“Theo,” Kit says, “you’re overworking it.”
I look at my dough. Half of it is flattened under my fist.
“Oops.”
“It’s okay,” he says, “you can still fix it, you just have to—”
His hands move toward mine and stop, hovering an inch above. A speck of flour floats down from his palm and settles on my skin with the weight of one of Gérard’s antique sofas.
“Like, um, like this.”
His left hand does a funny sort of circular motion, and I catch the hint and mirror it with my right. My misshapen lump of dough starts to resolve into a loose ball.
“That’s good, just like that,” he says. When I glance up, he meets my eyes and gives me a small, encouraging smile. “Don’t stop.”
“I bet you say that to all the boys,” I say, which is an overcompensation, but Kit gives a bright, permissive laugh.
“Keep going.”
I stare down at the dough, at our hands. He expertly guides me through each step without ever touching me, his fingers so close I can feel their warmth. It helps. He moves, I move. He gives simple and patient directions, I follow them. His thumb almost brushes mine, I classify the twinge in my chest as acid reflux.
Together, we roll out three lopsided baguettes.
“Not perfect,” I observe, “but not bad.”
“Better than the Calums,” Kit says in a low voice. At the next table, Ginger Calum’s nose is smeared with flour, and Blond Calum has made the courageous choice to eat a hunk of raw dough.
“How doallof theirs look like penises?”
Kit puts his hands on his hips. “Sometimes baking is about what’s in your heart.”
Gérard returns, accompanied by a scruffy gray terrier, and at last we amble into the vines. When I realized we’d be touring the vineyard in the first week of August, this was the part I couldn’t wait for: Bordeaux in veraison, when the vines are as colorful and alive as they’ll ever be.
We visit the merlot first, the main grape of Pomerol’s eponymous wine, which we’re allowed to taste off the vine even though it’ll be weeks until they develop their biggest flavors of cherry jam and strawberry and, because it’s been a hot year, lush black fruits. Next, Cabernet Franc in a riot of lavender and fuchsia and the juicy green of a cut-open lime. We hear about warm, dry summers and mild harvest seasons, the life-giving clay and the salty kiss of the Atlantic, how it all comes together to yield grapes with a lot of personality. That’s how Gérard talks about his grapes—like kids he’s trying to raise into strong-willed grown-ups with something to say at a party. Every morning, he plays Édith Piaf for them.
Beside me, Kit is smiling. If there’s one other person in the world who’d get lost in this vineyard teaching plants to love French torch songs, it’s Kit. Theyes-no-yeshappens again, like that unripe grape bursting sour across my tongue.
“Ah, here is one of our farmhands!” Gérard says. “Florian!”
A pair of work boots tromps down a row of vines, and a young man bursts onto the path.
My God, what a young man he is. Square-jawed and faintly stubbled, with sweet brown eyes and dark curls falling across hissweaty golden forehead. He’s carrying a crate of grapes on one muscular shoulder, straining the fabric of his dusty white shirt. Suspenders hang around his hips, apparently shrugged off to allow full range of motion for cinematic deadlifting.
“Salut!” Florian says, wiping his face with a gloved hand. Soil streaks his cheek. “Welcome!”
On pure reflex, my head snaps toward Kit. His does the same, and our eyes meet in the raised-eyebrow look of unspoken agreement we used to share in moments like this:He’s hot!We turn away just as fast.
Gérard invites Florian to join us, and Florian tells us how his parents met working on this vineyard and let him race around the vines when he was small. He lives in an apartment in Bordeaux proper now, but he happily makes the drive five days a week to tenderly coax vines up their trellises.
Kit leans into my ear and says, “I don’t think we’re the only ones who noticed the Florian situation.”
Dakota and Montana are exchanging conspiratorial whispers, and at least three different brides are visibly contemplating leaving their new husbands. One of the Calums asks if he knows any good bars in Bordeaux. Even the old Swedish lady starts cleaning his cheek with her scarf.
“Do you think he’s always part of the tour?” I ask Kit. “Like, when they know guests are coming, they have him come in to provide an immersive hot farmhand experience?”
“I think they buried a bunch of French romance novels in the garden and he’s what sprang up.”
In the wings of the château, Gérard takes us through the vat room and the aging cellars to a narrow, stone-walled tasting room. Then, one by one, Gérard pours us each a glass of their signature Pomerol.
