Sinfandel Read Online Free PDF Page B

“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.