The Sauvignon Secret Read Online Free PDF

with the usual early evening rush-hour logjam.
    “Oh, gosh no. At least I don’t think so. I mean, they weren’t like that.”
    He gave me a don’t-be-naïve look.
    “No, Pépé. Neither of them did it. I’m sure,” I said. “Believe it or not, for a while the deputy from the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Department who turned up on the scene thought I might have done it. There was an empty bottle of my Sauvignon Blanc and a wine-glass next to Paul’s body. Plus it was no secret I disliked him. The reason I drove over there was because I was mad at him.”
    “The police suspect
you
?”
    “Not really. Bobby Noland showed up later. He knows I didn’t do it.”
    “Ah, Bobby. I have a couple of cigars for him,” he said. “Do you think someone wanted to cast suspicion on you by leaving your wine bottle there?”
    I moved from one slow-moving lane of traffic to another that crawled along only slightly faster. “No, that’s too far-fetched. Besides, no one knew I was planning to drop by today.”
    “You’d be surprised how angry people become when they believe they are being cheated, or their livelihood is being stolen,” he said. “It doesn’t take much to push them to the kind of violence we’ve had in France. You’ve heard of the CRAV, haven’t you? The Regional Committee of Viticulture Action, in English. A clandestine group of winemakers who, a couple of years ago, sent the president a video promising blood would flow if he didn’t stop importing cheap wine from Algeria and Spain, and didn’t do something about the overproduction driving down the price of French wine on the world market.”
    “I read about those people. They sounded scary.”
    “They were scary. They bombed government buildings, tanker trucks, supermarkets,” Pépé said. “They drained thousands of euros’ worth of wine from tanks at agricultural cooperatives and let it seep into the ground. Once someone tried to plant a bomb along the route of the Tour de France. Thank God he was caught in time. The press called it ‘wine terrorism.’ ”
    “It isn’t like that here, Pépé. It’s nowhere near that bad,” I said. “Plenty of people were mad at Paul, but not enough to consider blowing up his warehouse. And I honestly don’t believe it was murder, after what the crime scene detective said about how hard it is to fake a suicide. I think Paul killed himself and we’ll probably find out why sooner or later.”
    “It wouldn’t take much to tip the scale for that kind of anger and violence to take hold in America.” Pépé shook a warning finger at me. “It’s what I’ve been asked to talk about in California next week—the lessons your government can learn from what happened to us.”
    “We had September eleventh,” I said. “That changed everything. We have the Department of Homeland Security now. They reclassified wine as a food so we have to report every part of the production process to the Food and Drug Administration under some bioterrorism law. It’s mind-boggling, all the paperwork we have to file. Records of everything we transport, everything we receive, whatwe add to the juice, batch lots, packaging materials … even each batch of grapes and the blend of each wine. It drives Antonio and me crazy. Sometimes I wonder why we even bother or if they ever do anything with all that information.”
    “The first time something happens, you won’t wonder anymore.” My grandfather sounded ominous.
    “Who’d do something to wine?”
    He shrugged. “How hard would it be? A group of tourists drive by a picturesque view of vines planted alongside a country road, say your vineyard on Atoka Road, and get out of the car to take a photograph. At the same time one of them scatters something that the wind will take and blow through your fields. They drive off and disappear forever. Gradually all your vines wither and die. Or a disgruntled employee adds something to one of your five-thousand-gallon tanks of wine just