“It depends.” Henry took a deep breath. “Usually we work with a vine nursery—that’s Kerry, if you’ve ever heard me talking about her—like we did with those pinot grapes we planted near the caves. When we know where we want to plant and what we want to plant, we call the nursery and order specific vines. They find the right rootstock, graft the budwood, and grow them for the first year. They come to us and we plant them.”
“So it’s a semicustom process,” Megan said, quickly grasping what Henry and Nico might have been up to. “But you were growing something completely different?”
“We were attempting—and succeeding—at growing a vine that’s never been grown on the Central Coast before.” Henry took a deep breath and reached for the cup of coffee she handed to him. “Have I told you anything about my family?”
“Not really. I know you’re from Washington State and it’s a big family, but that’s all.”
“My mom is from Washington State, but my dad actually lives in Northern California, and my grandmother—my dad’s mom—comes from a very old wine-growing family in a region of France called Jura.”
“So wine really is in your blood.” Megan put another mug under the coffee maker. “I’ve never heard of Jura.”
“It’s east of Burgundy, on the way to Switzerland kind of. It has… a unique topography. I spent some time studying there with my cousins during the summers when I was in college, and pretty soon after I came to work here, I realized that there is one particular area of Nico’s acreage that reminded me of Jura. So I thought…” His cheeks got a little red.
“What is it? That all makes sense. You wanted to try growing some vines from France here in California?”
“But the thing is, any new vine imported into California has to go through a very strict quarantine process. It takes years.”
Megan’d had her fruit confiscated at the airport. She knew how harsh the agricultural inspectors could be. “Henry, did you sneak a grapevine from France into—”
“France?” His eyes went wide. “Oh God no. No, no, no.” He took a breath and set his coffee on the edge of her desk. “My grandmother has some Poulsard grapevines in her garden. She brought them in the 1950s when she moved to America. I don’t think she had any idea it was illegal back then—but she brought a few vines from her father’s vineyard in Jura, and she’s managed to keep them alive and healthy in California. She made a little wine with them, and we ate them like table grapes when we were little. They were just grandma’s grapes, right?”
“Okay.”
“And I never really thought about that commercially until I started working here. But they’re Poulsard vines. They make a pretty unique wine if it’s done correctly. I wanted to see if we could grow them here, so…” He dropped his voice. “I brought some cuttings to Nico, and we grafted them onto some of the oldest rootstock we could find from the ranch here to create some viable clones.”
“Clones? Y’all were making clones?” Okay, that sounded way more sci-fi than farming.
“Cloning just means that you take cuttings from established vines and graft them onto new rootstock. You’re not growing the new vines from seed, so genetically it’s going to be the same as the vine you took the cutting from. That’s why they call it a clone, but it’s nothing new. It’s the way growers have been propagating vines for a long time.”
“Oh, gotcha.”
“We’ve been trying them on various rootstocks from around the winery. I even took some rootstock from the vines near Toni’s house over by the old barn. And in the past year, we’ve found some really successful combinations that solved some of the problems we might have growing Poulsard vines here. In fact, we were getting ready to do a larger-scale propagation to plant some outdoor rows, but then this morning happened and the vines are just… gone.”
Megan shook her head. “Someone stole your project?”
“Someone stole three years of work,” Henry said. “And possibly an opportunity to grow a completely unique grape on the Central Coast. There are easily a hundred wineries within a hundred square miles around here.” He took a long, slow breath. “And every single one of them is looking to distinguish itself from everyone else.”
“A brand-new grape variety would do that.” Megan wasn’t a wine expert, but she understood exclusivity well enough. People loved getting that thing that no one else had. They loved being in on the secret, being one of the chosen few. “So who might have stolen it?”
“God knows.” Henry threw up his hands. “I mean, if we’d been talking about it at all, maybe anyone. But we’ve been secretive as hell on this one. Nico was adamant about it. He and I were the only ones who knew about the greenhouse. You’re the first person I’ve spoken to about all this.” He looked at the ground. “I haven’t even told Toni.”
He looked guilty, but Megan wasn’t sure why. “Would Toni care about grapevines?”
“Probably not. And I don’t really want to stress her out with everything she’s having to juggle right now, so I didn’t say anything.” Henry scooted forward. “Do you think she’s going to be angry?”
Oh, bless his heart. “Uh, no.” Megan suspected Toni was going to have to try out her very best acting if she wanted to assuage Henry’s guilt, because she had a feeling her friend didn’t give two licks about new grapevines. “I’m sure she’ll understand, Henry. After all, it sounds like Nico was the one who insisted on the secrecy, and he’s her cousin. She knows what he’s like.”
“It was a mutual decision,” Henry said. “We were the only ones working on it, and honestly, I didn’t even expect us to succeed. I just got drunk one night hanging out with Nico and got onto this whole spiel about how amazing and picky Poulsard wine is, how challenging it is to grow, and how I missed having it here. Nico got curious and ordered some bottles from France; he really liked it too, and the rest is history.”
Except it wasn’t history, it was now, and it sounded like this project—even though Henry made it sound like a cool and fun science experiment—could potentially put Dusi Heritage Winery on the map. You didn’t spend three years practicing utter secrecy on a new project unless it had very real and very lucrative potential.
Which meant that Nico was going to take it personally.
Very, very personally.
Chapter 4
Hours later, Drew Bisset and his team left, and Megan finally walked out of her office. There had been three police cars that drove up to the winery making lots of noise, Nico and Drew had been locked in the main office for a solid two hours, and officers had been wandering around the house and the winery, taking pictures, talking to people, and generally trying to look very serious about missing grape vines.
She leaned against the barn door, staring as Drew and Nico spoke outside his office and talking on her phone. “Drew looks like he’s taking it really seriously.”
Katherine was on the other end of the line. “What Henry and Nico were doing was essentially trade research and development. Their product was stolen from them after three years of work, so I would hope the police would take it very seriously. It’s estimated that over two hundred billion dollars is lost by domestic businesses every year to intellectual property theft.”