The Year of Fire and Fortune – 15th Annual Brierly Harvest Festival

The fifteenth Brierly Harvest Festival very nearly did not happen. The year that gave the settlement its most remarkable wine had begun by almost destroying the vineyard that made it, and the festival that closed the season was kept in the shadow of a fire that had come within a single night of taking the harvest entirely.

A long, dry wind had worked across the Brierly Plains through the season, pulling the moisture from the soil and leaving the vines parched and brittle on their trellises. The vineyard was the settlement's living and its pride, the labour the whole year bent towards, and the settlers watched the slopes go grey and the sky stay empty, knowing how much stood at the mercy of a single spark.

When the storm finally came, it came without mercy and without rain. Cloud rolled thick over the Whitmore Highlands and thunder shook the valley in its frames, but what the sky delivered was not the water the settlement had prayed for. It was lightning.

A bolt struck the Whitmore estate, the oldest vineyard in Brierly and the first rows George Whitmore had planted on the southern slopes a generation before. The dry trellises caught at once. The fire ran through the vines faster than any settler could head it off, climbing the slope on the same wind that had left the rows so ready to burn.

Samuel Whitmore, grandson of the founding vintner, raised the settlement against it. There were no wells in Brierly large enough to answer a fire of that size, and so the townsfolk formed a chain down to the Whitmore River and hauled water up the slope by barrel and bucket through the whole of the night. The wind was against them and the fire moved faster than water could be carried to it, and before long it was plain that the whole estate could not be saved.

They gave up the burning northern rows and made their stand along the southern slope, soaking the ground and the vines ahead of the flames and beating out whatever spread past the line. They held there in choking smoke and killing heat until, by first light, the fire reached the wet ground and could go no further. It had been stopped, but only after it had taken a great part of the estate.

What it left behind was ruin. The northern reaches of the vineyard were gone, the vines burnt down to blackened stumps, and the estate's storeroom had collapsed, burying beneath it barrels of wine that had aged there for years. Ash lay grey over the soil, and the smell of burnt wood hung along the slopes for days.

The fire had not taken everything. The southern rows — the oldest vines in the settlement, the founder's first planting — had survived at the very edge of the burn, scorched and singed but standing. The grapes still hanging on them had been shrivelled and darkened by the heat, half-roasted where they hung, but the fruit was intact, and it was not allowed to go to waste.

Over the weeks that followed, the Whitmores and their labourers picked the fire-touched fruit by hand, working slowly along the surviving rows and handling each darkened cluster with care. The heat had done to the grapes what no vintner would have dared attempt: it had dried and shrunk them where they hung, concentrating their juice and driving the smoke of the fire deep into the skins. When they were pressed, the must ran richer and darker than any the settlement had drawn before. The wine made from it was bold and heavy and unmistakably marked by fire — a wine the vineyard had never produced and could not have produced by design.

By the time the festival came round, the settlement was tired and grieving what it had lost, and the question of whether to hold the festival at all divided the town. The estate that had given Brierly its first wine lay half in ruin, and to many it seemed a poor year to be raising cups. That the festival was held was itself a decision, taken in the face of the loss rather than in ignorance of it.

The town gathered in the square nonetheless. Samuel Whitmore took up the season's cup before the assembled settlement, and as he raised it the crowd fell quiet. He told them that they would drink not to what the fire had taken from them but to what it had left them — that out of the fire had come strength, and out of the struggle, fortune. Then he drank, and the cup went out into the crowd.

The pour was the smallest the settlement had yet made, a single modest cask where other years had broached many. But the wine in it was extraordinary, unlike anything Brierly had tasted, and the relief of a town that had braced for no festival at all broke over the square in a roar of defiance and gladness. The feast that followed was a humbler one than the better years had seen; the wine at the heart of it was the finest the settlement had made. The town named it the Harvest Reserve.

Under the lanterns and the dying embers of the Festival Fire, Brierly did not mourn the vineyard it had lost. It drank instead to the rows that had survived, and to the strange turn by which the fire that should have ended the harvest had given the settlement, in a single small cask, the best wine it had ever made.