Wine People by Michelle Wildgen EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Michelle Wildgen
- Language: English
- Genre: Friendship Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
In her five years in the wine business, Wren observed many roads into the
industry—an affinity for chemistry, history, or travel; an auspicious mix of
boredom and family money; unchecked hedonism—but surprisingly few
ways out.
Wren herself had arrived here after working front of the house at a James
Beard Award–winning restaurant in Madison, Wisconsin, where she’d spent
several years pouring Lionel Garrett’s wines before joining his wine
importing company. People arrived in the wine industry from restaurants
and bars and sales jobs and Ph.D. programs and culinary schools, but once
ensconced in the business they all sorted themselves into three types of
colleagues. Some realized early that the highs of tastings, dinners, and
parties weren’t worth the endless bureaucracy and physical toll; those
people departed for saner industries by the age of thirty-five. Others stayed
in the wine business when they shouldn’t, desperate and resolute, their teeth
growing ever more stained and their enviable international anecdotes ever
longer, until they were gently escorted from the wine business by their
spouses, doctors, or AA literature.
And then there were the lifers.
Wren was a lifer, and she knew the rules. To stay in wine, you had to be
both romantic and pragmatic, never losing the love of this ancient substance
even as they figured out how to balance its excesses with ruthless physical
economies. She nursed the same dream they all did: fifty years in the
business and dying upright at the table, a glass of her ideal wine in hand.
(The perfect final wine was ever-changing and an ongoing topic among
wine people, who didn’t find the conversation morbid.)
Until today she’d thought that the owner of Lionel Garrett Imports shared
that dream. But then, at a meeting in preparation for everyone’s spring
buying trips, Lionel had done something he never had before. He started
talking about endings.
“Who knows?” he’d said, in response to someone’s offhand joke about
the future. “By then I’ll have stepped down and one of you could be
running the place.”
For someone else, this might not have been notable, except that Wren had
never heard Lionel envision a world in which he was doing anything but
ruling it. He was not physically imposing—rumor had it he’d been an
indefatigable boxer in an earlier life, and he still had a compact pugilist’s
build—but his opinions carried more force than others’. It was something
about the absolutism in his brilliant black eyes, the vulture’s cast of his
nose, the way his balding head gleamed in the office lights like something
powerful and ancient.
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