Medium Plus

“You’re three hours late and you’ve parked on my crush pad, Agius. Shift it before I put it through the destemmer.”

Graham Kessner is standing in the winery shed doorway with the lights behind him and a plunger over his shoulder like a rifle, and he’s purple to the elbows. Joe kills the engine and sits for a second in the cab with the windows down, letting the smell come in. It’s the ferment. On a hot March night in the Barossa it hangs over every shed in the valley, sweet and yeasty and dark, so thick you could spread it on toast.

“Road was shut at Gawler,” Joe calls back. “Truck rolled on the Sturt. Six hours from Lonsdale. You want your barrels or you want to complain?”

“Both.”

“Figures.”

He climbs down, and his knees tell him about the six hours. Graham comes across the gravel to meet him at the back of the tray, where the six new hogsheads sit strapped down under the lights. Joe split the French staves for them in July and toasted them medium plus over the fire in August, and his brand is burned into every head. Graham runs a stained hand over the nearest one the way other men touch a horse.

“They’re beauties,” he says, grudging.

“Best I’ve made. Don’t tell the Angaston mob.”

“I don’t tell the Angaston mob anything. They still owe me a forklift.”

Graham’s fifty-eight now. He’s gone broad and slope-shouldered like the old Lutheran men in the photos on the cellar-door wall, his belly sitting proud over his belt, and his vintage beard has whitened at the chin. Joe has been bringing him barrels for fourteen years. It’s the same night every March, more or less, a beer on the crush pad afterwards and then the long drive home to the south side of Adelaide with the radio up loud so he doesn’t have to think about how much he wanted to stay.

Graham catches the new burn on Joe’s wrist straight off, red and shiny among the old white ones from thirty-odd summers of toasting fires, and takes hold of his hand without asking and turns it to the light.

“What’d you do?”

“Stave sprang out of the hoop when I was firing the last one.” Joe shrugs. “It’s nothing. Your barrel’s fine.”

“I wasn’t asking about the barrel.” Graham lets go a beat late. “Come on. Help me get them in before the possums move in.”

---

They roll the barrels down the ramp one at a time and walk them into the barrel hall on their chimes, Joe in front and Graham steering, the way they’ve done it every year. The hall’s cool and dim, stone walls a metre thick that Graham’s grandfather put up in 1931, the racks going back into the dark in rows. The new oak smells like vanilla and campfire. Joe chocks the last one into place on the bottom rack and straightens up with a hand pressed to his lower back.

“Getting old,” Graham says.

“You’re older.”

“I’m aware. I’ve got a vintage on, no sleep, and a son-in-law who reckons he can do my job because he did a wine course at the Waite.” Graham leans against the end of the rack and looks at the barrel instead of at Joe. “Stay for more than one beer. You’re not driving back to Lonsdale tonight on six hours’ road. There’s the bed in the office.”

Joe stands very still in the vanilla dark.

“Is that the offer?” he says. “The bed in the office?”

“That’s part of it.”

On the way out Graham stops where last year’s barrels sit, Joe’s barrels, chalked with block names and dates, and knocks on one with his knuckle like a doctor.

“Ebenezer block’s in that one. Best fruit off it since Dad died. Every time I top it up I think about the bloke who made the barrel.” He looks embarrassed straight away. “That’s the no-sleep talking.”

“Is it?”

Graham doesn’t answer. Out on the crush pad he pulls two stubbies from the old fridge by the press, and they sit on upturned picking bins in the warm night while the fermenters tick and bubble behind them. The ranges are a dark line against the stars, with the lights of Tanunda and the church spire below. A fox screams somewhere down in the vines. Graham drinks half his beer in one go and wipes his beard on the back of a purple hand.

“Kirsten rang me Sunday,” he says. Kirsten’s the elder daughter, the one who runs the cellar door on weekends and calls Joe “the barrel man” to his face. “Asked if you were coming up this week. I said Tuesday. She said, good, Dad, so are you going to do something about it this year or are we doing this again.”

Joe nearly chokes. “She said that?”

“Every vintage since the divorce. Her sister says it at Christmas.” Graham picks at the label on his stubby with a stained thumbnail. “They worked me out before I did. Sat me down at the kitchen table the winter after the divorce, the pair of them, and told me it was fine and to stop being so bloody Lutheran about it. Next question was whether it was the cooper.”

“What’d you tell them?”

“Told them to mind their own business.” He peels the label off in one piece and flattens it on his knee. “Then I told them yes.”

The fermenters tick. Joe stares at him.

“Fourteen years,” Graham says. “You’ve watched me go through a divorce and a bad hip, and I’ve watched you go grey. Every year you drive off at eleven o’clock, and I go and plunge the ferments and think, well, Graham, that’s another year you didn’t say it.”

Joe’s heart is going hard enough that he puts his beer down on the concrete so he won’t drop it.

“Say what?”

“Don’t be a bastard. You know what.” Graham finally looks at him. In the shed light his eyes are bloodshot and very blue. “I want you to stay. With me. I want you to take me to bed, or whatever you’d call it with no bed worth the name. I’ve wanted it since about year three, and I’m saying it now because I’m fifty-eight and tired and sick of thinking it on my own.”

Joe has been having this conversation with himself on the Southern Expressway for eleven years, and in none of the versions did Graham go first.

“Year three was the stuck ferment,” he says. “I stayed till two helping you warm the tank. I nearly said it then.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“You were married. And I was three barrels off going under and you were my biggest order. I wasn’t going to make it complicated.” Joe turns the stubby on the concrete. “Now I’ve got eleven wineries on the books and a forklift that doesn’t leak. The barrels are on your rack and the invoice went through in January. Nobody owes anybody anything. So it’s just me asking.”

“And I’m not married now.”

“No. You’re not.” Joe stands, and his knees crack, and he holds out his hand. “Graham. I’ll stay. I want you, mate. Have done as long as you have, probably longer. But I want to hear you say yes to me properly, standing up, not to a barrel.”

Graham takes the hand and lets himself be pulled up off the bin until they’re belly to belly, the fermenters bubbling, the fox gone quiet.

“Yes,” Graham says. “Yes. Bloody hell. Yes.”

Joe kisses him.

---

He tastes of beer and grape must, and his beard is softer than it looks. He kisses back hard and clumsy at first, then slow, both fists knotted in Joe’s work shirt as if the floor might tip. Joe gets a hand round his thick waist and pulls him in and feels Graham’s cock already hard behind his work shorts, shoving against his thigh. Graham makes a sound into his mouth that goes straight to Joe’s own cock.

“Not out here,” Graham says against his lips. “The Hoffmanns’ dog barks at everything. Barrel hall. Nobody goes in there at night but me.”

Joe gets the drop sheet out of the cab, the heavy canvas he puts under barrels so they don’t scuff a client’s concrete, and Graham ducks into the office where he’s been sleeping all vintage and comes back with a tube of water-based lube out of his own bag. He puts it in Joe’s hand without a word, ears red.

In the barrel hall Joe spreads the canvas on the stone in the aisle, folded double so it’s thick, right in front of his six new hogsheads. Graham kills the main lights and leaves the one bulb at the end of the row, and the hall goes gold and shadowy, the new oak smell everywhere.

“Stop word,” Joe says. “You say red, everything stops. Red, and I’m back on the picking bin with my beer.”

“Red. Fair enough.” Graham pulls his shirt off over his head. “Now get your gear off before I think better of it.”

They undress each other badly, laughing when Graham’s boot lace knots. Naked in the gold light Graham is heavy and pale where the sun’s never been, grey hair thick on his chest and running down over the curve of his gut, his cock dark and stiff and standing up out of more grey. Joe can’t stop touching him. He runs his hands down Graham’s sides and over the soft weight of his belly, round to grab his big arse in both hands, and Graham shudders and leans into it.

“Bloody state of me,” Graham mutters.

“I like the state of you. I’m not stopping.”

Joe kneels on the canvas and takes Graham’s cock in his mouth with no warning, and Graham’s whole body jerks and his hand slaps down on the barrel head beside him. “Christ, Joe.” Joe sucks him slow, tongue flat under the head, then takes more of him until his nose is in that grey hair and Graham’s thighs tremble against his shoulders. He tastes of clean sweat, with the ferment on him too. Joe pulls off, licks slowly up the underside, and goes down again, and Graham’s fingers dig into his scalp.

“Any more of that and I’m done,” Graham says hoarsely. “And I’ve waited eleven years, so I’m not done till you’re in me.”

Joe looks up at him. “You want me in you.”

“I’ve had a bit of practice on my own and I want you in me. Is that clear enough for a cooper?”

“Clear as a bell.” Joe kneels up. “Down here with me, then. On your knees, facing the barrel.”

Graham gets down onto the folded canvas, slow on account of the hip, and kneels facing the bottom rack with his hands on the curve of a new hogshead at chest height. Joe kneels behind him and squeezes lube into his palm. He warms it between his hands and runs one slick palm down the crack of Graham’s arse, and Graham drops his forehead against the barrel head and lets out a breath like a tyre going down.

“Cold?”

“No. Go on.”

Joe goes slow. One finger first, circling and pressing, feeling the ring of muscle start to give. He kisses the back of Graham’s shoulder and the broad plain of his back and works the finger in to the knuckle, and Graham groans, a deep sound that comes off the stone walls and back.

“All right?”

“Better than all right. More.”

Two fingers. Joe twists them and strokes until he finds the spot, and Graham’s hips buck against nothing. Joe keeps at it, steady and patient, the lube loud and wet in the quiet hall, until Graham is rocking back onto his hand and swearing under his breath in what sounds like his grandmother’s German.

“You like that,” Joe says. “Shoving back onto my hand, greedy as anything.”

“I am. Three, Joe. Give me three and then give me you.”

Joe gives him three and holds them there until Graham loosens around them and is panting, forehead pressed to the oak. Then he slicks his own cock with what’s left in the tube, so hard it aches, and pulls his fingers out.

“Up,” he says. “Kneel up. Back against me.”

Graham straightens on his knees with his hands still on the barrel, and Joe shuffles in close behind him, knees between Graham’s spread knees, chest to his broad back. He lines himself up, and Graham reaches back with one hand and grips Joe’s hip.

“Say it again,” Joe says into his ear.

“Yes. Now. Put it in me.”

Joe pushes in. It’s slow because it has to be. The head slides in on a long breath, and Graham’s whole body goes tight and then, deliberately, loose. Joe holds still. Graham’s hand on his hip is shaking.

“Talk to me.”

“You’re big. Give me a second.” Graham breathes. The bulb down the row hums. “All right. All right. Further.”

Joe sinks in further, a bit at a time, his hands on Graham’s hips, until he’s flush against Graham from thigh to belly and there’s nothing left to give. They both make a noise at once. Graham’s head falls back onto Joe’s shoulder.

“God almighty,” Graham says to the ceiling. “Fourteen years.”

“That’s the lot,” Joe says, low. “You’ve got all of it.”

“I know I have. You’re halfway up my throat.” Graham laughs, shaky. “Move. Slow.”

There’s not much room to pull back like this, so Joe rocks instead, long rolls of the hips that keep him deep and drag across the spot every time. Graham’s breath goes ragged. Joe wraps one arm round his chest, palm flat on the grey hair over his heart, and feels it thudding.

“Lean on me,” Joe says against his ear. “I’m holding you up. Just lean back and have it.”

“I’m having it,” Graham gasps. “Christ, I’m having it. Don’t stop doing that.”

Joe doesn’t stop. He rocks into him deeper and rougher, and Graham starts making noise in earnest, low groans on every thrust that grow into something rougher, coming off the stone and filling the hall. His hands slide on the barrel head and grip again. His cock stands up hard and untouched, bobbing with every thrust, dripping a long shiny string onto the canvas.

“You’re squeezing the life out of me,” Joe says. “Hot as a firing pot inside you, mate. Every stroke, you grab on.”

“Rougher,” Graham says. “Joe. I’ve been dropped off a forklift, I’ll survive you.”

Joe laughs into his neck and stops holding back. He gets both hands on Graham’s hips and hauls him back onto it on every stroke, short and deep and fast, his belly slapping against Graham’s back and the canvas bunching under their knees. Graham’s head is thrown back on Joe’s shoulder, his mouth open, and a run of filth is coming out of it that Joe would never in a million years have expected from a man who sings in the Tanunda choir.

“Fuck me. Yes, there, right there. God, you’re big. Fill me, you bastard, I’ve waited long enough. Don’t you ease off. Joe. Joe.”

“Like that? That how you want it, you filthy old Lutheran?”

“Like that. Christ. Like that.”

“All those years I drove home thinking about this arse,” Joe growls into his ear. “Now I’ve got it on my drop sheet, wide open for me and squeezing like a hoop going on hot.”

“Then use it,” Graham groans. “Use me, Joe. Fuck me till that bloody dog starts up.”

Joe’s thighs are burning. Sweat runs down his chest into the hair on Graham’s back. The barrel creaks on its rack when Graham shoves against it. Joe slows for a few strokes just to hear him beg, and Graham does, loud and filthy, and then Joe goes at him rougher than before.

“Joe,” Graham says, sudden and almost surprised. “Joe, I’m going off. Just from this. Just from you.”

“Then go,” Joe says. “All over my barrels. Go on.”

Graham comes yelling, loud enough to set the Hoffmanns’ dog off after all. His whole body locks against Joe, his arse gripping Joe’s cock in hard pulses, his own cock jerking untouched and spattering the canvas and the bottom of the nearest barrel head. Joe holds him through it with his arm across Graham’s chest, still moving, slow, while Graham shakes and swears and finally sags back against him.

“Keep going,” Graham pants. “I want you to finish in me. Go on.”

Joe grips his hips and fucks up into him hard, six strokes, seven, and then he’s gone too, deep inside him with his face in Graham’s shoulder, groaning into the salt of his skin, coming so hard the pair of them nearly tip into the rack.

They stay kneeling there a long while, wrapped up in each other on the drop sheet, breathing hard, the bulb buzzing down the row.

---

“You came on a brand-new French hogshead,” Joe says eventually. “Medium plus toast. That’s two grand of oak.”

“It’ll wash.” Graham’s voice is wrecked. “And it’s mine now. I’ll tell the next winemaker it’s terroir.”

Joe laughs so hard he slips out, and Graham groans at that, and they topple sideways onto the canvas in a slick heap. The stone’s cold under the edge of the sheet. Neither of them cares. They lie and look up at the dark curved bellies of the barrels while a fermenter gurgles somewhere outside.

“I’ve got to plunge the shiraz at two,” Graham says. “The cap’ll dry out.”

“I know. I’ve watched you do it fourteen times.”

“You never offered to help.”

“You never asked.” Joe rolls his head toward him on the canvas. “I’m asking now. Can I help?”

Graham looks at him a long time in the gold light.

“Yeah,” he says. “Get your shorts on. You’ll want them.”

At two in the morning the moon is over the ranges and the crickets are going in the vines. The open fermenters stand in a row on the crush pad, waist-high and breathing, the caps of skins on top gone tight and dark. Graham hands Joe the second plunger, and they climb the gantry and set to work side by side, driving the caps down into the bubbling wine while the hot sweet smell of it boils up around them. The juice comes up purple over their hands and up their forearms. Graham works without speaking, and Joe has matched his rhythm by the third tank.

When they’re done Graham leans on his plunger and looks sideways at him, purple to the elbows the both of them.

“You’ll want a shower before you drive home,” he says.

“I’m not driving home,” Joe says.

“No,” Graham says, and goes back to the first tank to check it again, though it doesn’t need checking, smiling into his beard where Joe can see it.