Free The Telling Room: A Tale of Love, Betrayal, Revenge, and the World's Greatest Piece of Cheese by Michael Paterniti Page A

and sisters, nicknamed Puri (pronounced pure-
ee
). Even as a girl, she possessed a dignified beauty, her acumen glinting behind wide-set eyes. Her displeasure was a wincing grimace; her joy was a laugh that, as she aged, came in a girlish register higher than her voice. She was at once warm and a bit apart—aloof, some said—but most of all, she was sensitive. From the beginning, church was a place to reclaim one’s faith in humankind.
    Her grandfather had been relatively young for a grandfather—and able. The fields had a way of breaking a person; by fifty, if injury hadn’t already curtailed the body, there came a slow resignation to the new, more able-bodied generation. But he was as active as ever, involved in every last decision, up on the gangplanks that crisscrossed the bubbling stew of fruit skin and guts, punching down the must.Working alone, he must have slipped, leaned too close for inspection or reached out with his paddle only to have found no bottom. Then he was in the air, suspended above the grape slurry.
    The mixture was like quicksand. Perhaps he might have been able to stay afloat for a moment, or even touch bottom, but because he was now down in the clouds rather than above them on the gangplank, and because the relentless fermentation process wouldn’t end until the last of the sugar had been converted to alcohol, he stood no chance. His turgid realization probably occurred the moment he lost his footing and lasted until he was asphyxiated. Then the grapes ate his body. He was found slopped in the must, as if he’d been dealt an unexpected blow by some invisible hand.
    Puri initially absorbed the event through the despondency of her own mother. She noticed how the townspeople, with their red-rimmed eyes, consoled her. She deduced that her
abuelo
wasn’t coming back, and because theirs had been that special grandfather-granddaughter bond, she felt that she’d been eaten by grapes, too. The irony of the incident came years later, from a totally different perspective of time, when the children of Purificación Molinos de las Heras joked in her absence that dying in a vat of wine would be the most perfect death. But to the citizens of La Aguilera, her grandfather’s passing was an occupational hazard, really. Her people, like everyone in this part of Spain, were grape people. Making wine was a way of life for them. Accidents happened. a
    With her move to the village, Puri inherited a wine-loving husband and his vineyards. She inherited streets that ran uphill and a tall villa, across from
la ermita
, the hermitage, that demanded much of her attention. Despite her almost aristocratic bearing, she was a farmer’s wife, and so her place was in the home, preparing food, cleaning, tending to the children.
    It was in those early days that she’d been put in charge of makingthe family cheese—and then, at some point during Ambrosio’s childhood, she’d stopped. Years later, when her son came to her in hopes that she might remember the recipe, she was fuzzy on the details. One thing she would never forget, however, was its taste. b Although it was a
queso tipico
, what the Castilians called a “house cheese”—which meant it had always been there, on a board set on the kitchen table, to be sliced and nibbled on at all hours—the Molinos cheese, as she recalled it, was much stronger than Manchego, almost piquant, with an earthy vein and nearly overwhelming tang. She remembered that the cheese was often heated slightly before it was served, to soften it and let it perspire, in order to release its flavors. The cheese had been like the first of all cheeses, c a mistake, an improvisation, a reflex, and then, under the watchful eye of the Molinos matriarch—depending on the era, it could have been Candida, Felipa, or Tomasa—a fine evolution. It was a hard cheese—hard to cut, hard to categorize—the kind that forced you to savor each bite. So powerful was this cheese that eventhe members of the