Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World's Greatest Wine (14 page)

Jean-Charles explained that Lalou had been forced from the Domaine under bitter circumstances and the thought crossed his mind that maybe she was determined to exact some revenge. Jean-Charles emphasized there was no evidence that she or anyone associated with her was responsible for the call; it was just his suspicion. He said there had been only one call, and the police at the time did not come to any conclusions.

“What else?” the Inspector asked.

Jean-Charles also described a moment that struck him as suspicious, and which had occurred just after the police first visited the Domaine on St. Vincent Day, January 22, 2010, at around 1 p.m. That day, when he went with Monsieur de Villaine to look at the two vinestocks that were mentioned in the second package, his group came upon six people at the bottom of the wall of Romanée-Conti. One of the people was taking pictures. When Jean-Charles and Monsieur de Villaine passed by, three of the people rushed into a Renault Clio. Jean-Charles said the car was gray and that he had recorded the number on the license plate. He gave that license plate information to Inspector Pageault.

“Anything else?” the inspector asked.

There was one more thing.

Jean-Charles said that between the first and second mailings, that is to say between January 9 and January 20, 2010—he couldn’t remember the exact date—he had had several phone contacts with a Serge Bessanko, who identified himself as a writer and said he wanted to write a novel about a prestigious vineyard. Jean-Charles said this Bessanko asked him about the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. He asked about its precise dimensions, and then he asked if the vineyards had ever been the victim of bad intentions or acts—considering the fact that it was not protected.

The inspector was listening.

Jean-Charles continued.

On January 18, Jean-Charles said, this Bessanko sent him an email that referred to their phone conversations. Jean-Charles took out his iPhone. He informed Pageault that he was forwarding a copy of the email right then to the inspector, who began to look at it:

Attached to Bessanko’s email, in the police file, was a sample of the novel-in-progress. It included dialogue, which grew from his conversation with Jean-Charles:

“Because of everything,” Jean-Charles said to the inspector, “I thought it was important to share this with you. Again, I am sorry for not thinking of some of this earlier.”

Inspector Pageault said he was very glad that Jean-Charles had remembered these things and had brought this new information to his attention.

I
n the late 1840s, a farmer left his home in Bordeaux and boarded a ship bound for America. Étienne Theé did not set out with grand ambitions to revolutionize American winemaking. Never in his wildest dreams could he have imagined his life’s work would galvanize characters and events that would nudge the universe of Romanée-Conti. Theé was an immigrant with gold in his eyes. He traveled to California hoping to strike it rich in the Gold Rush.

In the Santa Clara Valley, which was then about a day’s journey south of San Francisco, Theé got a deal on a piece of land on the Guadalupe River, between the town of Los Gatos and the New Almaden quicksilver mine. In 1847 he constructed a home there on a hill with a breathtaking view of the valley and surrounding mountains. Gazing out at the landscape, a visitor of the period remarked that “colors indeed seemed to change like the chromatic scale of hues on tempering steel.”

It wasn’t long before Theé had experienced enough of the so-called rush to decide that prospecting was a riskier proposition than he could bear, and figured it was more of a sure thing
to sell wine to dejected or elated gold miners. After all, whether boom or bust, it’s a bullish market for booze. On the hillside beneath his home, Theé planted a vineyard. It wasn’t long after that he discovered that conjuring wine from California might be just as challenging as unearthing slivers of gold from it.

It was the Franciscan missionaries of the Catholic Church, in need of sacramental wines, who had brought viticulture to Las Californias in the late 1700s. Following their lead, Theé attempted to cultivate the common “mission” grape varietal, the Criolla, of Spanish provenance. No matter what Theé tried, his wines were characterless. Fine for the consecrated blood of Christ, but not so great for commercial appeal.

In 1852, a stylish Frenchman arrived in the valley and settled near Theé’s place. Charles Lefranc was not a vigneron. He was a tailor from Paris’s posh sixteenth arrondissement. There’s evidence to conclude Lefranc came to California, his trunks filled with needles, thread, and fabric, and his head filled with ideas of selling handmade fashion to the nouveau riche.

Within the valley’s tight community of French expats, Theé and the much younger Lefranc became friends. For Lefranc, at least, his fondness for the family might have had something to do with the fact that he and Theé’s daughter, Marie Adele, had taken a liking to one another. Upon learning of Theé’s viticultural challenges, Lefranc suggested, well, why not import some vines from home?

A shipment of cuttings from Bordeaux was arranged—some Pinot, Sauvignon, Semillon, and Cabernet varietals. Theé and Lefranc grafted the cuttings onto the mission rootstock and repopulated the vineyard. In so doing, the men made history, as these were the first high-quality French vines ever planted in Northern California, and they were among the very first planted
in the United States. (The only other documented planting of imported French varietals of the time was much farther south, in Los Angeles. Frenchman, Jean-Louis Vignes, had begun planting whole vines shipped from Bordeaux.)

Of more tangible reward for Theé and Lefranc, their new grafted vines produced very fine wine. Whatever the farmer and tailor had done to stitch those French cuttings onto the mission rootstock and into the California soil, pruning here and trimming there as they matured, had worked. Theé and Lefranc were pleased to discover that these vines produced wines that were—as the French tend to say when they allow themselves to think they might have reason to be pleased with a wine—something quite interesting.

The market agreed. The wines began to sell and a partnership was born. Shortly thereafter, Theé and Lefranc made history a second time when they erected an adobe winery, Northern California’s first ever for commercial production. Lefranc named the winery New Almaden, after the nearby mine. They filled the cellar with their liquid gold, stored in oaken casks also imported from France.

The partners joyfully drank from those casks in 1857 to celebrate the marriage of Lefranc and Marie Adele. It was then, with Theé getting on in years, that his son-in-law became the proprietor of Almaden. Lefranc expanded the winery’s holdings to seventy-five acres, which produced 100,000 gallons of his varietal wines, which were now winning prizes at fairs and competitions. By 1862, Lefranc was recognized as the preeminent winemaker in the region, representing San Benito County at the first California Wine Convention in San Francisco.

As the wealth of the Gold Rush flowed into San Francisco and the city became more metropolitan and interested
in wine, New Almaden garnered a reputation for excellence beyond California. The winery made the papers when President Ulysses S. Grant dropped by for a tasting. Gossip columnists wrote about a raucous party at New Almaden where Anna Held, a famous actress of the time, bathed in the estate’s sizable tub filled with champagne. True or not, the tale made for fantastic marketing.

As the winery achieved national notoriety, so, too, did Lefranc. In 1876, he was invited to Philadelphia for the grand celebration of America’s first centennial. Dressed in a three-piece suit, impeccably fitted, of course, and holding a cane, the bearded vigneron stood before the Philadelphia crowds and proudly tapped on an oval cask some ten feet high, nine feet wide, and eight feet deep, filled with 3,447 gallons of Almaden’s best. On the centennial stage in the birthplace of the nation, Lefranc showcased to the world his Almaden wines, born of the first French vines grown in Northern California soil.

By 1880, Almaden was one of the largest and most recognized wineries in the country, and for that matter, around the world. The estate sprawled over 130 acres, and was now planted with vines not only from Bordeaux, but also from Champagne, the Rhône Valley, Burgundy, and even Riesling and Traminer vines from Germany.

Just when it seemed that the winery was charmed—a true fairy tale of immigrants achieving the American Dream—tragedy struck.

One day, in 1887, the serene work at the idyllic estate turned into fatal chaos. Lefranc, who was by then in his sixties, steered a horse-drawn wagon loaded with his wine, a crate of bottles fell and smashed; the startled team of horses took off possessed. Trying to rein in the animals, Lefranc fell into the whinnying,
snorting melee of dust; under the hooves and wagon wheels he was trampled to death.

Lefranc’s only son, Henri, who now co-owned the winery with his two sisters, Louise and Marie, took over Almaden, sharing management duties with a twenty-nine-year-old Burgundian, Paul Masson. Masson had been raised in a family of well-established vignerons. He came to the United States for the first time years earlier, in 1878. With Bourgogne in the midst of the phylloxera epidemic, his family’s wine business struggling like all the rest, Masson had arrived in California’s new wine country looking for work, and possibly solutions to combat the bug.

For two years, Masson hung around the Almaden vineyard, which he had heard about over in France, and observed the unprecedented viticultural success the two Frenchmen had grafted and planted. When he wasn’t at Almaden, Masson attended business courses at the College of the Pacific. Just as he had planned, in 1880 he returned home to put into practice what he learned. However, back in Burgundy, Masson found the vignerons were still struggling. He hopped on a boat and returned to Almaden, where Lefranc welcomed him back and hired him on as a bookkeeper.

Following Lefranc’s death, Masson married Lefranc’s daughter, Louise. They honeymooned in France, and then Masson joined his brother-in-law managing the winery until 1909, when the family endured a second tragedy. Henri was killed in a trolley car accident, leaving Masson the sole director of New Almaden.

Proving early that he was a shrewd businessman, Masson kept the winery alive through Prohibition by securing a special dispensation that allowed the winery to grow grapes for “medicinal” wines. He then led Almaden into a period of great expansion driven by the sparkling wine he began to bottle under
the New Almaden label (“sparkling wine” because technically only the Champagne region of France produces champagne). Masson continued to build what would become his remarkable dynasty of sparkling wine and “selling no wine before its time.” In 1930 he traded the New Almaden vineyards for a 26,000-acre ranch farther south, near Gilroy, California, where he believed the
terroir
was more suited to champagne grapes.

During the next decade, Almaden lost its way. A bank took over the property, selling it in 1941 to a wealthy San Francisco businessman and remarkably extravagant bon vivant, Louis Benoist. At the time that Benoist purchased Almaden, all that he knew about wine was he liked to drink it. And all that anyone seemed to know of him was that he was the president of something called the Lawrence Warehouse Company and he liked the good life; other than that were the biographical shreds he chose to give.

According to the story of Benoist that Benoist gave a magazine journalist, he was a descendant of French aristocracy. His ancestor, the Chevalier Benoist, who had been the court painter to Louis XIV, emigrated to Canada. As far as Louis Benoist’s explanation for his own rise, chalk it up to hustle, smarts, and luck.

Benoist also nonchalantly told the journalist about the time he and his wife, Katharine, were sailing off the west coast of Mexico on their recently acquired ninety-eight-foot ketch, the
Morning Star
, when his crew of paid hands mutinied, forcing him and his wife to anchor off a little town called Puerto Vallarta. Benoist didn’t explain the cause of his crew’s dispute with the management, but he did say, “That landfall was the luckiest thing that ever happened to us. We found a hotel on the waterfront and liked it so much that I bought it next morning.”

For Benoist, exotic excursions and impulse buys were not
unique. His life, again as he himself described it, was spent mostly traveling about the five homes he had in California, occasionally varied by a trip east or to Mexico in his private plane. When Benoist gave this interview in 1959, he had owned Almaden for nearly two decades, during which time he had dramatically expanded the vineyard’s holdings, moved a mountain to install a swimming pool, and added a helicopter pad to the estate, used for transporting guests and, naturally, himself and Katharine, between San Francisco and Almaden.

Katharine went to great lengths and cost to have Theé’s original house meticulously restored, sparing no cost to maintain the home’s original character. Katharine, or Katey as she preferred, would not hear of leveling the slanted floors. Her beloved Louie’s contribution to the interior design was to decorate the bedrooms, parlor, study, powder room—really, wherever there was a wall—with paintings and photos and drawings of Napoleon Bonaparte, almost as if he were attempting to assure visitors that he was every bit as French as he claimed.

In 1964, Louis and Katharine welcomed to this Almaden estate a guest who was to stay in their home and work at their winery for a few months. What they knew of the young monsieur was that he was a twenty-four-year-old son of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti; this was his first trip to America; and he was recently discharged with honor from the French military, where he had nearly died from spinal meningitis.

When Louis and Katharine greeted Aubert at the San Francisco airport, they insisted he please call them Louie and Katey. Although Aubert’s English was then still sketchy, he understood. He thanked them for coming to get him and for their willingness
to host him. He told “Mrs. and Mrs. Benoist” that it was all so very kind of them. Aubert being Aubert, he decided he would stick with the formal address. Anything less, he felt, would be disrespectful. They tossed his bags in the trunk and were off.

From the moment he laid eyes on California, Aubert was enthralled, always comparing this world to the one he’d left in France. During the two-hour drive south to Almaden, Aubert began taking mental notes for an article he would write for the French wine magazine
La Revue du Vin de France
. He noted they drove on a “classic American highway” that crossed “endless fields of sugar beets and potatoes in exquisite company.” As they pulled farther away from the city and deeper into the rugged, mountainous wine country, he felt he was entering “the middle of the open American West.”

It was early fall, just before the harvest. Driving onto the grounds of the Almaden estate, Aubert marveled at the green vines juxtaposed against the sunburnt hillside. Once inside the Benoists’ home, the wooden screen door having gently slapped closed behind him, Aubert found himself unexpectedly standing on the slanted floors, under the scrutiny of the so many sets of Napoleon eyes; everywhere he looked the General was watching him.

There were several reasons he had come to America. First, convinced that he’d cheated death, Aubert was determined to not squander the second chance he had been given. Visiting the States was on his bucket list. From the time he was a small child and saw the Americans rumble into France and liberate his country, he had always been curious of the place that grew such gritty spirit. America was where the cowboys roamed. It was the home of Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders. Americans had a heart and a passion he greatly admired.