“Hazy brownish gold, medium stain, low viscosity,” Tabitha murmured. She squinted at the wine she held above her eye level, so the kitchen light shone through it. She swirled the wine again, watching it cyclone in her glass, the light reflecting through it in liquid fractal patterns.

“No, change that to ‘hazy dark brownish gold with green undertones, medium stain, medium viscosity.’” She held the glass to her nose and sniffed, first a small one, opening her mouth to allow the tastes to reach her tongue. Then she pushed her nose farther into the glass, inhaling deeply. “Desiccated stone fruit, forest floor, pencil shavings.”

She swirled the glass again and took a sip, swishing it around her mouth. She closed her eyes and inhaled through her nose. After some contemplation, she spat the wine into the pitcher near her, taking several deep breaths of the lingering scent left in her mouth. “It tastes exactly like a piece of buttered toast with opera in the background. This is a medium-dry, oaky Chardonnay, old-school Europe. France. South Provence. Michel Cru. No, the soil is too rocky. Renoir 2015. No, wait, 2011.”

Tabitha looked up. Doug and Gabrielle sat on the other side of the table, watching her expectantly. Weston Towne sat at the head of the table, peering at her over the clipboard he held close to his face. A dozen empty glasses were scattered around the table between them.

“Are you sure?” Weston finally said.

“Yes. No. Yes, I’m sure.”

“Well, you were right.” The people around the table collectively released their held breath. Tabitha handed the glass to her sister, who took a small sip and then passed it to her husband to finish.

“How did you get pencil shavings from that?” Doug asked. “I think crayon shavings, maybe. This tates like opening a new box of crayons and taking a giant whiff of it. Crayons and grass. Bloody grass. After there has been a murder, and the blood is soaked into the ground? Sort of like copper and dirt. But you can also smell the murder weapon. Rope. This wine smells like crayons and bloody grass and the fibers of a thick cotton rope.”

Darting an apologetic glance at Tabitha, Gabrielle shushed her husband, though she smiled at him while she did it. “I told you we weren’t going to let you be part of the tastings anymore if you get silly.”

“I kept my mouth shut until the last wine. I think that’s a record.”

“Do you want to know your overall results?” Weston asked, as if there were any chance Tabitha would say no. “You got ten of the twelve correct. Remarkable, considering we have never tasted eight of these before. I’d say you are tasting better now than you ever have in your career.”

“Hear, hear!” Gabrielle said, and lifted one of the empty glasses up in a toast. Weston and Doug joined her, also raising empty glasses.

“This does call for a champagne toast,” Weston said. “I didn’t bring any bubbly with me. Do you happen to have any?”

Tabitha laughed at Weston’s question and walked to the stack of boxes in the hall. She opened one with the word “bubbly” scrawled on the outside of the box in black marker and pulled out a bottle without looking at it. She plunged it into the ice bucket on the bench seat next to her chair and slowly turned the bottle around in the icy water to cool it. Gabrielle gathered glasses and brought them to the sink to rinse them out.

“No soap,” Tabitha and Weston called out.

“I know, I know. Geez, you guys. This is not amateur hour.” But Gabrielle winked at her sister as she said it, and brought four gleaming glasses back to the table. Weston corked each of the bottles he’d brought with him for testing and put them back into his crate. He glanced over his notes.

“I will say this. You change your mind a lot. It makes me nervous every time.”

“What do you mean, nervous?” Tabitha asked.

“I kept thinking you were on the wrong track. The way you bounce back and forth—translucent then transparent, oily then acidic, white then black. Your descriptions are all over the place, and they don’t make sense, and each time I thought for sure you weren’t going to get it right.”

“But she did get it right,” Gabrielle said, a hint of pride and defensiveness in her voice.

“She almost always does. I just didn’t think she was getting there while she worked through it.”

“Her words don’t matter, though, as long as she guesses right?” Gabrielle asked.

“Yes and no.” He turned to Tabitha. “You always start off with all the right words, and then you veer into disco music or tattoo needles. That’s not the language wine people understand.”

“Football,” Doug interrupted. “That was my favorite description of the night. You said that one wine tasted like a football and Creedence Clearwater Revival. Did you like football players and vinyl records when you were a teenager?”

“Was I wrong?” Tabitha asked him with a smile, as she pulled the bottle out of the ice bath and toweled off the outside. “Remember, our dad is a sports fan. We spent many Sundays throwing a football with him. There is a taste; I can imagine it precisely.”

“Ol’ Felix really should have taught you to throw footballs, not lick them. That’s what weird kids do.” Doug cracked up at his joke, and Gabrielle looked on indulgently.

The cork popped out of the bottle, and Tabitha poured into each glass. “It’s more about the scent. If you throw a football back and forth for an hour, you can smell it in the air; it’s on your hands. And Dad always played CCR. He dragged the speakers out to the patio so we could listen. Remember, G?” Her sister nodded. “Later, when you go to get a sip of water and you can taste it. It’s a sensory experience that I always translate to music.”

“Here’s to that music. God help everyone at the SommFest.” Gabrielle raised her glass in the air, and they all clinked before taking a sip.

The wine flooded Tabitha’s system. This was the first sip she’d swallowed all night, and it filled her with a wave of calming peace.

“Mmmm, this one is good,” Gabrielle said.

Doug, already a little drunk on the wine he’d sampled during Tabitha’s tasting practice, drained his glass and then addressed Weston again. “But back to the descriptions. She’s strange, everyone knows that. But even if the judge thinks a wine tastes like peaches and she describes it as ground beef, it doesn’t matter as long as she guesses the bottle correctly, right?”

“Well, yes.” Weston frowned at his glass, and then looked up at Doug. “For that part of the competition, the deductive tasting, it’s all about the final bottle call. They’ll put six glasses of wine in front of her in an empty room, and she has to call it. She can say every bottle tastes like a car tire, and as long as she guesses the grape, country, appellation, and year correctly, she’ll be fine in the end.”

“And what about the rest of the competition?”

“Day one is theory—that’s just memorization. She won’t go off script there. Right, Tabitha?”

Tabitha sipped from her glass with a grin.

Weston continued, “She needs to know the rules of wine production, international wine law, grape varieties of specific regions. No way to screw that up if she just sticks to the textbooks.” He took another sip. “Day two is the service event. That’s where I’m nervous that she might go off the rails.”

“Thanks a lot,” Tabitha murmured.

“You know I’m right. This is where your weird brain might get in your way.” He turned to Doug. “She has to select and prepare the proper stemware for anything the judges might ask her for. Aperitif, red, white, fortified. They could ask her for anything. Then she has to serve them and deal with their questions, complaints, whatever they throw at her.”

“And they could do anything,” Gabrielle chimed in. “There’s a famous story of one year a judge asked a somm to serve a ’26 Chateau Lafite over ice cubes.”

“That’s shocking,” Doug deadpanned. Tabitha bit back a smile, but Gabrielle was nodding intently.

“It was shocking,” she said. “I mean, that’s a first-growth Bordeaux. You just don’t do that.”

“So what did he do? The somm, I mean?”

“He poured it for the judge. What else are you going to do? The customer is always right. The thing is, he would have passed the somm test if he had used proper language to try to talk the judge out of that decision. Which, in that particular case, the somm did not. He told the judge that it was a dick move and it would ruin the wine. You’re not supposed to do that. You can make gentle suggestions and try to steer a customer, but you never make a guest you are serving feel stupid. You can’t blame the somm—it would make me sick to ruin the wine that way. Supposedly the judge was smiling at him as he sucked the iced wine down. Taunting this poor guy. But the somm forgot that the service test isn’t about your knowledge, it’s about how you treat the customer.”

“You’re good at this,” Tabitha said. “You should go into the wine business.”

Weston poured himself another glass of champagne. “I don’t think Tabitha would ever be rude to a judge, no matter what they ask her for. But there is a language, you see, common words that all somms use to describe wine. She always circles those words.” He took another sip and then studied the bottle. “What is this?”

Tabitha turned back to her brother-in-law. “You can say whatever you want, but if you stick to the usual words, everyone else gets you. If I describe a wine as tasting like sunflowers and stars, a customer might not know what I’m saying. If I use the word ‘peaches,’ that’s a wine word you hear a lot. More easily digestible.”

“I like sunflowers and stars better,” Doug said.

Tabitha grinned at him. “That’s because you are an artist. You like it when I get creative.”

“I’m not an artist, and I like your way better, too,” Gabrielle added. “I can imagine exactly what sunflowers and stars taste like, and I want to try that.”

“It tastes like this,” Weston said, holding up the bottle. “Where did you get this?”

“Oh, I don’t even remember.” Tabitha took the bottle from him and studied the label. “Italy, I guess. One of the tasting— Oh!” She frowned at the label, turning it back to front several times. “I do remember this one.”

“I’ve never heard of that vineyard,” Weston said, and took another sip. “It’s extraordinary.”

“It is, yes. Extraordinary.”

Giovanni.

Tabitha raised her glass to her nose and inhaled deeply, remembering the taste of his skin as she ran her tongue over rough whiskers on his chin. Heat crept over her cheeks, and her heart hitched in her chest.

“I think there might be a story here.” Her sister smirked.

“No story. I found it on my scouting trip last summer. An undiscovered gem.”

“How would you describe this one?” Weston asked her.

“Nina Simone on a tinny radio. Blue moonlight on a wall. Linen sheets,” Tabitha blurted out before she could stop herself.

“Mmm. Exactly. And what were you saying? That there was no story here?”

Tabitha shot her sister a look and felt the blush deepen.

“That’s what I’m saying—that’s what you do.” Weston was speaking to her, but still studying the glass in front of him. “I would have used the descriptions that are more common in the wine world. Yeast, toast, melon. Medium bubbles, crisp mineral finish. Fine, serviceable words. But you do this thing where you make all these crazy associations to music and emotion and stories, and suddenly I want to have sex with this glass of wine.”

“Not in my kitchen. Please,” Gabrielle said quickly.

“That’s not a problem, though. Right?” Tabitha said. “I mean, if you say melon and I say Nina Simone, but still name the bottle, we all win.”

Weston shook his head. “I suppose that depends on what you want to do with all of this.”

Later, sitting alone on the couch, Tabitha stared at the empty Prosecco bottle on the coffee table in front of her. She took a long sniff of the remaining sparkling wine in her glass and then drained the last of it into her mouth, letting it linger on her tongue before she swallowed it. She had only spent one night with him, but she could recall Giovanni down to the tiny mole on his waist, just to the left of his belly button. Her body tingled at the memory of him. She hadn’t slept with anyone since him. Her celibacy hadn’t been intentional, obviously. She’d been on some dates. Abbreviated, lame attempts at connection with men other people thought she’d get along with.

Tabitha didn’t know why it was so hard for her to connect. She could describe the type of man she wanted, and she didn’t think she was particularly choosy. Kind, smart, good in bed, smart, passionate about something. Anything. It would be nice if he were into wine even nicer if he were good looking, but those weren’t mandatory qualities. Not a goddamned cheater. It seemed like a pretty basic list; that man shouldn’t be so hard to find.

She shifted on the couch, trying to ease the ache that suffused her skin and settled into her bones. If only Giovanni could be here with her tonight. She’d love to sneak him into her guest room, feel his palm brush over her neck, dance her fingers over his plump lips as he moved over her. No one must hear that she’d snuck him into her room—that would be a terrible thing to do when she was a guest in someone’s house—but Giovanni would open his beautiful mouth, and her fingers would drift onto his tongue. He’d close his mouth around her fingers, maybe bite down a little—

“Tabitha?”

Her eyes jerked open, and she saw her sister had entered the room.

“Oh, I’m sorry. You fell asleep?”

“No.” Tabitha was glad her sister couldn’t see inside her head. “No, just thinking.”

“About the SommFest?”

“Yes. About all the studying I still have to do. About how much I still don’t know. About how much I want to know.”

Gabrielle sat next to her on the couch, and Tabitha prayed she couldn’t feel the heat coming off her body. She hadn’t technically lied about what she was thinking about. She had only framed it differently.

Gabrielle’s gaze fell on the bottle on the coffee table in front of them.

“I think that was the best sparkling wine I’ve ever tasted, and I’m even including the champagne Mom picked out for our wedding.”

Tabitha nodded slowly. The champagne at Gabrielle and Doug’s wedding had been great—a classic, creamy bubbly that tasted like money on the tongue. Obviously. Jillie Jones Lawson would only serve the best of the best.

“This one is a Prosecco. Which is Italian bubbly. You can only technically call it champagne if it comes from a specific region of France.”

“Yes, Professor, that is fascinating. What are you not telling me?” Gabrielle asked.

“Nothing. I met the winemaker.”

“Ah.”

“It was nothing.”

“Okay.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes.

“Well,” Gabrielle finally said, “I’m going to get my cup of tea and go back to bed. Doug is already snoring. I think he may have over-served himself.”

Tabitha nodded. “Occupational hazard.”

“Really?” Gabrielle asked sarcastically. “Not for you, it’s not. In fact, it wasn’t until we got to the Prosecco that you even got a drop of alcohol into your body. There don’t seem to be a whole lot of occupational hazards in this job for you.”

“I have to stay on my game when I’m officially tasting. You know that.”

“Yeah. I know.” Gabrielle stood up from the couch and started walking toward the kitchen.

“G? What is it?”

“Nothing. I’m glad you’re doing this. I really am.”

“Buuut…?” Tabitha said. Though she knew what was coming. Sometimes she wondered why she and her twin bothered to vocalize their thoughts

“But nothing,” Gabrielle said, smiling a little sadly. “I miss having a glass of wine with you, that’s all. I miss that little sparkle in your eyes when you love something. Your face turns to stone when you are working.”

“I know,” Tabitha said. “I miss it too. I miss the days when we just drank wine and laughed.”

Gabrielle nodded and went into the kitchen. Tabitha watched her fill the electric kettle, take down two mugs, and spoon an herbal mixture into both of them. From across the room, Tabitha could smell the lavender flowers and chamomile; Gabrielle was as much of an insomniac as she was, and this was her favorite nighttime mix.

Gabrielle handed her a mug, smiled, and turned back to her room. Tabitha could hear Doug snoring from their bedroom. Her sister had married a good man, but Tabitha watched her hesitate at the door. Perhaps Gabrielle was considering that snore. She turned from the door and stepped back toward the living room. A smirk played at the corner of her lips.

“Tabitha?”

“Yeah?”

“You are full of shit if you think you are not going to tell me the story of the Italian who gave you that champagne.”

Tabitha took a sip of the tea, which scalded her tongue and then warmed her throat as it slid down to her belly. She patted the couch cushion beside her.

“I already told you. It’s not champagne; it’s Prosecco. Have a seat.”