Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World's Greatest Wine (19 page)

Maybe the endgame was something else entirely.

Now, not only was just about everyone a suspect, it seemed anything was possible.

With less than twenty-four hours to prepare, Commander Millet decided there was no way for his team to put into place the necessary strategy and logistics around Romanée-Conti, around Vosne, to ensure they successfully apprehended the bad guys and ended entirely whatever it was that was happening. At least not without the risk of tipping their hand. Millet figured the sting would require at least three dozen officers and hours of careful setup. So far the bad guys had been clever and careful, and the police didn’t know where the criminals had their eyes and ears.

Millet wanted to try to buy more time and better circumstances. Rather than hastily attempt to arrange a sting and risk compromising their investigation and losing the criminals and the vineyard, now two vineyards, and maybe even risk losing lives, rather than deliver the money they would deliver a note.

Monsieur de Villaine was away on business. He had been reluctant to leave, but the police insisted. They advised that it would be best if he generally stuck to his routines and appointments, and continued to do whatever he would normally have done.

In the Grand Monsieur’s absence, it was decided that Jean-Charles would write the letter. The fact that Monsieur de Villaine was away was actually helpful in establishing the credibility of the note.

The note said that Monsieur de Villaine was prepared to pay the million euros, but he didn’t have that kind of cash on hand and would have to secure the clearance of representatives of the two families who owned the Domaine. The letter would beg for a bit more time, a few days was all that was required. Jean-Charles petitioned for patience and asked the perpetrator to call him on his cell phone with the time and location of the drop-off.

The next evening, promptly at midnight, Jean-Charles drove his Mercedes sedan out to the vineyard with Commander Millet hiding on the floor in the backseat. The two confirmed dead vines that had been removed were in the southwest corner of Romanée-Conti. Jean Charles took the road out of Vosne that ran along the south wall of the vineyard. The road twisted up the hill about one hundred yards and dead-ended at the woods.

As Jean-Charles and Millet had planned, when they reached the point in the road for the drop-off, Jean-Charles put the car in park and got out, leaving the car running. He walked around the
car into the vineyard. He put the note at the base of a vine next to holes in the earth. There were no lights in the vineyards. Jean-Charles was reminded just how dark it can be out there.

Without lingering, he returned to the car and headed west on the road, up to the top of the hillside. Without going especially fast or slow, Jean-Charles reached the top of the hill and turned around. Descending the hill, the light from his Mercedes flashed over the spot where only minutes ago Jean-Charles had put the note. He told Millet he wasn’t going to believe this, but the note was already gone. Jean-Charles was certain of it.

T
hirty-four-year-old Aubert de Villaine was driving as fast as he could toward Paris. In the passenger seat, his father, Henri, sat in a catatonic-like state, staring at the road straight ahead but seeing nothing at all. As much grief as Aubert was feeling, all he could think about was his father. Aubert knew Henri’s heart was twisting. He didn’t know what to say to his father. He wasn’t sure there was anything that could be said.

And so, for the entire drive from Vosne to Paris neither of them spoke more than a few sentences. There was that kind of profound, pregnant silence that makes a long ride even longer. The rhythmic, soft thump-thumping sound of car tires over the cracks in the road and the soft whistle of the air current around the car became a kind of torture, all of it a maddening reminder of how far they had left to go.

The 1970s had started off wonderfully for Aubert: He and his wife were expecting a child. After his 1965 trip to America, he returned several times. In 1969, through the Wildman family, he met Pamela Fairbanks. One of Wildman’s nieces and Pamela had gone to boarding school together. The Wildmans and mutual
friends within the wine world had long been telling Pamela and Aubert that they should meet, that they would make a good match. Pamela was from Pasadena, California, the great granddaughter of Charles Fairbanks, who had served as a U.S. senator from Indiana and as vice president to Theodore Roosevelt, a man Aubert greatly admired. Pamela knew wine. She also knew France, very well, and loved it. She had spent her college years at the Sorbonne.

In 1969, Pamela and Aubert found themselves in New York at the same time. Aubert invited her on a date. One of the first things he noticed about Pamela was her smile and her laugh. Her spirit was light, such that it lifted his own. Explaining to Pamela that his mother was Russian, he took Pamela to dinner at the Russian Tea Room.

When Aubert came to pick her up for their date, Pamela was staying with an aunt. The minute Pamela opened the door and saw Aubert, she felt as if she’d always known him. As they walked the city together, she thought Aubert cut a very dashing figure. In an observation that would foreshadow their lives together, she also found it difficult to match his pace. She would always look back on her first dates with Aubert and remember herself thinking,
I don’t know where this young man is going, but I sure would like to go with him
.

During their time together in New York and the many dates that followed—she would visit him in France and he would travel to America—Pamela was struck by his incredible
simplicité
and yet at the same time his
très cultivé
sensibilities. She quickly saw that his outwardly reserved façade was precisely that, a necessary defensive mechanism. The real Aubert was tender and loving. They married in 1971 in a Catholic wedding, but also in a civil union officiated by the mayor of Vosne-Romanée, Jeanine Gros.
Vosne being Vosne, Jeanine also happened to be the matriarch of the highly regarded Domaine Gros.

Pamela welcomed the move to rural Burgundy. She understood full well that Aubert was in line to become codirector of the Domaine, and she understood what that would entail. She was fully supportive, as long as he kept some distance and reserved time at home, just as his father and grandfather had done, for the two of them and for the family they looked forward to having.

The home in Bouzeron, she had agreed, would be a perfect place to raise children. Together, the newlyweds envisioned, they would raise their own vines and one day pass them on to their children. But what had started off as the very best news of incipient glad tidings ended in the stunning loss of miscarriage. Painful as it was, Aubert and Pamela held hands and reassured one another that these things happen. They would simply try again.

Meanwhile, together they planted a garden at their home in Bouzeron. They tended their
enfant
vines and expanded that family by acquiring more parcels around their home. Together, as Domaine A&P de Villaine, in 1973, they celebrated a different kind of firstborn, their first vintage, a Bouzeron Aligoté. Fittingly, the Aligoté is a white grape varietal that flourishes in trying circumstances where other varietals would not succeed, often at the bottom of the slope, where it can be very cold.

Aubert never imagined his circumstances would become more challenging. However, he had not yet reached the bottom of his slope. There was horrific news about Jean in Paris.

It happened in 1973. By then, Aubert had been working at the Domaine for eight years. During that time, he apprenticed in the
cuverie
under André Noblet, and he learned the management of the business from Monsieur Leroy and his own father, Henri.

Earlier that day, before Aubert and his father began their unexpected trip, they had arrived at the Domaine and were met by Madame Clin. She had stayed on after Monsieur Clin retired. The look on her face was unlike anything Aubert had ever seen in Madame Clin. Something was very wrong.

“Monsieur de Villaine,” she had said to Henri, “you must call your daughter, Christine. Something has happened to Jean.”

Christine, who was then twenty-three years old and Aubert’s youngest sibling, shared an apartment in Paris with Aubert’s youngest brother, twenty-eight-year-old Jean.

Henri dashed to the phone. Aubert watched his father listen to Christine and observed his father wither.

Christine informed their father that Jean was in the hospital. The night before, she and Jean had gone to a party at a friend’s flat. Jean had complained of a headache and left early. On the way home, he collapsed. The doctors weren’t sure, but the prevailing theory, and the one that would prove to be accurate, was that Jean had suffered an aneurysm.

Henri asked his daughter how serious it was.

“Papa,” she said, “you need to come very quickly. They are doing what they can to keep him alive until you and Mama get here.”

Aubert’s mother, Hélène, and his sister, Marie-Hélène, traveled from their home in Moulins and met them at the hospital. Aubert’s brother Patrick and their other sister, Cecile, would gather with the family later. The family joined around Jean’s bed, where he was hooked to machines that showed a live heart but a dead mind.

Each of those there had time to be alone with Jean, to
kneel next to him and to pray, and to weep. Jean was very dear to Aubert. They were very close. Aubert admired Jean’s sense of humor. They shared a love of poetry. Whenever the family would gather, everyone knew that Aubert and Jean inevitably would end up off together.

The medical staff unhooked Jean from the machines and he was gone.

While Aubert’s mother would struggle for years to recover from her son’s death, Aubert proved emotionally resilient. He took very seriously the Catholic teachings that assured him that he and Jean, and the child Aubert and Pamela had never met, would see one another in heaven. There, perhaps, as Aubert had planned, Jean would become the godfather to Aubert and Pamela’s unborn child.

Over the next few years of the 1970s, very few people would know that Aubert and Pamela were enduring a second miscarriage, then a third, followed by the resigned acceptance that they would never have children of their own.

It would have been understandable if after three miscarriages Pamela and Aubert had felt more space between them. Instead, their bond intensified. They found family in each other. In this rocky
terroir
of life that God had provided, Aubert and Pamela tended to each other. Their love, like Aubert’s faith, grew stronger.

It was about a year after Jean’s death that the new era of the Domaine began. In 1974, Henri Leroy and Henri de Villaine left their roles as codirectors. It had been in the planning for quite some time. More and more, Leroy and de Villaine had been giving additional responsibilities to Lalou and Aubert. They would be the ones to inspect the account books. They would be the ones to host the buyers and guests who visited the Domaine. If they
chose to, they had been empowered to hire new distributors—they had traveled around the world together to speak with potential distribution partners.

There was no ceremony, no party to commemorate the historic changeover. Aubert’s father did not pass along any advice. Whatever wisdom Henri had to give, Aubert already had received. The one bit of advice Herni gave Aubert that Aubert often had found himself remembering was “
Le mieux est souvent l’ennemi du bien
.” The drive to make something perfect often ruins the good you have, or, as the Americans say, Leave well enough alone.

What there was to note the Domaine’s new appointments was perfunctory. At the annual meeting of the two families, all of the stakeholders gathered in the Domaine as they did every December. The first order of business was to approve the new codirectors. Someone announced what everyone already knew, that the proposed successors were Lalou and Aubert. The stakeholders were asked to approve of the appointments by a majority vote. Along came the question, “All those in favor?” Every hand went up. That was that.

The change, and how it unfolded, in the wake of Jean’s death, and while Aubert and Pamela privately endured their heartache, was the first time that Aubert fully comprehended one of the things his grandfather and father both had always said:

“The domaine is bigger than any one person or any one family. We will come and go, but the Domaine will live on. We are part of its history only for a short time. The Domaine is the Domaine.”

As the new codirector of the Domaine, Aubert was about to make some of his first contributions to that history, by participating in an unprecedented wine-tasting competition, and with the
release of his early vintages of DRC wines. Hard but valuable lessons would be learned.

One of the very first wine shops to carry Aubert and Pamela’s first vintage of Domaine A&P Bouzeron Aligoté was a relatively new
magasin de vin
in Paris owned by a clever and charismatic British chap by the name of Steven Spurrier. Born into English privilege, from the time he was a small boy Spurrier was fascinated by wine. As a child he would rearrange the bottles in his parents’ cellar over and over again, obsessing over the labels the way some American kids do with baseball cards.

Spurrier’s love of wine drew him to Burgundy, where, in the early 1970s, he and his American wife, Bella, bought a home and became part of a clique of friends who would rise to be some of the most influential figures in Burgundy and in the wine world at large. Regulars included Jacques and Rosalind Seysses of Domaine Dujac; Aubert and Pamela; and recently transplanted Americans Becky and Bart Wasserman. (In a matter of years, Becky would launch an export business in Beaune and become something akin to the Godmother of Burgundy, but at that point, the couple were merely avid collectors and great company.)

In April 1971, Spurrier purchased an established but languishing Parisian wine shop, Caves de la Madeleine. Named after a nearby church, it was in a tiny arcade, the Cité Berryer, in a posh pocket between the first and eighth arrondissements. Eighteen months later, the shop next door became available and Spurrier picked that up, too.

Fluent in French and English and savvy, he converted the former locksmith shop into the Académie du Vin, which would offer wine education classes to his well-heeled English-speaking
clientele. Spurrier had the expertise. If there was any doubt of that, right around that time, the
Revue du Vin de France
was giving a test for sommeliers; Spurrier waltzed in unscheduled, talked his way in, and was the only person to score a perfect 100 on the written exam. The moderator asked him to stay for the tasting component, but Spurrier declined, saying he had just wanted to see how he would fare on the written portion.

In 1976, with the Northern California wine scene coming alive, Spurrier hatched a plan to stage a tasting that would compare some of the finest wines of France with the some of the best American wines. He would swear that his intention was to host a comparison rather than a contest. He figured what better way to commemorate America’s revolutionary independence (and not to mention market his relatively new business to the English-speaking wine world) than by gathering a knowledgeable panel and, among friends, assess the state of things. It was not, he would say again and again, his intent to give the revolutionary upstart winemakers in California a refined battlefield on which to engage the ancient establishment of French vignerons.