Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World's Greatest Wine (28 page)

Then something else unexpected happened.

In the summer of 2010, while he was being held in the Dijon prison awaiting trial, Jacques Soltys fashioned some prison clothing into a rope and hanged himself. In the wake of his father’s death, Cedric was the only one left to face trial and whatever sentence might now be deemed appropriate to send the desired message.

W
ith each tick of the clock closer to 10 a.m., the New York restaurant, A Voce, filled with more of the guests who had been invited to taste the greatest, rarest, most expensive wine in the world.

All well-heeled types, they breezed in, unwound their scarves, shed their overcoats, shook hands and did the double-cheek kiss thing. Sommeliers, critics, a handful of wealthy collectors, top wholesalers, that sort. As they waited for the affair to begin, many of them looked around the room, at least in part to see who else the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti had deemed worthy to receive an invitation. The annual “unveiling” of the Domaine’s newest vintage is one of most exclusive events in the world of wine. In the United States, each year, there are only two: one in San Francisco and one in New York. I had been invited to attend the New York unveiling on March 7, 2013. This was the release of the 2010 vintage, the vintage of the crime.

A Voce is on the third floor of a high-rise on Columbus Circle, at the southern edge of Central Park. The restaurant is a
slick place of black marble floors, gold-colored walls and curtains, with a wide-open floor plan. The vibe of a 1940s jazz club. Huge windows provide a glorious view of the park, which on that spring day wasn’t quite so glorious. The sky was gray. The weather was cold.

A Voce’s main dining area is a sunken floor, about three steps below the perimeter of the room. Stationed at each of the three stairwells to the dining area was a black-tied usher to keep guests from prematurely descending the stairs and disrupting the preparations that were silently under way. Over at the far end of the sunken dining room, just in front of the massive windows, were a few long tables covered in white tablecloths. On the tables were bottles of the 2010s. The dining room was filled with maybe twenty round, white-clothed tables, each with eight place settings of eight wineglasses, one for each of the Domaine’s
grands crus
. They were arranged in an arc. A handful of staff members moved from table to table oh so carefully pouring the Domaine’s wines. I overheard someone whisper to one of them, “Nobody spills here.”

The Grand Monsieur, dressed in a tweed blazer and thin wool tie, moved about the room for a bit. At once, he looked entirely at ease and positively uncomfortable. He mingled about the room saying hello to old friends and greeting guests. He knew better than anyone that just as everyone there wanted a taste of the Domaine’s wines, everyone wanted to say hello to Monsieur Aubert de Villaine, if for no other reason than to be able to say they shook his hand. This sort of thing came with the job.

Promptly at 10 a.m., Monsieur de Villaine approached one of the stairwells and tried to enter the dining room, when he was stopped by one of the guardian-ushers.

“I’m sorry, sir. I can’t let you enter until the tasting begins.”

Monsieur de Villaine smiled. He gently touched the usher’s shoulder and leaned into his ear. In the Grand Monsieur’s quiet way, in his gravelly whisper of a voice, he said, “It’s okay, I am the winemaker.”

He went to the round table closest to the tables covered in the bottles of his wines, where he was joined moments later by Jack Daniels of Wilson Daniels. Jack, who can have a booming voice when he wants one, politely summoned everyone to their seats. People trickled into the dining area as reverentially as they were entering a prayer service and took seats wherever they were available.

Jack thanked everyone for coming and said how honored he and Wilson Daniels were to once again be working with the Domaine on this, their thirty-fourth release together. He then introduced Monsieur de Villaine, calling him an “aristocrat.” The Grand Monsieur stood. With his hands clasped just so, he turned toward Jack, cocked an eyebrow and said, “I am a vigneron.”

Monsieur de Villaine reiterated his gratitude to everyone for attending and then talked about the story of this vintage.

He talked about the challenges the weather had presented. He talked about when the harvest began, September 22, 2010, and ended, October 5. He said every vintage presents its challenges.

This vintage, he said, “we struggled with anguish and despair and moments of hope.”

He made no mention of the crime.

He invited everyone to taste the wines, encouraging them to take their time. To let the wines breathe a bit. He said that after everyone was finished, in a little while, they would talk about the wines.

Everyone sat and stared at him, clearly waiting to take their cue from him.

Monsieur de Villaine said, “Well,
bon
. I’ve said enough. Let’s taste and let the wines speak for themselves.”

Although only two of the vines of Romanée-Conti were fatally poisoned, the fact that 728 were drilled with holes was quite serious, and for the Domaine, angst-inducing. Vines, especially Pinot vines, are a vulnerable plant. Drilling a vine, as with most any plant that would be pierced through by a metal drill bit, can traumatize the vine and quite possibly kill it. As Henri Roch, the Domaine’s co-
gérant
, said when he was interviewed by police, he was very concerned by the attack because just the drilling of the vines was “enough to deteriorate them.”

What sort of impact that trauma would have on the fruit, and in turn on the vines, Monsieur de Villaine and his staff had no way of knowing until the fruit was picked and the wine was ready; after it was aged and was bottled over three years. And finally, when it was poured in the glass and drunk.

Naturally, the wines would not have made it this far if the Grand Monsieur had sensed any reason to withhold them, but given the public scrutiny, with all of the critics, he could never know how they would react, or what they might taste that he did not. The way he put it that day, unveiling tastings like this one are “always extremely interesting and full of information for the vigneron.” The unveiling is the true test.

Every one of the glasses now sitting before us was filled not just with wine, but with all of those centuries of history—the monks, the prince, his grandfather and father, the Grand Monsieur’s own life and legacy. But what of the Soltyses?

“Ghost in a glass.” That’s how Monsieur de Villaine’s nephew, Pierre de Benoist, talks about wine. Pierre was the one the Grand
Monsieur had wooed to run his own domaine in Bouzeron. He liked to say that wine was not grapes, but rather “the ghost of the grapes.” Pierre was very much like his uncle that way, and in just about every other way. Like the young Aubert, Pierre, who was the youngest of Hélène-Marie’s two sons, grew up in the vines and had wanted nothing to do with them. His parents’ estate was in Sancerre.

Part of Pierre’s resistance to becoming a vigneron was that he had grown up knowing how hard he and his family worked in their parcels of Château du Nozay, but because their vines were not in the highest classification of appellation, the Benoists’ wines were considered lesser. Meanwhile, Pierre felt vignerons nearby cut corners on their wines, put quantity and profit over quality, and yet their wines received more prestige, purely because of where the vines grew. Pierre thought it was all terribly unfair. So he had left Sancerre and gone off to law school in Paris. That is where he was when his uncle called him in 1998 and asked if he would come and run Domaine A&P in Bouzeron.

After telling his uncle no several times, Pierre received a call from his great-uncle, Aubert’s father, Henri, who said to him, “Please, before you make this final decision, at least come and taste the wines.” So in the spring of 1999, Pierre took the train from Paris. He toured the vines and the winery, and he tasted the most recent vintage still in barrel. The minute he drank the wines he reconsidered everything he had said, and his future.

In that moment, in that taste, he tasted home. Not home in the sense of place, but in terms of where he felt he belonged existentially. Regardless of what he had been telling himself, no matter how much fun he was having in Paris, that crisp Aligoté wine reminded him that the bottom of his shoes, and the bottom of his heart, would always be covered in the dirt of the vineyards;
that he was a vigneron and the vines was where he belonged. In 2000, he accepted his uncle’s offer and moved from Paris to Burgundy and went to work for A&P.

One afternoon when I visited with Pierre in Bouzeron, I found him out in the vines, stroking the canopies and talking to the plants in a loving voice. I couldn’t bring myself to disturb this Vine Whisperer. When he noticed me standing a few feet away, he smiled a smile like he knew he’d been caught in a secret.

“You talk to the vines?” I said.

“Always,” he answered. “They like it.”

He led me to his vintage Citroën Charleston. It was filthy inside and out. Pierre knocked some plastic water bottles and a pair of muddied boots off the tattered passenger seat and told me to get in. He took me to the winery, next to his uncle Aubert and aunt Pamela’s home. As he opened some of his 2007 Domaine A&P Aligoté, Pierre explained to me that it was priced well under thirty dollars. Any wine with Aubert de Villaine’s name attached, from his own vines, which he oversaw and approved, could easily sell for at least double or triple that amount, but the Grand Monsieur believed it was important to price his wines such that anyone who wanted to taste a fine Burgundy, made by a vigneron, could do so.

As we drank the wines that he and his uncle Aubert had vinified, Pierre told me, “People say that wine is grapes in a glass, but I have a different view. The grapes are gone. They are no more. What’s left are the juices, the souls of the grapes, the ghosts of the grapes. These souls, these ghosts, these are what we drink; their spirit infuses our own.”

It was this sort of poetry and tenderness and thoughtfulness from Pierre that had people inside and outside the family
wondering if he might make the best successor to Monsieur de Villaine at the Domaine.

The anointed heir apparent, Bertrand de Villaine, was quite a different personality. About the same age as Pierre, Bertrand was not raised in the vines. He first got the idea of going to work for the Domaine while he was on a job interview in Beaune. He was interviewing for a position with a security company in the late 1990s. He mentioned that he was part of the family that owned the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. The person looked at him and said, “Well, why are you here? When you have the greatest domaine in the world, you should be there.”

Within weeks, he wrote to Aubert and asked him if he could come to work at the Domaine. This was in 2000, right when Pierre was starting in Bouzeron. To demonstrate his serious commitment, Bertrand enrolled in viticulture classes and began extensive course work in oenology. Monsieur de Villaine took on Bertrand at the DRC in 2008, paying him the lowest salary of anyone on the staff and starting him at the very bottom, sweeping the floors and picking the grapes. Meanwhile, Bertrand took viticulture classes at the university in Dijon.

Bertrand is married with five children; in order to get by on his Domaine salary, his wife sold off one of her small handful of eyeglass shops.

As the family began to look for a successor to the Grand Monsieur, everyone at the Domaine knew that according to the corporation’s bylaws and out of fairness, it was time for the other branch of the de Villaines to have a representative selected as co-
gérant
. Thus far, after Edmond, it had been his son, Henri, and then his son, Aubert, who served as co-
gérant
for the de Villaines. But Aubert’s father, Henri, had a brother, Jean, and Jean
had two sons, and they had several sons of their own, and now it was time for someone from Jean’s side.

Bertrand was the only one to step forward, and so he had preference. In fact, at a December family shareholder meeting, his candidacy was approved. Yet within the family of the Domaine, there has been some concern about whether Bertrand is the right choice. Pierre is almost Aubert incarnate. He prefers to be in the vines and with his crew. He is a vigneron in the most spiritual sense of the word, believing in the soul and ghosts of grapes.

Bertrand is more of the backslapping manager who is looking toward a future of alternative distribution systems and maximizing profits. One of the first things Bertrand asked me when we met, picking grapes in La Tâche, was if I had seen
The Hangover
, that buddy comedy movie about some guys on a bachelor-party adventure in Las Vegas. After we finished picking that morning, Bertrand pointed to the corner office, overlooking the vines that belonged to Aubert, and said, “That’s where I will be.”

There is no doubt that Bertrand views the Domaine’s wines as a sacred family legacy; there is also no doubt that he also views them as an underpriced luxury good. The question is, which does he believe more strongly? One afternoon, Bertrand told me, “It must be hard for Aubert.” With great empathy and respect, he said “When he looks at me, he sees an end for him.”

Perhaps, but the Grand Monsieur is concerned about much more than his own future. “If you make a bad decision on a harvest,” he told me as we had a lunch and drank a 2007 Romanée-St.-Vivant, “you have one bad vintage. If you make the incorrect decision on a director, you maybe have decades of bad vintages.”