Friday, the first day of Christmas in Middleburg weekend, didn’t start well. Quinn and I were about to leave for the winery after breakfast when his phone chimed that he had a text message. He pulled it out of his pocket, read the text, and said, “Damn.”

“What?”

“Antonio says one of the barrels in the room where we store the older reds apparently sprang a leak. There’s wine everywhere. Dammit. We’d better get over there.”

A barrel of wine was worth anywhere from eight to ten thousand dollars of bottled wine—on the higher end if it contained one of our older reds.

“Let’s go,” I said. “This isn’t going to be good.”

BY THE TIME WE got over to the barrel room, Antonio was siphoning wine from the defective barrel into another oak barrel. There was still the matter of cleaning up what had leaked onto the floor. The good news was that the leaking barrel had been on the bottom of the rack so wine hadn’t dripped over other barrels. The bad news was that it had been in the very back row in the deepest alcove where we stored our reds, meaning it had taken a while before the leak had been spotted. We couldn’t just take a hose and rinse the spilled wine into the floor gutters, either; there were environmental regulations and a protocol that we needed to follow.

“There’s something else you ought to know, Lucita,” Antonio said.

His jeans and a light gray sweatshirt were splattered with red wine as if he’d been shot. A knitted Andean chullo covered his head and ears. It was always chilliest back here in this far alcove, but in December the cold could go right through to your bones in no time.

“What is it?” I asked him. “Not another barrel leaking.”

“Nothing like that.” He shook his head. “I found a door in the wall behind those barrels. About the size of a crawl space. Come over here where you can see it.”

Quinn and I followed him and crowded into the tight space. Antonio turned on a flashlight and used the beam to pick out the edges of a small wooden door with a rusty ring attached. I caught my breath.

“Jesus H.,” Quinn said.

The Madeira.

“Did you open it?” Quinn asked him.

“I figured you’d want to do that.” Antonio picked up a crowbar that was leaning against the barrel stand. “I brought this. It looks like the door might be stuck.”

“You want to open it?” Quinn asked, passing me the crowbar.

“I do. I had no idea this storage place or whatever it is existed.”

“You think the Madeira might be here?” he asked.

“Why not? It’s the perfect place to store it.” I couldn’t keep the excitement out of my voice.