there's a gazebo. Some people get married there. Fine. Yes. It's a grudge. Twelve years of marriage and you married a man with one grudge and a very organized cellar. You knew this."

"I married a sommelier, not a saboteur." She sighed, and pulled the green jacket tighter, and I could tell she'd decided something, though not what. "Okay. Here's what's happening. I'm staying. All weekend. Not because I don't trust you, though you've earned about sixty percent of that lately. Because if my husband is going to humiliate a grown man in public, I want a front-row seat, and I want to know everything before somebody else tells me first."

"That's... fair," I said.

"It's more than fair and you know it." She pointed at the tasting table. "And I'm doing the flight. Pour me the Dobson first. If it's as bad as you think, I want to laugh too."

Rosie slid a glass down the table, grinning ear to ear. "Welcome to the heist, ma'am."

"Stop calling me ma'am. It's Raquel!" She looked at the unmarked glass, then at me. "And Gerald? You're telling me the rest of the plan tonight. All of it. Every detail you left out."

"There's not much..."

"Tonight."

Mitch, I noticed, had wandered closer with his foam cups and his catalog smile. The afternoon was going to be interesting.

Raquel took a sip of the unmarked white. She did the little thing with her jaw she does when she's evaluating something. Then she looked up at me over the rim of the glass.

"Okay. That's not bad."

"It's not supposed to be bad. It's supposed to be his."

"His what?"

"His money-maker. The Vermentino he's been pushing at every restaurant in the county."

She took another sip. "It's fine. A little flat on the finish. Is that the point?"

"That's the point. Wait till you try ours."

* * *

Rosie and I worked the line while Raquel drifted around the tent, reading our signage like she was auditing it. Which, in fairness, she was. She's a marketing consultant. She can't look at a poster without grading it.

"That banner is crooked," she said from behind me.

"It's been crooked for five years. It's part of the charm."

"Fix the banner."

I fixed the banner. Rosie watched the whole exchange with her coffee cup halfway to her mouth, enjoying herself way too much.

"So you two have worked together how long?" Raquel asked. She said it casual, like she was asking about the weather.

"Five years," Rosie said. "Saturdays. Mostly. He's the counter guy, I'm the floor guy. Girl. Person."

"Five years." Raquel let that sit. "And you're what, thirty-eight?"

"Thirty-eight, ma'am. Raquel. Sorry."

"And in five years of Saturdays, the two of you never once..."

"Raquel." I came around the table. "It's a wine shop, not a soap opera. Rosie's my coworker. That's it. That's the whole..."

I stopped, because I almost said it again. Raquel raised both eyebrows at me like, go on, finish it.

"We've got a good working thing," I said instead. "That's all."

"Mm." She picked up a case of the Garnacha and stacked it under the table without being asked. My wife does not do idle. "Well. Coworker. Grab me a bucket and some ice, I'm going to run the second pour station, this line's stacking up."

"That's not..."

"Gerald. I've run product launches for clients with budgets bigger than this whole market. Go pour."

Rosie mouthed oh my god at me behind Raquel's back. I elbowed her.

I haven't said this yet, and I'll say it now because Raquel dragged it out of me that night and I might as well put it on the page where it belongs. The plan had two halves.

The first half was the blind flight. Six wines, five dollars, people vote for their favorite. Mitch's two wines were in there, and so were four of ours, and the whole thing was rigged in the only way that matters, which is honestly, actually, legitimately rigged. Our wines were just better. Four of them were small-lot stuff I'd been sitting on for a year, saving for exactly this kind of stage.

The second half was Rosie, who talked to people. Rosie remembered names, remembered that the Hendersons' daughter was going to college, remembered which of the bakers down the row liked the Riesling. Half the market loved her by noon. That was the plan. That was always the plan. Win the room, win the vote, hand Mitch a receipt.

And the reason my wife came around that tent corner looking like a customs officer at the airport is that for three weeks I'd been rehearsing that plan with Rosie after hours, on the phone, four-hour errands, all of it, and I never once told my wife any of it, because part of me wanted the win to be a surprise. And a bigger part of me, if I'm honest, liked having a secret that wasn't about anything bad, just so I could have one.

That's the ugly little core of it. Raquel saw it before I did.

* * *

Mitch came by at half past two, when the line was longest and I was mid-pour.

"Gerald Thornton." He leaned on the corner post of our tent like he paid rent on it. "Heard you're doing a little guessing game back here."

"Blind flight, Mitch. Five bucks. You're welcome for the traffic."

"Traffic." He looked at the line, then at Raquel, who was pouring at the far station with her sleeves rolled up. "Didn't know you hired help. She's a little old for your usual recruiting pool."

Rosie set her bottle down very carefully.

"Careful, Mitch," I said.