Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World's Greatest Wine (12 page)

These three presentations made clear once and for all, at least to anyone with common sense, that Planchon had been correct all along: The cause of the malady was the bugs. The presentations also set the stage for another debate, which morphed into Burgundian class warfare.

In the wake of the congress, the French government made subsidized carbon disulfide available only to syndicates of growers who would pool together their money to purchase and apply collectively in an organized manner. For families like the wealthy heirs of Duvault-Blochet, paying for the carbon disulfide treatments that ultimately spared the Romanée-Conti vineyard was not an issue.

For many smaller growers, the prescribed regimen of treatments was too expensive. Instead, they favored planting American vines, which didn’t sit well with Burgundy’s top producers, who were adamant that French vineyards should be populated only by French vines.

The day he spoke at the congress, Laliman never mentioned grafting, but it was already under way in parts of France. And as it became apparent that sulfiding did not guarantee success the
way grafting did, the popularity of grafting grew, first quietly and then with more fanfare. The grafting process was painstaking and tedious.

Although grafting was nothing new, and dated back to the time of Pliny, the French had no history with it. Everyone was learning as they went. The challenge was twofold. First, there was finding the right combination of rootstock, which is the part of the vine beneath the soil, and scion, which is the plant aboveground. Then there was landing on a consistently successful technique to marry the scion to the rootstock. The collective ignorance was so profound that amateur grafters actually attempted to graft grapes onto Boston ivy.

Pierre-Marie Guillaume’s grandfather, it turned out, had a talent for grafting. He started grafting to reconstitute his own vineyard. When neighboring vignerons saw how well his vines were doing, they began to ask Guillaume if he would mind whipping up some vines for them. In no time,
grand-père
Guillaume was grafting so many vines that he figured he might as well make a business of it, a business that he passed on to his son, and his son passed on to Pierre-Marie. The Guillaume nursery became the third-largest vine-grafting operation in the world.

On January 26, 2010, the morning after he received Monsieur de Villaine’s urgent request, Pierre-Marie woke early, shifted his Renault into drive, and traveled the hundred miles to Vosne. Along the way he gazed out at the fields filled with dead, dormant sunflowers. Brown and with their heavy “heads” bowed, they resembled monks in solemn prayer. Most dead plants don’t inspire such poetic thoughts. Dead vines, for example, are just dead vines.

At the Domaine, as Pierre-Marie listened to Monsieur de
Villaine’s briefing he did so with a poker face; then they headed off to the vineyard. They were joined by Jean-Charles and the young vineyard manager, Nicolas. After a brief examination of the two vines in the southwest corner of Romanée-Conti, Pierre-Marie confirmed what the Domaine’s senior team had suspected earlier when they had visited the vines.

“They appear to be dead,” Pierre-Marie said.

Monsieur de Villaine grunted. For a long while he said nothing. Then he asked if Pierre-Marie would take one of the two vines back to his nursery-laboratory and see if it could be awakened. He asked Pierre-Marie to learn in any case how they had been attacked.

Nicolas and Jean-Charles helped Pierre-Marie shovel around the two vines and tug them from the earth. One of the men had thought to bring along a couple of plastic shopping bags. One vine would go to Pierre-Marie, the other to the police. Pierre-Marie put his vine inside a plastic bag. As they headed back to Pierre-Marie’s car, Monsieur de Villaine trembled.

Indeed it was cold that January day, and Monsieur de Villaine may very well have been shivering. However, something Jean-Charles witnessed later that afternoon was an indication that the Grand Monsieur had been shaken by what had been done to his vines and the crop circles of death he feared might appear in Romanée-Conti.

After Pierre-Marie had left that day, Jean-Charles passed Monsieur de Villaine’s office and saw him seated at his desk holding his head in his hands. Jean-Charles saw the Grand Monsieur was weeping.

Jean-Charles was not entirely surprised. Everyone in France knew of the phylloxera and what it had done to the vines. Although Romanée-Conti had been spared during that first
phase of the plague at the end of the nineteenth century, when the devastators returned in the first half of the twentieth century, Edmond de Villaine and Henri Leroy’s Domaine had not been so fortunate. The ring of death killed their vines. After they were torn out and burned in 1945, until the new vines were planted, the vineyard produced no wine for two years.

Now indeed it seemed quite plausible, maybe even provable, that the ring the hand of evil had sketched on the graph paper might very well be another circle radiating destruction—the promised crop circle of death.

The idea that those very same vines that Little Aubert had visited that day so long ago with Edmond, and which Edmond had gazed upon like a proud father looking through a hospital nursery window, the idea that those vines that had grown up with Monsieur de Villaine; the
enfants
that he had cared for as if they had been his children—the idea that they might very well have been murdered… Jean-Charles could see how that would cause the Grand Monsieur to weep.

T
wenty-three-year-old Aubert de Villaine was on his hands and knees on the wooden floor of a French army barracks. He could hear the wind that had whipped at his face and hung icicles on his lungs now smacking hard against the creaky building, as if to let the men inside know that winter was still out there, roaring, waiting for them to return.

On either side of Aubert rows of bunks were filled with the men of his unit. Many of them deep into desperately needed sleep. Several of them suffering. At least three of them were gravely ill, including Aubert.

The training that his platoon of officer candidates had done during the previous days of that winter of 1962, in and around Narcy, in central France, had been the most grueling experience of their lives. And despite the warnings their commanding officer had received that the base was under a quarantine for disease, he had gone ahead and marched them right into it. The decision confirmed what many of the men of Aubert’s unit had already come to believe: Their commanding officer was a madman.

As Aubert crawled across the floor, out of the room, and into the hallway, he could barely hold up his head. The pain—it felt as if his brain were a knot being pulled tighter and tighter into itself—was excruciating. He was burning up. Covered in sweat. His muscles, even as he moved, felt as if they were turning to wood. He vomited, which led into a coughing fit that drained more of what little energy he had left.

There was a ringing in his ears. His vision was blurry. He was having trouble seeing what was immediately in front of him. Yet he was beginning to see clear visions. Before his eyes appeared the cross and the Romanée-Conti vineyard shrouded in mist. In it he saw a little boy and old man. It was himself as a child, Little Aubert, and Edmond. It was a day like that day with his grandfather. The stables. Coquette. The vines. His grandfather kneeling among the vines of Romanée-Conti while Little Aubert wandered about picking up stones.

From this perspective, Officer Candidate de Villaine now saw something that Little Aubert did not see. Everything was enveloped by an aura, a palpable energy that traveled from sun to vine, from vine to his grandfather, from his grandfather to the boy. In the moment there was—and there was no other way to put it—a divine presence. Nothing and everything was happening.

Officer Candidate de Villaine crawled toward this vision of his past, but once more it was gone, dissolved into his present view of the stretch of corridor before him.

Down at the other end, Aubert saw a softly backlit doorway.

He dragged himself toward it, toward the infirmary.

An aspirin. He had it in his head that an aspirin was what he needed.

Under the lights of the infirmary someone rushed to him, helped him up.

Probably meningitis, a voice said. Another case.

Someone put him into a bed.

Next thing he knew officer candidate de Villaine was seated in a small wooden boat, adrift in his past.

Where am I?
he thought

Is this death?

The water appeared to be a pond…

A pond?
… Yes. A pond surrounded by woods.

There were familiar smells: the sweet aroma of
pain au chocolat
and roasted almonds. Familiar sounds: He heard the faint background noise and honks of traffic. Much more immediate was the sound of laughter. Above him balloons floated into a sky with a setting sun. His eyes dropped to beneath the balloons, to the children who had released them. He watched them chase after the balloons, running past the vendors selling the baked goods and roasting the nuts.

He looked at his hands. He was holding oars.

He looked straight ahead. There was someone in this boat with him. His vision was a beautiful young woman in her late teens. She was seated opposite him in the subtly bobbing bow. She was watching him, smiling at him. In her lap there was a picnic basket. He recognized this woman. He recognized this moment. This was a time from not so long ago.

From when he was a teenager. A time when Aubert was a teenager, off at Catholic boarding school in Paris. He wasn’t an especially devoted student. Rather than focus on the assigned tasks and memorizing the certainties of scientific and religious dogma, he gave himself over to ambiguities of poetry and the
expansive spirituality of the philosophers, ancient and contemporary, like Jean-Paul Sartre.

Sartre was a celebrity of that era. Aubert read his idea that man is “condemned to be free.” Aubert was of the mind that Sartre must have chosen his words with some degree of wry irony. The way Aubert saw it, a freedom of choice was just that,
liberté
, which for him meant liberty from the vines; the freedom to pursue all the metropolitan culture Paris had to offer.

Aubert could choose to go to the cafés and watch the people and think and daydream and write poetry. He could choose to go to the Musée d’Orsay or the Louvre, where he could stand before a painting, lose himself in the colors, and choose the possibilities of interpretation. Or he could choose to go on a date with a pretty girl, to a park as magnificent as any of the works of the masters in the Louvre.

Like this day, in a rowboat on the pond in the Bois de Boulogne. It was Paris’s largest park, just to the west of “
le 16e
”—the posh sixteenth arrondissement, one of Paris’s most elite neighborhoods. The Bois de Boulogne is more than twice the size of New York’s Central Park. The vast woods are legendary as a place of romance during the day, and at night a site of sordid passions and illicit vices.

De Villaine’s seventeen-year-old self rowed alongside the banks of a quiet patch of the woods. He leaned forward and took the basket from the pretty girl. He took her soft hand in his and helped her step from the wobbly boat. As she stepped out and brushed by him, he smelled the fragrance. It was just then he remembered he had forgotten something very important.

He looked up at her, standing there against the backdrop of the Parisian sunset.

“One minute,” he told the puzzled girl. “I will be right back.”

He rowed a short distance to an old man selling flowers. He explained to the man that he was with a girl, someone who was very special; they were having a picnic. Aubert asked the man how much for some flowers. He told the old man he did not have much money.

The old man reacted as if he remembered such a time and such a special girl from his own youth. He told Aubert that he was done for the day; his flowers were expiring and would not last until tomorrow. He said that for whatever change Aubert had in his pocket, the old man would sell him all that he had.

The flowers were
pois de senteurs
—sweet peas, or fragrant peas. Pink and delicate orchid-like flowers. Aubert knew these flowers. They were a favorite of his mother. He knew that they were especially lovely in the morning when wet with the dew that would burn away in the sun’s heat.

Aubert kept a few of the flowers bundled to hand to the girl. The rest he sprinkled about the boat. It would be a good idea, he thought, if at the end of their picnic he would row his date home on a bed of
pois de senteurs
.

This was 1957, a time that many decades later he would reflect on as a very different time; when the ritual of courting still mattered; when the youth of his generation savored a slowly unfolding romance, rather than lust for the certainty of quick conquest. It was a time, as he would one day put it, when he was in love; when he was always in love; when he was in love with idea of love.

These growing pains of his expanding heart are what consumed him as he transitioned from a boy to a young man in Paris. He did not give a thought to what was happening back in Burgundy. There the Domaine was experiencing its own growing
pains, but of a very different sort. Tensions between the old and new, between the Leroys and the De Villaines, were beginning to take root.

When Aubert’s father, Henri, returned home after World War II he didn’t talk much about it. As far as he was concerned, there simply wasn’t much to tell. One minute his unit had been preparing to engage the Germans; the next they were surrounded. Every day of the three years he spent in the stalag was the same: miserable. The only sunshine came with the mail, in the letters from Hélène. If he held those letters to his nose, he could smell her bouquet.

Hélène’s letters kept Henri informed about the changes at the Domaine, such as that Jacques Chambon had sold his shares to Monsieur Leroy. Mostly she wrote of Little Aubert growing from the toddler Henri had last seen into handsome boy. She wrote that he was so much like his father, and assured her husband that in his absence Edmond tended to Little Aubert with grandfatherly care.

Hélène wrote almost exclusively of those two things: the
enfants
in the vineyard and their
enfant
son. To write of anything else, she feared, would risk drawing the attention of the Germans, who they knew read every POW’s mail. The Germans looked for anything that might be construed as the resistance. The vines and Little Aubert, these topics were pure, and purely their own.

During Henri’s time in the prison—that period when Henri and Hélène, who had waited so long before they had Edmond’s permission to be together, could not be certain they would ever see one another again—the vines and Little Aubert were the two things that kept them together as one.

Other men in Henri’s stalag were not so lucky. One fellow prisoner—and this was a story Henri did share with his family, and he shared it because it offered a rare moment of gallows humor—well, this fellow’s wife would send her husband wonderful packages filled with homemade treats. Delicious cookies. Which the man always shared with Henri and other men in the prison.

One day, well beyond their first year in captivity, instead of the package of cookies this man received a letter from his wife. This time she said she was afraid she had some bad news: She was pregnant and wanted to know if her husband could forgive her. The man asked Henri and his friends how they thought he should respond to his wife’s question. The men looked at one another, and after carefully considering the circumstances, advised him to tell her that he would talk about this development when he returned, and in the meanwhile to be sure to keep sending the cookies.

There was another story that Henri shared, this one because there was a lesson it. The Germans gave very few rations, mostly in the form of ball-shaped loaves of bread. The bread was given out infrequently, every couple of days. Henri said that many of the younger men, when they received the bread, would ravenously eat it all at once.

Immediately after, these young men would sit full and satisfied, but then in the coming days they would have nothing to eat. It was feast and then famine, physically and psychologically, because their stomachs were tied to their minds. Every time it was the same. It seemed these men had no memory and surrendered to their stomachs.

On the other hand, the older, more disciplined men, when they received the bread, would eat only a very small amount and
would ration the rest to themselves in the days when there was no bread handed out. They would never feel full, but they were never without something to eat. Little Aubert understood the moral: On the days that you have bread, be mindful there will be days when you will not have any.

Because the camp had made Henri thin and frail, when he returned home the doctor advised him to avoid excess activity and strain. As he regained his strength, the doctor said, he ought to gingerly recuperate. As far as Henri was concerned, this did not preclude the vigor he put into growing his family. Within six years, he and Hélène had five more children. In addition to Aubert, next came his two brothers, Patrick and Jean, and then his three sisters: Marie-Hélène, Cecile, and Christine.

None of the children wanted to have anything to do with the Domaine, and none of them felt that more passionately than Aubert, who as the oldest male sensed the unspoken wish of his grandfather and father that he join the DRC’s operation.

Aubert’s grandfather died in 1950, only three years after he and Little Aubert had visited the newly planted vines of Romanée-Conti. Aubert’s father, in addition to his work as a commercial banker, took Edmond’s place as the de Villaines’ representative
gérant
alongside Monsieur Henri Leroy. There were other changes at this time. Monsieur Clin was retiring. After three decades, he was turning over management of the winery and the vineyard operations to André Noblet, who in 1952, two years after Edmond’s death, birthed his first vintage of Domaine wines.