Eight Hundred Grapes: a perfect summer escape to a sun-drenched vineyard. Laura Dave

      

      

       Copyright

      Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

      Copyright © Laura Dave 2015

      Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2015

      Cover images © Shutterstock.com

      Laura Dave asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Ebook Edition © July 2015 ISBN: 9780008129378

      Version: 2015-07-02

       Dedication

       J.

       Without you, there probably wouldn’t be a novel …

       There certainly wouldn’t be such great wine

      You have to grow about eight hundred grapes to get just one bottle of wine. If that isn’t an argument to finish the bottle, I don’t know what is.

       —Anonymous

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      Dedication

       Epigraph

      Part 1: The Grapes

      Sebastopol, California. Six months ago

The Last Straw

Regarding Henry

The Contract

The Secateurs

Sebastopol, California. 1979

Mr. McCarthy

A Guy Named Mark and a Guy Named Jesse

The Wedding Crashers

       Sebastopol, California. 1984

       The View from 8 A.M., the Last Sunday of the Harvest

       The Wine Thief

       The Ride Home

       Grown, Produced, and Bottled

       Part 2: The Crush

       Ben and Maddie and Georgia and Jacob

       Sebastopol, California. 1989

       The Terroir Has a Story

       The Last Family Dinner (Part 1)

       Spontaneous Fermentation (and Other Ways to Lose the Love of Your Life)

       Sebastopol, California. 1994

       The Last Family Dinner (Part 2)

       Exile on Main Street

       The Vintner Drinks Alone

       Pancakes at The Violet Café

       Perfect Red

       Sebastopol, California. 1999

       Home

       The History of Wine

       Note by Note

       Falling Out of Sync

       No Secrets

       Part 3: The Union

       An Invitation

       People Who Screw Up

       High Yields

       The Starkville City Jail

       The Wine Cave

       Sebastopol, California. 2004

       Have-to-Have

       The Harvest Party

       A Few Good Men

       The Defrosting

       Synchronization

       Part 4: The Last Harvest

       The Waiting Room

       Sebastopol, California. 2009

       The Details

       The First Contract

       The Other Line

       Everything Worth Doing

       The Wedding

       Part 5: An Unnamed Vineyard

       Sebastopol, California. Present day

       Acknowledgments

       About the Author

       Also by Laura Dave

       About the Publisher

Part 1

       Sebastopol, California. Six months ago

      My father has this great story about the day he met my mother, a story he never gets sick of telling. It was a snowy December morning and he was hurrying into his co-worker’s yellow Volkswagen bug parked in front of Lincoln Center, holding two cups of coffee and a massive slew of newspapers.