Page 197 - The Midnight Library

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Buena Vista Vineyard

In the next visit to the Midnight Librar y, Mrs Elm helped Nora find the life

she could have lived that was closest to the life depicted on the label of that
bottle of wine from the restaurant. So, she gave Nora a book that sent her to
America.
In this life Nora was called Nora Martìnez and she was married to a
twinkle-eyed Mexican-American man in his early forties called Eduardo,

who she had met during the gap year she’d regretted never having aer
leaving university. Aer his parents had died in a boating accident (she had
learned, from a profile piece on them in e Wine Enthusiast magazine,

which they had framed in their oak-panelled tasting room), Eduardo had
been le a modest inheritance and they bought a tiny vineyard in California.
Within three years they had done so well – particularly with their Syrah
varietals – that they were able to buy the neighbouring vineyard when it
came up for sale. eir winer y was called the Buena Vista vineyard, situated

in the foothills of the Santa Cruz Mountains, and they had a child called
Alejandro, who was at boarding school near Monterey Bay.
Much of their business came from wine-trail tourists. Coachloads of

people arrived at hourly inter vals. It was quite easy to improvise, as the
tourists were genuinely quite gullible. It went like this: Eduardo would
decide which wines to put out in the glasses before each coach load arrived,
and hand Nora the bottles – ‘Woah, Nora, despacio, un poco too much’ he
reprimanded in his good-humoured Spanglish, when she was a bit too

liberal with the measures – and then when the tourists came Nora would
inhale the wines as they sipped and swilled them, and tr y to echo Eduardo
and say the right things.