Chapter 141: Cause and Effect (5)
TL: Hanguk
After the hulking Harry vanished, Jack O'Connell tipped back in his chair as if to lie down in it. His heart felt like it had leapt clear up into his throat.
"What in the world..."
Permanent water usage rights, of all things, would mean a staggering rise in costs when it came to running the farm down the line. And if he refused, he'd likely be slapped with damages beyond anything he could imagine.
As he agonized over the hopeless situation, his gaze landed on a small glass vial sitting on the table.
Water that had backflowed out of the groundwater well. The evidence he himself had created.
"Damn it..."
He closed his eyes for a moment, opened them again, and steadied himself. Because if this went into a courtroom, it was all over. Hands trembling, he opened his phone and placed a call. His hands shook so badly he misdialed three times.
In the end, he tapped the familiar name of his lawyer, Greg Richard.
"Huh? Jack?"
Only after catching his breath a little was he able to get the words out.
"Come to the farm right now. This instant."
"Can't you just tell me over the phone? I'm in the middle of something important right now..."
"Now! I said come now."
When he barked it out, Greg's voice came back tight.
"What's going on?"
"A lawyer came by and left. He's counsel for the pear farm owner, and I'd been wondering why they weren't part of this lawsuit, and then..."
At the rambling, Greg asked.
"What's the name of the lawyer on the other side?"
"He said Howard Montis. Harry? Yeah, Harry, he called himself that too..."
For a moment Greg's voice came back hard.
"...Where did you say you are right now?"
"My office."
"I'll be there within the hour. Don't go anywhere, just sit tight and wait for me."
Once the line clicked dead, he felt a little more at ease. Greg was a fairly capable lawyer, so a flicker of hope rose in him that maybe he'd turn up with some other solution. After all, Greg handled just about every water dispute in the Napa and Lodi area, and it was going on ten years now that he'd been working alongside Jack.
In less than an hour, sure enough, a black sedan came sliding onto the dirt road in front of the farm. A man in a suit climbed out and, heedless of the dirt splashing up onto his shoes, strode toward the container.
"Open up."
At the voice that came the instant he knocked, Jack opened the door.
"You're here."
Stepping into the container office building, he brushed past Jack, dropped down onto the sofa, and spoke with a somewhat savage expression.
"Harry, you said? Are you sure it's the Rainmaker?"
"You know him?"
Greg Richard's face filled with unease. Then, spotting the glass vial set on the table, he said with a bitter look.
"Did Harry leave this behind?"
"That's right."
Without so much as putting on a pair of gloves, Greg lifted the vial. The way his eyes fixed on it as he gave it a careful shake was like a judge peering down at a piece of evidence.
"This would be the water you backflowed, I take it?"
"I didn't do it on purpose, it just happened while I was running the pump..."
"Jack."
Greg raised his head.
"I know how you feel. I was just asking. I'm on your side, remember."
"Whew... Right. Harry left it. Is this Harry guy somebody famous?"
"Famous, you ask?"
Greg let out a snort of laughter, then looked at Jack with serious eyes.
"There are three men in Napa Valley you never want to run into as opposing counsel, and the Rainmaker is one of them."
"......"
"A vineyard owned by a Napa Valley winery pulls in tens of millions of dollars a year even on just a hundred acres. It's a whole different league from ordinary farmers who grow crops and sell to wholesalers. So when a fight over water rights breaks out at a place like that, how big do you think the lawsuit gets?"
"...It'd be enormous."
"Right. Sometimes the amount in dispute alone is huge enough to match the entire revenue of the Lodi region. You've seen the news, haven't you? Acquiring a single winery can run north of two hundred million dollars. And the Rainmaker is the kind of guy who goes to war with clients like that behind him. A big shot."
Blinking, Jack asked.
"And a big shot like that is out here defending some measly seventy-acre pear farm?"
"That's what I can't figure out either. Why a man who mostly plays in Napa Valley would come all the way out to Lodi to pull this. But if the other side really is the Rainmaker... then your luck's about as bad as it gets."
Jack clutched his head and dropped onto the sofa across from Greg.
"Haah, so what do we do?"
"What exactly did Harry demand? He wasn't trying to drag this all the way to trial, was he?"
"He demanded permanent water usage rights. Fifty-one percent of the groundwater we pump up out of our well."
"Damn it... That's the Rainmaker for you.
"The guy's a crazy son of a bitch. The land's mine, and he wants to walk off with half my water?"
Unlike the worked-up Jack, Greg slowly drummed his fingers on the desk.
"You've got an answer you're hoping for, don't you. You want me to hand you a solution."
"...That's right. Is it possible?"
"No."
At the curt reply, Jack's face twisted.
"What?"
"If it were a demand you could ignore, the man wouldn't have driven all the way out here, Jack.
Harry Montis isn't a man who makes a move without good reason. The fact that he came to this office and laid a settlement offer in front of you means he's already run every last calculation. He didn't just show up holding a single card, he's got every counterattack that could follow it mapped out too."
"So what are you telling me to do?"
"Think about one thing and one thing only. Whether your farm survives, or whether it gets torn to shreds in court."
Jack couldn't get another word out.
Greg lifted the glass vial and gave it a shake as he spoke.
"The evidence is too clear-cut. A case this open-and-shut is so easy compared to everything Harry Montis has handled up to now that he probably won't feel a shred of tension over it. Forget about winning. Just aim to settle with as little damage as you can."
"Damn it..."
In despair, Jack clutched his head again and bowed it low, and Greg could only look on with pity. In the end the two of them began working through how they might give up as small a share of the annual water usage as possible.
Because they both knew that keeping the farm alive and swallowing a bit of a loss was, without question, better than being wiped out entirely by punitive damages.
At the very hour a certain farm in Lodi was sinking into despair over a certain lawyer, over at Redwood Winery.
"Getting anywhere with it?"
"I'm still working out methods. Something really fine might come of it, so keep your hopes up."
Honestly, when it came to brandy, I was nowhere near an expert, I didn't even rank among ordinary drinkers. Because I hadn't been a whiskey drinker before my regression.
Having somehow stumbled into wine research, I'd come to possess deep knowledge of wine, and from there an interest in Korean-style liquor grew, and I'd studied it a little, and that was who I was now. I knew the basic principles of making brandy well enough, but I had no idea how the differences in one process or another produced such subtle differences in flavor.
Come to think of it, Warren seemed to know quite a lot about brandy.
"Have you been studying brandy this whole time?"
"Studying? I've always been at it."
"So you'd been meaning to branch into brandy all along, then?"
"No, just curious. I love wine, but that doesn't mean I refuse to let another drop of anything else touch my lips. Sometimes what a man needs isn't wine but something else."
"Ah..."
He grinned and ran a hand over the tank we were in the thick of prepping for release.
"Funny thing is, your winery produces two kinds of wine. One from grapes, one from cherries. Know why that's funny? Because those two are exactly the most important ingredients for the new brandy I'm making."
"You mean using grapes as the base foundation?"
"Right. The grapes build the structure of the new brandy, and the other fruit lays the aroma on top of it. And out of nearly every fruit there is, grapes have the most stable fermentation properties. You know why, of course?"
"Yes... The sugar content (Brix) is naturally high, sitting at a baseline of 20 to 25 degrees, the acidity (pH) balance is ideal, and the microbial stability (the variety and activity of the natural yeasts) is high. On top of that, it generates very little off-flavor."
Warren gave a satisfied smile.
"Exactly. Grapes make the perfect raw material as a base for spirits, and top-grade Cabernet Sauvignon happens to be produced right here. For laying aroma on top of that, a fruit with good acidity works well, and as it happens, cherries are the finest material for the job."
"Hmm..."
"For now I've got three techniques in mind, and the one I'm considering for holding on to the aroma is low-temperature vacuum distillation. If that works, we can make the brandy keep the cherry aroma."
"That would make sense. Cherry aroma is a delicate scent that vanishes easily at high temperatures."
"Right. In the premium market, cherry aroma is always classed as a high-end note. And once your girlfriend's pear farming bears fruit, the grape-and-pear combination is one of the pairings I'm quite looking forward to as well."
I shook my head slowly.
"Wow... you've already thought it through that far?"
"Isn't that a given? The liquor laws will make moving and storing the raw materials a bit of a hassle, but once that's sorted out, something truly spectacular is going to come of it. Just wait a little. Anyway, when the hell did they say that low-temperature still would show up?"
"In two days."
"This is exactly why America's going to fall apart. Not one damn thing around here moves fast, dammit..."
He needed the low-temperature still to arrive before he could run any proper experiments, and since that hadn't happened, he was stuck doing nothing but theoretical research.
I shook my head.
"Ah, Redwood isn't planning to get a DSP (Distilled Spirits Plant License), right?"
"No, there's no real need to go that far... I think it's right for us to keep wine as our sole focus."
"Right, selling off the raw materials and collecting dividends is a lot more efficient than doing every last thing yourself."
If Redwood handed its raw wines over to Golden Grenin Soju House, the steady revenue that came from it would grow considerable too. Those wines didn't need to be top-shelf, so it would be a simple matter of bringing in grapes in decent shape, making wine, and selling it.
Just then, at word that a visitor had arrived outside, we stepped out of the aging cellar again. Only today's visitor wasn't mine.
"Oh? You came all the way out here yourself?"
The person visiting the winery was a man so enormous it was a marvel he could walk at all. From his build alone, I could guess who he was.
"Say hello. He's one of the few friends I trust. A lawyer. This is Harry, the one who's taken on your girlfriend's farm."
"The one they call the Rainmaker..."
"That's right."
I shook hands with him.
"Howard Harry Montis. Feel free to just call me Harry."
"Sure, I'm Brian."
"It's an honor to meet you, Brian. Ever since I heard Mr. Warren had joined this winery, I'd been meaning to pay a visit."
At that, Warren gave Harry's thick arm a light smack.
"As well you should. But... looks like you've gotten even thicker than before?"
"What are you talking about... I've dropped a good thirty kilograms since the last time you saw me."
"Really? Is that true?"
"Of course. A year from now I'll be even slimmer than I am today."
Warren looked at me and grinned.
"This fellow wasn't always like this, but then he had a health checkup and ended up this way. Anyhow, his legs are bound to be aching, so we ought to fetch him a chair or something."
"I'm fine. I'll sit right here."
Harry parked himself on an empty wooden crate stacked in one corner of the winery. For an instant the crate let out a creaking shriek, but it somehow managed to hold.
"I've just come from pressing the other farm to settle. The terms I laid down were fifty-one percent of the permanent water rights from the other side's farm, and naturally, I let Ms. Chloe know on my way over here."
I asked anxiously.
"Do you think it'll go well?"
He lifted one corner of his mouth.
"Let's just watch and see."
If anyone else had said that, I'd have taken it to mean there were plenty of variables, so let's see how things played out for now, but somehow an indescribable confidence read on his face. Almost to the point where it looked as if the whole affair was already over?
"But the fact that you came out in person like this makes me think you're not just here to report the outcome?"
When Warren asked, Harry looked over at me and said.
"The truth is, I wanted to talk about the fee."
It was a conversation we obviously had to have, so I nodded, but Warren cut in.
"Didn't I say I'd cover that?"
"I got to thinking, and I'd rather take something other than money."
Curious, I asked.
"What would you like to receive...?"
"My younger sibling just opened a restaurant in LA. I want to do something to help the place succeed, but outside of legal matters there's really nothing I can offer. If you'll promise me just one thing, I'll handle any future litigation involving Redwood Winery at a discount."
Just from that, I felt like I already knew.
"Ah, so...?"
"Yes. Going forward, could you supply wine to my sibling's restaurant on a steady basis? I'll pay a fair price for it, of course."
"Haha..."
At his astonishing little maneuver, I let out a dry laugh.
*****
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