Leo shrugged. “It’s bad for people who’ve always lived here,” he said, pushing his hair back with a thin hand. He’d been sick for a long time, she knew. But he seemed fine now. “Not so bad, though, for those of us new to town.”

Jasper, unable to find the brandy, poured sherry into three delicate glasses and then pointed toward the panes in the door. “What,” he said, “are they doing out there?”

The snowy garden, still lit by the lanterns hanging from the trees and the gazebo, gleamed like a frozen lake but seemed to be empty until two gray shapes dashed along the base of the cliff in the direction of the shore. They stopped abruptly, barked, and then reversed, this time bolting back toward the winery.

“Those dogs have cornered something,” Leo observed. “Shall we try to help?”

Jasper grabbed a coat and boots while she and Leo slogged into the garden. She let Leo go first; the snow was up to her knees. By the time they reached the gazebo the dogs had vanished, and Henrietta and Leo stopped and waited for Jasper.

“What was that about?” Jasper said when he reached them. He batted snow from one of the benches and sat down. “Charlie’s dogs—I wish they were as well behaved as he is.”

“What is he up to this summer?” Leo asked.

Jasper gestured toward Henrietta, who sat beside him. The moon was high and nearly full; when she held out her arm, it cast one shadow from the lantern on the lattice behind her and another, brighter, from the light of the moon.

“It’s not up to me,” Henrietta said. “I don’t know what he’ll decide to do.”

“If he’s not busy,” Leo said, “Jasper and I have some ideas we thought might interest him. It’s a lot of work, we need the help. And he’s so smart—well, you know.”

He glanced at Jasper, who kept an eye out for the dogs but also chimed in as they described their plan. Didier had reorganized the facilities to make and sell grape juice—but they wanted to do something different, pressing grape types separately and bottling the pure juice, with different labels, as “wine juice.” Burgundy-type and port-type, sauterne-type and Riesling-type: any grape they got could be treated this way, attractively packaged in uniform portions. Delivered to customers’ houses, by well-trained deliverymen who would also supply the other needed ingredients and could explain to buyers exactly what steps were required to “mature” the juice. “We could advertise,” Jasper said. “Judiciously.”

The dogs were barking again, and Henrietta tilted her head. “Emphasizing that everything ordered is legal,” Jasper continued. Charlie, he explained, could help in the laboratory as they attempted to standardize the juice and the other products they’d package with it to form a home vintner’s kit.