Eight Hundred Grapes

“I looked out at the vineyard, everything my father had spent his life building. I never felt more peaceful than when I was out there with him. It wasn’t just about the grapes, the wine. It was about the land he had kept safe to make that wine. It was about the farm and the house and how proud he was of what he had built here. And it was about the people he was giving that to—the last people who would appreciate it.”

The relationship between a winemaker and their terroir is one that requires an outpouring of love and commitment from the former. Though Dan has conflicts in his relationships, the one he holds with his vineyard showcases the quality of care that he puts into his passion for winemaking.

“He had no business doing what he was about to do.

‘I’ll take it,’ he said.

And he looked out at nothing. The beginning of his life.”

Laura Dave uses the irony of “nothing” as everything to highlight the inherit risk of winemaking in general. As wine production is arduous and unpredictable because of external factors like the weather, mastery of the process is hard earned and decades in the making.

“He was so focused on each and every step—as if what he did, what he didn’t manage to do, was going to change everything. I had never seen anyone concentrate like that on anything. It was like watching love.”

Jen notes here Dan’s all-consuming anxiety about the winemaking process. Though the tone is endearing, it nevertheless underlines The Personal Cost of Following One’s Passion, since little else could fit in Dan’s life with the vineyard so close to his heart and mind at all times. Jen is presented as an observer of a romance—“watching love”—rather than a participant.

“I’d been having a hard time in law school, and part of me had wanted to come home and quit. But that was what coming home felt like to me. Quitting. Giving up on my dreams to build a life away from here, a life that was more stable than a vineyard felt.”

Georgia’s relationship with practicing law is here denoted as being unsound from the very beginning, when she was still in law school. It wasn’t love of the law that pushed her toward the career path; rather, it was a decision to run away from the vineyard and the risks managing it entailed, highlighting the theme of Financial Instability and Career Choices.

“It was what my mother was doing—with an impotent man. It was what my good brother was running away from so he didn’t allow himself to do it to my other brother. Ben wasn’t guilty of that. Except weren’t there other unforgivable things you couldn’t turn back from?”

Unfaithfulness and Forgiveness in Familial and Romantic Relationships is a central theme in the narrative, one that becomes complicated with the nuanced interactions between characters. As Georgia highlights, adultery is not the only way someone can prove unfaithful in a relationship. The rhetorical question exemplifies the intimacy between reader and Georgia as the reader is given an insight into her feelings through the first-person narrative.

“After that first vintage—when he thought he had the hang of it, that one lovely wine giving him a false sense of security—he realized he didn’t have a handle on anything. The weather wasn’t cooperating: two years of storms, one year of no storms at all. Three children.”

For all that Dan is dedicated to his craft, he too could stumble after almost a decade in the business and threaten the livelihood of his family. Dave uses the motif of weather to highlight the risk of failure. She describes the weather in more details than the “[t]hree children,” reflecting Dan’s preoccupations with the vineyard over family life.

“My father still put the vineyard first, my mother still felt like she was in second place. And so, what was my father trying to say about Ben? That the demons we were facing, we needed to face now? That we’d face the same demons on the other side of building a family together, building a lovely life, and trying to hold on to it?”

Dave draws parallels between the relationship between Dan and Jen and Ben and Georgia to build suspense as to the outcome of Georgia’s primary romantic plot. Dan here acknowledges the central issue of his and Jen’s separation: Having left Jen aside in his priorities, the wound had festered and become worse with time.

“I don’t know if any of you all remember, but at one of the very first Cork Dork meetings, we sat around talking about it, doing the math on it, how much work a single grape requires. From vine to finish. A single grape the start of it, this unlabeled bottle right here in my hand the end of it, the eight hundred grapes inside.”

The quantification of the necessary number of grapes for one wine bottle reveals the massive amount of physical work needed in the process to turn the venture into a profitable one. However, while Dan outlines the physical requirements, it is not a full picture, as “eight hundred grapes” do not account for the financial, emotional, and psychological toll on the winemakers and their families, as Dave portrays in the novel.

“The idea was that the two parts in a concerto, the soloist and the orchestra, alternate episodes of opposition and cooperation in the creation of the musical flow. In the creation of synchronization.”

Concerto was the name of Georgia’s favorite varietal wine, a name Dan gave the wine as an homage to his wife. As a symbol, it represents the workings of their family in the vineyard, wherein Dan plays the part of the soloist and the rest of the family, the orchestra. Dave uses the motif of synchronization to portray the family dynamics.

“I understood the thousand steps between where he’d started and where he’d ended up. And, more than that, I understood the versions of him he contended with along the way: the version of him that was proud of what he’d built and the version buried far beneath that still felt like an outsider. Which might have been why all the versions of me I’d ever been—all the versions of me that I hoped to be—made sense when I was with him.”

For all that Ben and Georgia’s relationship is fraught with obstacles and bad decisions, this passage outlines how grounded their love was and how much common understanding they shared between them. Dave’s portrayal of these elements of their relationship build the tension surrounding their primary romantic plot since the outcome of its resolution is unclear until the end.

“If you took something out of the soil without putting it back in, the wine would suffer. The soil would suffer. You had to figure out how to get it to a better place than where it had started. My father was of the belief that, if you did that, winemaking took care of itself.”

This passage suggests that Dan treated the vineyard with more care than he did his own wife. While his understanding of biodynamic balance is helpful for grape growth, his care juxtaposes with his attitude to his marriage. The image of taking “something out of the soil” is a metaphor for the way that Dan took all of her devotion and support but never gave anything back, and the roots of their love dried up as a result.

“She was sitting at the Chinese restaurant, hearing him talk of soil, about the importance of foundation. And she heard the rest. His belief, at the center of his winemaking, that with work, you can give something the strength at the beginning that it needs later on. Before it even knows how it’s going to need it.”

What Jen hears in this moment as Dan discusses his passion is what she believes she will find in a relationship with him: commitment, hard work, effort, and devotion. Conversely, this passage also foreshadows how she will strengthen his future pursuits.

1.  “Maybe it was tied up. Synchronized to come apart the moment my father turned his back on the vineyard and we were all too busy to stop him.”

Though the motif of synchronization is often used in an optimistic fashion throughout the narrative, it can also have a detrimental outcome when things line up together for the worst to happen. Here, Georgia believes that all the issues that are currently plaguing her and her family are synchronized to allow what brings them all together—the vineyard—to disappear without their notice.

“Wasn’t the ultimate form of fidelity whom you told your stories to? Ben had stopped telling me his.”

In this passage, Georgia outlines what she deems unfaithful behavior in her relationship with Ben: intentional miscommunication and the keeping of secrets. Rather than be open about Maddie and Michelle, Ben has chosen to funnel Georgia’s access to his life and only give her the minimal information necessary for her not to question their wedding. Dave hence addresses the complexities of Unfaithfulness and Forgiveness in Familial and Romantic Relationships.

“People screw up, you know. You shouldn’t hold it against them. You shouldn’t expect everyone to know everything you’re thinking about or not getting from them. It doesn’t mean they don’t love you. They screw up.”

This passage is key to Bobby’s character development; it showcases how Bobby’s acknowledgement of Finn’s and Margaret’s fallibility gives them a way to resolve their issues. It also demonstrates that, despite his bravado, Bobby understands his own fallibility in his marriage.

“It left me thinking of my mother’s words. Be careful what you give up. You get it back however you can. I was floored and scared by everything my father seemed to be giving up here.”

Witnessing her parents’ anger at her decision to file an injunction against the vineyard’s sale makes Georgia realize that she wasn’t, in fact, trying to keep her father from making a mistake. This is a pivotal moment for Georgia’s character arc because she begins to understand how much she values The Last Straw, even though she ran from it to pursue law.

“Synchronization. Wasn’t this the definition? A fire hits a vineyard. And then, like a miracle, it starts to pour. It was overdue to pour but it starts then, pressing down at the fire. And then I looked toward the vineyard and I realized. The rain. The rain that was saving the vineyard. It would ruin the grapes that were still on the vine—Block 14, my father’s most valuable grapes. We had to get to them first. All of us realized it at once.”

Here, Dave demonstrates how weather can often be a double-edged sword in the winemaking business. Though the rain from the storm puts out the fire, it simultaneously threatens the most prized grapes in the vineyard. In the end, only half of the grapes will survive the downpour. The unpredictability of the weather contributes to the tension in the novel’s dramatic climax.

“The entire family ran through the vineyard to get to the rest of the grapes. The messy, wonderful business of getting the job done for each other when you most needed to.”

Dave builds toward the novel’s resolution here since, despite their differences, each member of the Ford family is attuned to the same values. All of them treasure the vineyard and the efforts that were made to make it successful. When the vineyard is threatened, they band together to face rain or flame to safeguard it and its grapes.

“Synchronization. Your heart pumped blood to the necessary vessels. The vessels pumped the blood back to the heart muscle. Everything flowed through the coronary artery to the heart muscle. To where everything was needed. An unspoken agreement.”

This passage resolves the climax of the narrative, wherein Dan has a second heart attack during the last harvest party. His heart becomes a metaphor for the state of his family following the attack. As he stabilizes in the hospital, his wife and children come to realize what is more important than the issues that divide them, and “[e]verything flowed […] [t]o where everything was needed.”

“She shook her head. ‘The details matter,’ she said. ‘It’s the big picture that confuses us.’ What were the details of today? What was the big picture? The big picture was that my mother made sacrifices. We all did, didn’t we? Hers caught up. But now she was trying to let them go for what she had gotten in return.”

This passage explains how Jen was able to justify her devotion to Dan for so long without receiving the same support in return: Though sacrificing her love of music for him and the vineyard was a heavy burden, the life they made together was the one she wanted. This presents the inverse of The Personal Cost of Following One’s Passion: the benefit of sacrificing a passion.

“He looked like he had lost everything. If Margaret saw that, would it be enough? Bobby loved his wife in a way she couldn’t feel, but he loved her all the same. Shouldn’t that count for something? Shouldn’t the effort, no matter how misinformed, be enough to keep people together—especially at the moment they might otherwise decide it was easier to be apart?”

Though Margaret believed Bobby did not “see” her, this passage also reveals that the same could be said in reverse: perhaps Margaret doesn’t see how Bobby loves her, and as both miscommunicate with each other, both are left unsatisfied with their relationship.

“Synchronization. Everything lines up like a sign of where you are supposed to be. But what do you give up? Because you give something up. As simple—and complicated—as the other line, the other way your life could have been if you had taken a different path. If you had gotten into the right car. If you hadn’t gotten out of the wrong one.”

Dave uses the motif of synchronization to generate a sense of resolution at the end of the novel when Georgia thinks about “where you are supposed to be.” One single choice led to very different lifetimes for both Dan and Jen, and had they not taken a chance on each other that night in the yellow buggy, Georgia, Finn, and Bobby would have never seen the light of day—nor, perhaps, the vineyard.

“The wine. And the fearless piece of me that wanted to be a part of it, even if I couldn’t control it. The fearless part of me knowing that just maybe it was the way to build a life I wasn’t only good at, but that I loved.”

Dave finally resolves the division in Georgia’s identity as she accepts herself as she is: A woman who loves Sonoma County and wants to pursue winemaking like her father. This resolves the theme of Financial Instability and Career Choices.