The Vine Between Us

There is a particular smell that clings to the tasting room in the early morning — oak and cold stone and something faintly sweet that I have never been able to name. I noticed it on my first day at Croftwood Estate three years ago, and I notice it now, standing in the doorway with my clipboard pressed to my chest like armour.
I notice it because today, everything else is about to change.
The tasting room at Croftwood sits at the end of a long gravel path that cuts through the oldest shiraz blocks in the Barossa Valley. The vines outside are winter-bare, their gnarled arms reaching sideways in the cold morning light. Inside, two timber desks face opposite walls — mine on the left, stacked with vintage notes and fermentation logs, and the one on the right, which has been empty since October.
It is not empty anymore.
A leather satchel sits on the right-hand desk. A jacket is folded over the chair. Someone has already arranged a row of tasting glasses along the windowsill, each one angled to catch the light, which is — I will admit — exactly how I would have done it.
I do not find this charming. I find it presumptuous.
“You must be Meera.”
I turn. He is leaning in the side doorway that leads to the barrel hall, holding two mugs of coffee. Tall, dark-haired, with the kind of unhurried ease that suggests he has already decided he belongs here.
Radoslav Zeman. I know the name. Everyone in the Barossa knows the name. He spent four years at a boutique winery in McLaren Vale building a grenache program that won every award worth winning. Then Hyacinth Carrington — the estate’s owner, silver-haired and ruthlessly pragmatic — decided Croftwood needed a second senior winemaker, and here he is.
Here he is, offering me coffee in my own tasting room.
“I am,” I say. I do not take the mug.
He sets one on my desk anyway, then crosses to his side of the room and sits down. He does not appear bothered by my refusal. That bothers me more.
“Hyacinth said you’d show me the barrel samples this week,” he says, opening his satchel.
“Hyacinth tells me many things at the last minute.”
He looks up. The corner of his mouth moves — not quite a smile. “I’ll take that as a yes.”
The first week is a negotiation conducted entirely without words.
I arrive early; he arrives earlier. I rearrange the tasting order; he adapts without comment. I leave my fermentation notes face-down on my desk; he never looks at them, which somehow feels more pointed than if he had.
He is meticulous. Annoyingly so. His barrel samples are pulled in perfect sequence, his notes precise, his palate — and I would rather not admit this — is extraordinary.
We taste the estate’s new shiraz together on a Thursday afternoon, standing at the long table in the centre of the room. The wine is young and difficult, all iron and dark plum, not yet willing to be understood.
“It needs eighteen more months,” I say.
“Twelve,” he says. “If you pull it at eighteen, the fruit closes up.”
“The fruit is not the point of this wine.”
He looks at me directly then. Not combatively. Just — directly. Like he is actually listening.
“Tell me what the point is,” he says.
I did not expect that. I expected an argument, and I had one ready.
Instead I find myself explaining — the particular quality of the soil in the old block, the way the tannins in a Barossa shiraz need time to become something generous, the way patience is not the same as hesitation.
He listens to all of it. Then he says, “Fifteen months. Split the difference.”
“That’s not how winemaking works.”
“No,” he agrees. “But it’s how partnerships do.”
I do not have an answer for that. I pick up my glass instead.
The sharp moment comes in the third week, on a cold Tuesday when the valley is wrapped in low cloud and the vines outside look like ink drawings against a white sky.

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About the Author

Clara Vance — a former corporate strategist, expert in the tension that builds between two desks. Her hobby? Morning coffee chats in the office where she collects ideas for her stories.

— Clara Vance

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Categories: Enemies to Lovers, Romances

Tags: 10min stories, Australia, Barossa Valley, contemporary romance, enemies to lovers, short story, slow burn, vineyard romance, winemaker romance

August 15, 2026

10min-stories