Aftertaste

About

Ana Reyes-Muir makes wine on eleven hectares she and her wife planted at thirty. Nineteen months ago a virus took her sense of smell and gave her something worse in its place: clean fruit reads as wet ash, the cellar smells like burning plastic, and the bank facility is secured against a crop she can no longer judge. For two vintages, the blending calls have quietly been made by her harvest-crew leader. Juno is eleven weeks past a scan that changed the tense of every sentence in the house. She wants to work this vintage, and she has been making arrangements nobody has been shown, because she has worked out — correctly — that Ana will never sell the place while she is alive and will not survive running it alone afterwards. Wen Aporo has the best palate in the valley, no capital, and loves both of them in shapes that have stayed manageable until this year. Three voices, nine weeks, one tank at a time: brix numbers, a botrytis warning that arrives twenty hours late, contract growers, a co-op tank that can only be filled once, and a bank meeting at which a woman with no sense of smell has to stand up and describe a wine. A grief story with dirt under its nails and desire running all the way through it — frank, adult, and closing the door. Five endings; the vintage is finished in four of them and the marriage survives in two, and they are not the same four and two.

Cast

• A Ana Reyes-Muir POV one; winemaker and owner no portrait yet
• Juno Reyes-Muir POV two; Ana's wife, eleven weeks past the scan
• Wen Aporo POV three; harvest crew leader, the palate
• B Bede Farrant neighbouring winery owner; Ana's old mentor no portrait yet
• M Moana Tapsell the bank's agri manager no portrait yet
• T Tesh Rahiri cellar hand, 24, first vintage as a full-timer no portrait yet