Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World's Greatest Wine (3 page)

As a young man, that was all Monsieur de Villaine aspired to do—to travel, to fall in love, to read and write poetry—to study
and attempt to unlock the wisdom of the great thinkers. Farming vines, the young Aubert de Villaine thought, he would leave that to others.

As he walked through Romanée-St.-Vivant, Monsieur de Villaine paused, gazed in one direction. Then he took a few more steps, paused, and looked in another direction. He removed his hat and scratched his bald head. In the center, there was a pink spot rubbed raw from so much thinking.

Even the professional meteorologists regard forecasting the late summer weather in Burgundy as a fool’s errand. Hail. Rain. Sun. Warm breezes. No breeze. Gentle. Violent. One minute, there is peace; the sun warmly kisses the vines. The next, those storybook clouds turn dark and spit hail that tears through the leaves and pelts and pulverizes the grapes, destroying a whole crop.

In the days to come of this 2010 vintage, Monsieur de Villaine would write in his vineyard journal:

The maturation had not been uniform. The June flowering—the
floraison
—which had filled the air with that sweet, familiar aroma that ever since he was a child he had likened to the scent of honey, had occurred unevenly throughout the vineyard. The fruit on some vines was further along than the fruit on some other vines. Were the least mature grapes mature enough?

Interestingly, in his vineyard journal, the Grand Monsieur made no mention of the evil that had occurred in his most prized vineyard.

Because the Grand Monsieur consistently produced the greatest wine in the world, everyone who knew anything about wine—and the many who pretended to know about wine—rightly considered him the greatest vigneron in the world. Some went so far as to liken him to a Buddha, to a shaman. For only a spiritual teacher, so went the thinking, could summon from the
terroir
such divinely balanced wines. In fact, it was about that time in the fall of 2010 that representatives of the wine magazine
Decanter
had informed Monsieur de Villaine’s representatives in the United States that the magazine wanted to put him on the cover as “Man of the Year.”

His advisers at the Domaine’s esteemed exclusive U.S. distributor, Wilson Daniels, urged him to seize the public relations opportunity. One of the firm’s owners, Jack Daniels, was advising him to go for it. Daniels had nothing at all to do with Jack Daniel’s, the famous American whiskey, yet he had a knack for pouring shots of the kind of American straight talk that Monsieur de Villaine had come to value.

The Grand Monsieur would never forget how Jack had stood by him when the Domaine’s wines were of such poor quality
that they had to be quietly destroyed behind the Wilson Daniels headquarters in St. Helena, California. Jack had stuck by his side, too, when the family tensions threatened to tear apart the Domaine’s reputation and even the Domaine itself.

Still, the Grand Monsieur wasn’t sure about this award and magazine cover business. Grateful as he was, he didn’t want another award. The idea of posing for a cover photograph struck him as immodest and contrary to the Burgundian way. Hoping to entice him, the magazine’s people had pointed out that he would be the first Burgundian to ever receive the honor. Though at that moment he remained undecided, the idea that the
Decanter
exposure would be an opportunity for Burgundy to be honored and recognized so publicly dovetailed nicely with his “World Heritage” campaign.

Since 2008, Monsieur de Villaine had been leading an effort to have the United Nations add the Côte d’Or to its list of protected and cherished international landmarks. The list of some nine hundred sites included wonders such as Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the Athenian Acropolis in Greece, America’s Yellowstone National Park, and a select few wine-growing regions, such as Hungary’s Tokaj area and the Jurisdiction of Saint-Émilion in Bordeaux.

The Grand Monsieur believed the Côte met several of the criteria for World Heritage status, such as being an “exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition” and an “outstanding example of a traditional human settlement and land use.” And how could anyone deny that the Côte d’Or “contained superlative natural phenomena or areas of exceptional natural beauty and aesthetic importance”?

It wasn’t just the wine magazines and the worldwide legions of oenophiles and critics with their allegedly supernatural palates
who regarded Monsieur de Villaine as something akin to the Shaman-Pope and Supreme Professor of wine. Most, if not all, of the world’s top winemakers held the same opinion. Certainly, all of Burgundy’s winemakers, whether they admitted it or lied and denied it, looked to the Domaine with awe and respect.

One of the neighbors to Monsieur de Villaine’s Domaine is the Domaine Georges Mugneret-Gibourg, a winery that itself produces some of the region’s most highly regarded wines. For the better part of a year and a half, I lived across the road from Domaine Georges Mugneret-Gibourg. It was comanaged by Marie-Andrée Mugneret-Gibourg. With her porcelainlike skin, youthful eyes, and pixie-style hair, the middle-age Marie-Andrée could have passed for a university student.

One afternoon while we visited and talked of the Grand Monsieur she spoke as if she indeed had a schoolgirl crush on him. Covering her mouth as if she were sharing a secret, she said, “Monsieur de Villaine. You know, you are very lucky to spend so much time with him and to learn about wine from him.” Then, in a reverential whisper, she told me, “I have only spoken to him once. Learning wine from him, you must realize, this is like learning physics from Einstein.”

Another nearby winery was the Domaine Faiveley, one of Burgundy’s most esteemed and dominant domaines, with vineyard holdings throughout the Côte d’Or. Domaine Faiveley is owned by François Faiveley, whose family had founded a company that had helped build much of the modern railway system throughout France and much of Europe. Even in his early sixties, François was a formidable ox of a man who appeared as if he could hammer a railcar together and lay a few miles of track himself if the need arose.

Not so long ago, when the world-renowned American wine critic Robert Parker, whose point-rating system dramatically
shaped the modern wine market, crossed a line that François felt should not have been crossed, François led a campaign that single-handedly drove the critic out of Burgundy, essentially forever.

When François oversaw his family’s winery, his wines took on his personality. They were famous for being “bold” and “masculine.” Now that the winery was directly managed by his son, Erwan, Domaine Faiveley’s wines had a reputation for being more “ethereal” and having more “finesse.”

One evening, François was hosting a small group of wealthy American collectors at his domaine for a dinner, and as he poured a few of his son’s prized wines, he told the group that he believed the high point of the evening would come when he poured some wines sent over as a gift from Monsieur de Villaine. Upon hearing the unexpected news, Monsieur Faiveley’s guests were unable to restrain themselves. They clapped with delight and began to speculate among themselves which of the Domaine’s wines and which vintage they were about to “experience.” François benevolently nodded and smiled. “All of us in Burgundy aspire to what the Domaine achieves,” he said. “The Domaine is the standard.”

While his guests pretended not to be racing to finish their first pour of the 1999 La Tâche and positioning their glasses for a second, François nursed his first glass as if he were alone. I watched him take a sip, then he raised the glass before his eyes. He rolled the stem between his fingers and gazed over his bifocals into the Pinot. It was if he was pouring himself into the glass.

After a few long moments he turned to me with an apologetic expression on his face, as if to convey he was sorry for having drifted away.

In his gruff rumble of a voice François said: “When I drink this, when I drink the Domaine’s wines, what makes it special for me is I think of my dear friend, Aubert de Villaine. I see his face
and I think of what he has gone through. I know the sacrifices he makes. During that crime against the Domaine, when the police were investigating, and no one knew anything, I never before saw him so distraught. In his face, you could see this was…”

François’s voice trailed off. He turned away and with his massive hand brushed a tear from his cheek.

Unlike the contemporary generations of vignerons who jockey for apprenticeships at the Domaine, Monsieur de Villaine had no degrees in oenology or agricultural engineering from celebrated French universities. Suffice it to say, Monsieur de Villaine could tell a lot from a grape just by looking at it, from considering the skin’s color and thickness. Tasting, he would tell you, was the truest way to know.

He squatted down between rows of vines where he knew the grapes were the least mature. He moved aside a canopy of leaves. He did this as lovingly as a parent might brush aside locks of hair from a small child’s forehead before a good-night kiss.

He plucked off a small bundle of grapes. He held them just so in his cupped hands, and carefully, with his long, slender fingers, he pushed apart the bundle to examine the quality of the interior grapes. He found only a modest and typical amount of moisture. He tugged off a berry, placed it in his mouth. He bit down on it, ever so gently, just enough to release the juice onto his palate, where he could savor it on the back center of his tongue, and deconstruct it, and cross-reference it with his forty years of tasting pre-harvest grapes.

He spit the grape onto his palm for examination. Poked at it. The purple skin mashed with the yellow-orange mush of the insides. The texture was good. The juice was good and sweet.
Romanée-St.-Vivant was ready. If the weather held—and he judged it would—he could give these grapes even a few more days on the vine. For a moment, Monsieur de Villaine felt his hope float like a line cast high above the Loue.

Then he looked in the direction of his most precious vineyard, the most legendary vineyard in the world. It was just on the other side of the dirt road, marked by a tall concrete cross. Suddenly, everything he wished to forget came back: the ransom notes, the surveillance cameras, the midnight sting operation in the cemetery in Chambolle-Musigny—the murdered vines.

He felt uncertain and sick—and overwhelmed by an emotion he seemed incapable of—anger.

He wondered why God had betrayed him.

The Grand Monsieur walked toward the cross.

The Lord works in mysterious ways
, he told himself.

Have faith. Believe.