As he passed the grinning winner, yammering into his cell phone, the pig had the bad taste to wink at him and say, “Better luck next time.”

Die, Luc thought, ignoring him. Fall down and die.

He pushed through the door onto York Avenue. He took a deep breath of the evening air and consoled himself with the certainty that more bottles of Château Petrus 1947 Pomerol Cru Exceptional remained unopened somewhere and that some of those eventually would come to auction and find their way into his cellar.

Yet he still felt a residue of humiliation. He had vied for a prize and was coming away empty-handed. He could afford three thousand, four thousand, five thousand dollars a bottle, but money was not the point. The point was winning. And he had blinked.

He didn’t feel like going home right now, so he began walking. He was about as far east as possible without being in the river, so he headed west, walking up stately Seventy-second Street. And he thought about his father. Wine always brought back memories of Papa.

Poor man. If only he had found a way to hang on to the ancien domaine in Graves or at the very least cached his wines somewhere before fleeing to America, life would have been so different.

Château Monnet’s vineyard had been among the smallest in the Graves district of Bordeaux, but it had provided a respectable living for generations. His ancestors had bottled small lots of their own wine for the family and sold most of the harvest to other vintners. But they’d never quite recovered from the Phylloxera vitifoliae plague that attacked the vineyards of Europe in the 1860s. The plant louse wiped out all—not most, all—of Château Monnet’s vines. Like its neighbors, Monnet had had to replant its acreage with Phylloxera-resistant rootstock imported from, of all places, California.

It took years before they were harvesting grapes again. The family fell into debt. Worse, the grapes were never as good as before the plague, so the debt grew. During World War Two, with the Germans in Paris and moving toward Bordeaux, Papa decided to abandon the place—it already belonged more to the bank than to him—and flee to America.

Luc was born in New York and thus a citizen. And by then the bank had auctioned off the Monnet domain to a neighboring château. Unable to face the ignominy of losing the ancestral home, Papa never set foot in France again.

Luc had visited the property a few years ago. He’d found the elegant stone structure that had been the ancestral home still standing, but now converted to an inn. An inn! He’d felt degraded.

Luc had stood in its front hall and sworn that he would buy it back someday. All it would take was money. And someday—soon, he hoped—he would have enough. Then he would drive the money changers from the family temple, move his wine collection back to the land of its origin, and take up where his father had left off.