Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World's Greatest Wine

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For Lori and our enfants, True and Jack

1) As cellarer of the monastery should be chosen from the community, one who is sound in judgment, mature in character, sober, not a great eater, not self-important, not turbulent, not harshly spoken, not an off-putter, not wasteful

2) but a God-fearing man, who will be a father to the whole community

3) He is to have charge of all affairs

10) He must regard the chattels of the monastery and its whole property as if they were sacred vessels of the altar

[Chapter 31 of the Benedictine Rules, as posted in English inside the Burgundy’s Abbey Notre Dame de Cîteaux]

T
he sun over Burgundy’s seemingly endless expanse of richly green vineyards belonged to late summer. What few clouds there were, were fantastical, fat, and luminous—giant dollops of silver and white acrylic paint that had not yet finished drying onto God’s vast canvas of sky. Plush canopies of leaves on the tens of thousands of vines fluttered in breezes so faint that if not for the subtle sway it would have appeared there wasn’t any breeze at all. Chirping sparrows swooped every which way, as if they’d spent the night drinking from an open barrel in one of the nearby
cuveries
. With the gentle rise and fall of the terrain, the vineyards resembled a slow rolling ocean of unpredictable currents.

The temperature that September morning in 2010, in the Côte d’Or region, which is the heart of Burgundy, and for many serious wine collectors the only part of Burgundy that matters, was already well on its way to sweltering. The humidity was as present as a coastal mist. Soon, the workers would spill from the villages to tend to the vines. The
enjambeurs
would arrive: The spider-shaped tractors, with their high tires to easily traverse
the meticulously ordered vine rows, would scurry about dodging the tourists bicycling along the narrow ribbons of dirt road between the vineyards. For the moment, however, the landscape was quiet; as far as the eye could see the only person among the vines was the
Grand Monsieur.

Dressed in shades of khaki—even his wide-brimmed, cloth hat—seventy-one-year-old Aubert de Villaine walked in the parcel called Romanée-St.-Vivant. Tall and thin, he waded through the vines as he had done for more than four decades: in bursts of long strides, arms out slightly from his sides, palms skimming the vine tops.

Every so often he would stop, fish the handkerchief from his pocket, wipe the perspiration from his brow, and look about. Monsieur de Villaine knew that everything and nothing was unfolding before his eyes, and that it was his challenge to determine which was the everything and which was the nothing—to find the clues in nature’s mystery.

At moments like this, surrounded by the sublime splendor of the vineyards before the harvest, the Grand Monsieur sometimes thought of the French masters—Pissarro, Renoir, Monet. He suspected they would have appreciated Burgundy and understood his work.

“One must have only one master—nature,” Pissarro had said. Renoir had put it this way: “You come to nature with your theories and she knocks them all flat.” And Monet—ah, Monet. Was it any wonder he described it best of all? “A landscape hardly exists at all as a landscape because its appearance is changing in every moment. But it lives through its ambiance, through the air and light, which vary constantly.”

Though Monsieur de Villaine would have insisted he was unworthy of such a comparison, he had much in common with
Monet. When Monet first picked up his brush he saw and painted the natural world in pieces. He put the water here and the sky there; the field went here; flowers and trees went here, here, and there. Each was an element unto itself, existing almost independent of its surroundings, as if, just like that, any one of the elements could have just as easily been placed in another scene, transported to another painting.

As he matured, however, Monet’s work became less technical and more organic, spiritual. He came to understand nature’s power. It was as if one day, while standing alone on the banks of that pond covered in water lilies, Monsieur Monet discovered a crease in the universe, pulled it open like curtains, stepped inside, and turned and viewed the world from another dimension—from a perspective that allowed him to see the interconnectedness of it all, to see the light and air, and the flicker and flow of energy among all natural things.

It was then that Monet began to make the invisible visible. The lines he had once thought defined and separated some natural order dissolved into a liquefied oneness, filling the canvas for others to drink in, and, if only for a few moments, to experience the divine.

This was what the Grand Monsieur labored to do. Only with grapes. His life had been dedicated to transcending the technical and vinifying nature’s invisible energy.

As he studied the masterpiece of the landscape around him, the Grand Monsieur prayed for a sign. He prayed although he wasn’t as confident in the power of prayer as he once had been. Because of recent horrific events and the possibility of unsettling outcomes, the Grand Monsieur had begun to question God’s very existence.

You wouldn’t have been able to detect his fermenting
anxieties just by looking at him. Or maybe you could have. If you were among the very few he trusted to know him well enough, and you happened to glimpse him in a moment like this—his long, weathered face and forlorn brown eyes—when he thought no one was looking at him, when he thought he was alone and could be himself.

Then again, it had been so long since Monsieur de Villaine had known what that was like: a private moment, unto himself. There was no himself. Only the tangle of what he represented: the vines, the families, the Domaine, Burgundy, France—the storied legacy of countless holy men and one unholy prince. A legacy subjected to the currencies of markets too often ignorant of how to truly appreciate a bottle of Burgundy, and that were instead driven by the whims of buyers who were obsessed with the bangs of auction gavels and status-symbol trophy bottles.

For the longest time Monsieur de Villaine had wanted no parts of any of it. He had resisted. It would be fair to say he had fled Burgundy’s vines. But crawling into a blackness that he believed was certain death, riding horseback into the starry night of the American West, repeatedly enduring the heartache of the unborn—well, these things have a way of altering a man.

Over time, like the best Pinot Noirs, within the bottle of his skin Monsieur de Villaine’s composition had become something other than what it had been. He matured. He came to accept and to appreciate what had always been his destiny—caring for his
enfant
vines, and producing the most magnificent and most misunderstood wine in the world.

His
employés
referred to him as the Grand Monsieur. The moniker signified their respect. A recognition of his grace and
kindness. Monsieur de Villaine put up a reserved front, but his people knew it was a façade, his way of protecting the Domaine and also his own heart, broken several times over and patched together, it seemed, with rose petals.

Years ago, when one of their beloved fellow workers, distraught over a lost love, was found hanging from a rafter in the winery, it was the Grand Monsieur to whom they turned for guidance. The workers gathered in the winery and bowed their heads as he led them in prayer and reminded them that the Lord indeed works in mysterious ways. He told them this was part of God’s plan. He petitioned them to have faith, to believe.

When the torrents of rain came and lasted for days and drowned their scheduled vineyard tasks, as was often the case in mid-to late summer just before the
vendange
, it was the Grand Monsieur who assuaged their concerns. Although during such times he more than anyone else worried that they would fall behind or the crop might be lost, he exuded a serenity; he reassured his crew that when the skies would clear they would be able to complete the work. In due time, he would tell his men when their partners, God and Mother Nature, were ready. Have faith, he would say to them. Believe.

Although the Grand Monsieur presided over the Domaine that was above all other Burgundian domaines, a national treasure—a “cathedral” of a winery, as a French official in Paris had once put it—and a winery that had made him one of the wealthiest men in France, Monsieur de Villaine carried himself with equal parts dignity and humility. He emanated gratitude and took nothing for granted. He was ever mindful of the time when the Domaine’s wines made no profit at all, and he never lost sight of the fact that such a period could easily come again.

He was often one of the first to arrive at the Domaine in the
morning, in his silver Renault station wagon, and he was among the last to leave. His back was just as sore as theirs; his hands just as calloused. He was the kind of Grand Monsieur who once, when his wife, Pamela, asked him to travel into Paris to meet her at a party hosted by an American starlet, he lingered at the “farm,” as he called the world’s greatest Domaine, for as long as he could, and then only grudgingly attended the soirée. He arrived late, as one of his family members recalled the evening, dressed in his khaki farmhand clothes.

During the long days of the
vendange
, the Grand Monsieur made sure his pickers were paid much better than the other domaines’ crews were paid; he contracted a locally renowned chef to prepare their meals. Rather than ensconce himself in an air-conditioned office, he opted to be in the
cuverie
, or in the vineyards for the clipping and sorting, often inquiring about his employees’ welfare and their families. He asked, his people knew, because he cared. As far as the Grand Monsieur was concerned, anyone who worked at the Domaine was family; they grasped they were part of something very special.

One day during a harvest, as the Grand Monsieur’s
vendangeurs
picked the Domaine’s vines in the parcel called Richebourg, one of his workers approached me. Squat, husky, with a nose that looked as if it got smashed crooked and flat by a barroom one-two wallop. He wore shorts, a white T-shirt tank top, work boots, and a skullcap. A cigarette dangled from the side of his mouth. He struck me as someone who would be more at home as a stevedore on the docks heaving bags of coffee beans or bundles of bananas rather than given over to the painstaking, delicate detail work of harvesting tiny bundles of berries.

He shouldered a backpack pannier and was tasked with transporting the picked fruit from the vineyard to a nearby flatbed trailer. “Pannier! Pannier!” The pickers called for him when their harvesting baskets were filled. For days as he worked I’d watched him stealing peeks at some of the female pickers as they bent over using their wire-cutter-like secateurs to clip off the clusters of the Pinot Noir. At least once he’d caught me watching him. I’d gotten the impression this Monsieur Pannier didn’t care to be observed. I thought he was going to tell me as much when he approached me.

“Can I tell you something?” He spoke to me in English. By then I’d been around the Domaine for two harvests and for enough months that everyone at the Domaine knew I spoke very little French. He stood with his face inches from my face. I could smell his sweat and the nicotine on his breath.

“
Bien sûr
,” I answered. Of course. I tried to use what little I knew of the language.

He flicked his cigarette onto a nearby ribbon of road. I reassured myself that it was unlikely he would pick a fight with me here, in front of everyone.

“The big boss,” he said, nodding in the direction of Monsieur de Villaine. The big boss was well out of earshot, over on the back of the flatbed, alone, sorting through the grapes that had been picked and carefully poured from the panniers into the plastic crates that would be transported to the
cuverie
.

“
Oui?
” I said.

“Son cœur est dans la terre.”

Pannier could see I was trying to process his French. He knelt down in front of me. Genuflected was more like it. He took his right hand and pressed his palm flat to his chest, over his heart. He looked up at me, his eyes locking on to mine, to make sure I was watching his gesture.

“
Son cœur
,” he said.

“His heart?”

“
Oui, son cœur
.” He removed the hand from his chest and pressed it into the soil. “
Est dans la terre
.”

“Is in the earth?”

“
Oui.
” He stood. He looked into me until he was satisfied I understood.

He softly punched my shoulder and said it again:

“
Monsieur de Villaine, le Grand Monsieur, son cœur est dans la terre.
”

With that, Monsieur Pannier smiled in the big boss’s direction and walked off back into the vines to see the sights and wait for his next load of fruit.