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TASTING NOTES - 2007 CHÂTEAU LAZAREV

APPEARANCE: Deep garnet, nearly opaque. Pronounced legs.

NOSE: Black cherry, leather, damp earth. Cedar. Tobacco. Faint mineralité.

PALATE: Full-bodied. Integrated tannins, surprisingly soft for the vintage. Dark fruit, graphite, subtle oak influence.

FINISH: Persistent. Complex. Melancholic.

I push back from the table and groan like a barnyard animal who’s been let loose at a trough.

“That was…” I search for the right word and come up empty. “I don’t even know. Criminal, maybe? It should be illegal to cook like that.”

The veranda overlooks the vineyard, which is currently awash in that rosy evening light that only exists in French wine country and Nancy Meyers movies. Candles flicker on the table between us, illuminating the wreckage of what was without a doubt the best meal of my entire life.

Coq au vin, with a sauce so rich I wanted to drink it straight from the pot.

Roasted carrots that tasted like they’d been personally glazed by Julia Child’s ghost.

Fresh bread that put biblical manna to shame.

I ate three helpings.I haven’t eaten three helpings of anything since Thanksgiving 2021, and that ended with me guzzling Tums by the handful and passing out on Jillian’s couch while a giant inflatable Garfield from the Macy’s Day Parade haunted my food coma dreams.

Lukas watches me from across the table. He’s still nursing his wine. He’s only just touched his own plate.

“You enjoyed it?” he asks.

“Enjoyed it?!” I repeat, almost offended. “I practicallymadeloveto that coq au vin. If you hadn’t been sitting right there, I would have licked the plate.”

“I wouldn’t have stopped you.”

The way he says it—amused, like he’s filing the image away for later—makes my stomach do a complicated little jumping jack.

I reach for my wine glass to give my hands something to do. It’s my second glass, which is one more than I usually allow myself, but exceptional circumstances call for exceptional measures. And if being wined and dined in a French vineyard by an alleged murderer doesn’t qualify as exceptional, I don’t know what does.

“Where did you learn to cook like that?” I ask.

Lukas swirls his wine. “My mother taught me.”

I wait for more, but he doesn’t offer it. So, with the wine loosening my lips, I get nosy. “Russian mothers teach their sons to make flawlessly authentic French cuisine?”

“Mine did.” He turns his face to look out over the horizon. “She believed a man should be able to feed himself. And others.”

It’s not much, but I file it away anyhow. Another breadcrumb. One more tiny fragment of the billion-piece jigsaw puzzle that is Lukas Lazarev.

“She sounds like a good woman,” I say carefully.

“She was.”

The candles keep dancing between us, casting wavy shadows across his scarred knuckles. He’s wrapped one hand around the stem of his wine glass, and I find myself staring at those pale lines crisscrossing his skin, wondering what they mean, what they’re from.

“You don’t talk about your family much,” I venture.

“Neither do you.”

Touché.I take another sip of wine. It’s warming me from the inside out. The evening air has cooled, but it’s still rich with the scent of grapes and earth.

“There’s not much to tell,” I say. “Not much that you don’t already know, at least.” I eye him, but when he says nothing and looks not the least bit ashamed, I shrug and fill in the blanks, just in case. “Parents died when I was nineteen. Brother’s in rehab. I work too much and sleep too little. The end.”