Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World's Greatest Wine (10 page)

Although she and her family still owned half of the Domaine, Lalou was effectively excommunicated from the DRC. The lingering perception was that she was quite unhappy about how
she had been treated. Over the years she had talked openly about how disappointed, meaning offended, she was that she had not been invited to taste the new vintages. Business moves she had made in the late 1980s only lent credence to the speculation that she was obsessed with eclipsing the DRC and establishing her domaine as the dominant winery in Burgundy.

In 1988, she had purchased the domaine just on the opposite side of Vosne from the DRC, Domaine Charles Nöellat. She bought up parcels in the best
climats
around Vosne—Le Richebourg, Romanée-St-Vivant—and she set about producing wines that directly competed with the DRC.

Often in Burgundy, many producers own parcels of vines within the same vineyard. In those situations where Lalou now had vines in the same vineyards as the DRC, according to some of the world’s most respected wine critics, certain vintages of Leroy wines were judged to be better than the wines of the DRC. From reading the wine critics, you got the sense that all it would take was a series of underwhelming DRC vintages for Lalou to achieve her wish, and the Domaine Leroy would be universally viewed as the top domaine in Burgundy.

Monsieur de Villaine was aware. He was aware, too, that Lalou was of the mind that her daughter, Perrine, would make an excellent codirector of the DRC. None of this troubled him. Just as pouring wine into a glass and leaving it be, giving it time to breathe, often allows the wine to develop its identity and fulfill its potential, in the Grand Monsieur’s time apart from Lalou, left alone to breathe in his own space, he had grown into his role and found peace. He had reached the point long ago where passing the Domaine Leroy no longer made him nauseated. When he and Lalou were at the same wine-related events, as they sometimes were, they greeted one another with smiles and civility.

Running any family business is challenging. Running a family business owned by two families is all the more so. Running the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and at times appeasing two families had been more than he was sure he could withstand. While the Grand Monsieur now was in good spirits, Lalou had nearly broken him.

In the Renault wagon Aubert made a thirty-minute drive on the highway to a point south of Beaune, the ancient wine capital of Burgundy. He negotiated another half hour’s worth of winding back roads through woods and cow pastures, until he came upon the village of Bouzeron.

Bouzeron was even smaller than Vosne-Romanée and without any of Vosne’s aura of princely aristocracy. At Bouzeron’s main intersection, really the hamlet’s only intersection, was the town’s ancient and defunct public urinal. Just before that, Monsieur de Villaine turned left toward a stone archway and a black wrought-iron fence. In what looked like handwriting penned in steel wire was written “Domaine A&P de Villaine.”

Bouzeron’s simplicity was one of the things that had drawn Monsieur Aubert de Villaine to the village five decades earlier. Its simplicity and its distance from Vosne and the Domaine. Monsieur de Villaine believed it was important for him to have a life removed from the Domaine. The drive was sometimes a nuisance, but it provided both a real and a psychological buffer, enabling him to drive into and away from the world of the Domaine. Plus, Bouzeron had splendid if underrated vineyards of its own, wholly unlike those in Vosne-Romanée.

The vineyards in Bouzeron had long been considered to have been the equivalent of fixer-uppers when he arrived. The
Hoboken to Burgundy’s Manhattan. That was just fine with Monsieur de Villaine. From the moment he’d seen the landscape, felt it, squeezed the soil between his fingers, the young Grand Monsieur sensed their potential and the freedom they would afford him.

In Bouzeron there were no expectations. He would be free to discover the
terroir
in his own way. There were no pressures other than those he chose to impose on himself. All in all, Monsieur de Villaine had quickly concluded that Bouzeron was the perfect place for him to raise his own
enfant
vines, and for him and Pamela to raise their own
enfants
, the children they so desperately hoped for.

Monsieur de Villaine got out of his car, pushed open the gates by hand, got back in his Renault, and drove through. He parked in a stone barn just inside and to the left of the gates. Two large sheepdogs, Sibelle and Ethan, shaggy like giant mop ends, gathered around him as he walked to the steps of his stone home, where the windows glowed yellow warmth.

Immediately inside the front door, he found Pamela preparing dinner. When they’d first met, she couldn’t make toast. Once, back in America, when Pamela had been briefly put in charge of a grill, she nearly set a wooden porch on fire. In Burgundy, she developed into a fine cook. She’d found a group of friends—one in particular, another American expat—who taught her to cook and, as a gift, given Pamela lessons with a chef.

Monsieur de Villaine hung his jacket and hat on a rack just inside the door and approached a stack of mail. Those days he was eager for correspondence regarding the Côte d’Or’s candidacy for World Heritage Site status. The program is run by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization
(UNESCO). Such a designation means a site is one of the most significant treasures in the world. UNESCO had already recognized French landmarks such as Versailles, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, and the banks of the Seine. For the previous two years, Monsieur de Villaine had chaired a Burgundian committee to gain World Heritage designation for the Côte d’Or. If Bordeaux’s Saint-Émilion region qualified, Monsieur de Villaine had no doubt that the Côte d’Or met the UNESCO criteria of being an “exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilization which is living”; its vineyards “contained superlative natural phenomena or areas of exceptional natural beauty and aesthetic importance”; and it was one of the “outstanding examples representing major stages of earth’s history, including the record of life, significant on-going geological processes in the development of landforms, or significant geomorphic or physiographic features.”

For a man considering his legacy, to have Burgundy recognized for all that it was, at least to him and his grandfather and father, as a World Heritage Site, well, the Grand Monsieur might be able to retire feeling that he had fulfilled his destiny, because Burgundy would have fulfilled its own.

There was nothing that evening in the mail from UNESCO, but in the pile he saw a cardboard cylinder, the kind an architect might use for blueprints. It was addressed to him and had been delivered by one of France’s overnight delivery services, Colissimo. The ends were capped and thoroughly taped. He opened one end and removed the contents: a small note and large sheet of rolled paper. He spread out the large piece of paper on the table. It was a map drawn on grid paper. Monsieur de Villaine immediately recognized the design. He read the note. It had
been typed on a computer and was without a single typographical error:

He showed it to Pamela, who felt instantly as if some evil had been opened in their home.

That night, Monsieur de Villaine barely slept. The next morning, he called Jean-Charles.

“Jean-Charles,” he said, “this is Aubert.”

Jean-Charles thought that was it was endearing and comical that after twenty years of working together, Monsieur de Villaine still felt the need to identify himself.

“I have received a most bizarre package,” Monsieur de Villaine said.

Jean-Charles listened to his boss explain the map and the markings and then read the note. Jean-Charles noted that as de Villaine read the words, several times the Grand Monsieur gasped and then fell silent, as if reading the note aloud had made it all the more real.

When the Grand Monsieur was finished reading, Jean-Charles asked him what he thought.

“I think,” Monsieur de Villaine said, “it must be some kind of sick joke.”

Jean-Charles reassured Monsieur de Villaine that yes, of course, that was probably what it was, even though Jean-Charles was not fully convinced that was the case himself.

Just to be safe, Monsieur de Villaine instructed Jean-Charles to contact their vineyard manager, the cellar master, and his codirector, and tell them to be at the Domaine early Monday morning.

T
hat Monday morning, January 11, 2010, the senior team of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti gathered in the winery for a closed-door meeting to discuss the threat delivered to the Grand Monsieur’s private residence.

The group was made up of Bernard Noblet, the
chef de cave
; Nicolas Jacob, the
chef de vin
; Jean-Charles Cuvelier, the Domaine’s director and Monsieur de Villaine’s trusted lieutenant; and the co-
gérant
, Henri-Frédéric Roch. Jean-Charles had provided them with a briefing when he had called each of them and asked them to attend, and so as they gathered around a wooden table the mood was somber.

Henri informed his colleagues that he had checked his mailbox at the Domaine before their meeting and found that he, too, had received what appeared to be a very similar package. The men nodded silently as if they were at once processing this new information. They agreed not to open Henri’s package, since undisturbed, if necessary, God forbid, it might be useful to investigators. They turned their attention to Monsieur de Villaine’s opened parcel.

The Grand Monsieur spread the map out flat on the table between them and once again, though this time without any discernible emotion, read the note aloud. When he finished, the group stood in silence looking at one another. Although they knew each other very well and could almost read one another’s minds when it came to performing their tasks at the Domaine, on this unprecedented and potentially troubling matter, no one was quite sure what the others were thinking. They were, after all, an eclectic bunch; each of them had taken a very different path to the Domaine.

Perhaps even more so than Monsieur de Villaine, Bernard Noblet was practically raised at the DRC. In the midst of World War II, with the Germans seizing much of occupied France’s manufacturing workforce to help build their war machines, Bernard’s father, André, a typesetter, was spared thanks to Monsieur Clin, who gave the young man work sweeping the winery’s floors. In time, Monsieur Clin took the broom boy under his wing as an apprentice
chef de cave
, teaching him everything he knew about all of the operations inside the winery, including the pressing of the grapes and the vinification after the harvest, as well as the barreling and then bottling of the wines. André Noblet produced his first vintage in 1952 and continued to do so for the next thirty years.

Bernard’s mother also worked at the DRC. The Domaine’s vineyard management policy holds that each of the DRC’s seven parcels is divided into sections and a caretaker is assigned to each section to maintain it. While Noblet’s father made the wines, his mother had been put in charge of caring for the cultivation of the fruit, maintaining two-thirds of the Romanée-Conti vines.

Growing up, Bernard and his three sisters had helped their mother with the pruning and hedging of Romanée-Conti. In
their off hours, the family cared for their own vines, which they owned a few miles to the south, just outside Nuits-St.-Georges.

As a boy, Bernard had decided he didn’t like vigneron work. It was always either too hot or too cold or too something. In his Catholic vocational high school, instead of oenology classes he had studied mechanics and after graduation took a job a factory in Nuits-St.-Georges that made parts for machinery that bottled and labeled wine. Funny thing was, the more time Bernard spent inside making parts to package wine, the more he realized he missed being a vigneron filling the bottles. He requested to be hired on at the Domaine and was welcomed back as an apprentice to his father.

Now a gangly, pigeon-toed giant in his late fifties, Noblet was shy but friendly enough, unless you were a pretty girl, and then he was perhaps a bit too friendly. Savvy guests who were fortunate enough to secure an appointment for a tasting at the Domaine knew to bring along a pretty girl because in the event that Noblet was the one doing the pouring, a pretty girl, preferably one in a blouse with a plunging neckline, increased the chances of bigger pours all around.

While Bernard learned at his father’s side, the old-fashioned way, Nicolas Jacob represented the best of the modern vignerons. He had graduated from the National School of Agricultural Sciences in Bordeaux with a degree in agricultural engineering, and then from the Institut Jules Guyot in Dijon with a degree in oenology. Making wine was something he had dreamed of doing from the time he was a child.

Like most vignerons of his generation, he went to school to learn the art and the science. And like many of the top students in his program he had applied for a job at the Domaine as a long shot. Nicolas was stunned when Monsieur de Villaine showed
interest in him and when the Grand Monsieur showed up to listen in on his thesis presentation on the dangers of overplanting a vineyard. The theme of his thesis was that a vigneron should never compromise quality for quantity.

Monsieur de Villaine offered the young Nicolas a job to apprentice under the vineyard manager, who would soon be retiring. It wasn’t just Nicolas’s fine academic marks or his regard for quality above all else; there was a gentleness about Nicolas that Monsieur de Villaine believed was necessary to care for the
enfants
.

In less than two years, Nicolas, who was then in his early thirties but looked barely old enough to drive, had ascended to
chef de vin
. He wore his hair in a crew cut and generally emanated a relentlessly by-the-book, clean-cut demeanor such that he appeared to fully understand he was responsible for the most valuable vines on the planet.

Monsieur Roch had come into his position as co-
gérant
by way of controversy and tragic happenstance. When Lalou was barred from the Domaine in 1991, in accordance with the corporation partnership bylaws of the Domaine the Leroys needed to appoint someone to fill her slot.

With a supportive vote of all of the Domaine’s stakeholders at the annual shareholders meeting at the end of 1991, the Leroys elevated one of Lalou’s nephews—one of Pauline Roch’s two sons, Charles. Only months after he assumed the role, Charles was killed in an automobile accident, and Henri Roch took his older brother’s place. Henri was now in his late forties with a gray, stringy ponytail and a goatee. His everyday sense of style was tie-dyed shirts, leather necklaces, and Converse Chuck Taylors. Henri was honored to take a groovy ride in the role of very deferential co-
gérant
to Monsieur de Villaine.

Jean-Charles was perhaps the least likely of them all to be standing in that room. Beyond the fact that he was born in the Burgundian village of Curgy and was raised to appreciate a good
vin
, the Cuvelier family had no ties to the culture of vignerons. Jean-Charles’s father was a laborer. His mother was a teacher. In his youth, Jean-Charles was a skilled enough rugby player that he had reason to think he might achieve his dreams of playing the sport professionally. His hopes were shattered along with his tibia in a rugby match.

With encouragement from his mother—she thought Jean-Charles was very good at coaching the children in the local rugby league—he became a teacher. For the better part of twenty years he taught in the big city of Dijon, ten miles north of Vosne. At the Collège Le Parc, he worked with at-risk students. Because of his working-class background he felt a kinship with the tough, defiant kids. The especially hard cases that intimidated other teachers didn’t intimidate Jean-Charles.

Vigilant for ways to connect with his students, to get them interested in school and show them it mattered in their lives, in 1985 Jean-Charles turned to computers. He had an idea that these new machines and those who knew how to operate them would shape the future. He thought computers might give his kids a shot at earning a living. Never thinking how computers might change his life, Jean-Charles learned everything he could and worked the school system to install computers in his classroom. The computers indeed proved to be an engaging tool. As he gained more and more training to pass along to his students, he became something of a computer programming expert.

It led to interesting side work. Jean Charles’s brother-in-law and sister-in-law worked in the wine auction business; they knew Jacques Seysses was looking for someone to help the Domaine
Dujac modernize its office administration. In 1991, Jacques hired Jean-Charles to install computers at Domaine Dujac. While Jean-Charles was there, training the staff how to keep their records of the harvest yields, profit-and-loss statements, and orders on the computers, he mentioned to Jacques that it was his dream to taste the wines of the Domaine. The two men hit it off, and by way of an additional thank-you, Jacques asked his dear friend Aubert if he would welcome Jean-Charles for a tasting.

A few weeks later, Jean-Charles was invited to bring a few friends to the Domaine. He arrived at the red gates of the DRC with a handful of his old rugby teammates. During their playing days, they could be brutal on the field, as evidenced by Jean-Charles’s snapped tibia, but off the field his teammates had a very civilized love of fine wine. Jean-Charles could hardly believe the experience Aubert and Bernard Noblet gave them.

They started off in the cellar tasting the 1990 vintage, still in barrel. Bernard then opened a bottle of 1970 Grands Échézeaux, then a bottle of the ’64. Then Aubert gave a nod, and Jean-Charles and his pals looked at one another in astonishment as Bernard filled their glasses with a 1975 Romanée-Conti! And then the 1983 Montrachet! Jean-Charles still had the wonderful finish of the Montrachet in his throat a few weeks later, in January 1992, when he answered a call from Monsieur de Villaine, who said he had an unusual request.

The Grand Monsieur wanted to know if Jean-Charles could build him a robot of the Prince de Conti. Every year, in January, Vosne-Romanée hosts a village-wide feast of St. Vincent, the patron saint of wine. Many of the villages hold a similar festival to help raise money for a fund that helps support injured and retired vignerons. Monsieur de Villaine thought it would be entertaining for the children if there were a robotically powered, life-size, talking Prince de Conti.

Jean-Charles had to restrain himself from laughing. He very politely explained to Monsieur de Villaine that his request was as unrealistic as it was thoughtful. Jean-Charles explained that engineering the mechanical man was a bit beyond his abilities—a bit, as in impossible—never mind the fact that he would have only about a week to build the thing. The Grand Monsieur figured as much, but he thought he would ask.

A few weeks later, Jean-Charles received another call from Monsieur de Villaine. After hearing from Jacques how well things were going with the computers at Domaine Dujac, Monsieur de Villaine now wanted to modernize his office system, too. In the early months of 1992, Jean-Charles wired up the Domaine and persuaded the very reluctant secretaries that there was nothing to fear in these twentieth-century devices.

Jean-Charles learned that the Domaine was changing in other ways, too. He’d heard that Monsieur de Villaine’s co-
gérant
, Madame Leroy, had recently left, or rather had been made to leave, the Domaine. Although he had a new co-
gérant
in Henri Roch, Monsieur de Villaine’s workload was increasing and he needed an assistant, someone reliable, someone who would always be there to help him and the Domaine stay organized. Jean-Charles asked Monsieur de Villaine if perhaps he was right for the job. Monsieur de Villaine thought he was.

Now—gathered with the Grand Monsieur and his colleagues around the strange note and map—Jean-Charles was in his late forties and two decades beyond his rugby-playing prime. He still had the husky, squat physique of a baller. The bifocals dangling from a string around his neck hinted at his professorial past. He was widely recognized as the gatekeeper not only for Monsieur de Villaine, but for the Domaine itself. If you wanted to request a visit to the Domaine; if you wanted to request that Monsieur de
Villaine attend an event; if you wanted to petition the Domaine to donate a bottle of wine for a charity auction; if you wanted to try to get on the exclusive approved list of private buyers or retailers, you went through Jean-Charles. Those who worked closely with Jean-Charles sometimes jokingly addressed him as “Dr. No.”

After Monsieur de Villaine finished reading the note, the men around him took turns contemplatively rubbing their chins and leaning over the map. Jean-Charles raised and then lowered his bifocals, and then raised and then lowered them again. They all commented on how meticulously crafted the map was.

Sketched on the graph paper it was almost exactly to scale of the vineyard, and what’s more, every single one of Romanée-Conti’s twenty thousand vines was represented. One of the men remarked that not even the Domaine itself had a map this detailed. Whoever had done this had spent a great deal of time studying the vineyard. It would seem there was also a high probability that whoever it was had spent a great deal of time
in
the vineyard.

Beyond that, none of them said much of anything. They waited for the Grand Monsieur to comment first. Monsieur de Villaine said that upon initial read the note indeed seemed menacing, especially when combined with the map, but when you considered what was really being said in the note, there was nothing much at all. There was no clear threat and so what was there to be afraid of? Monsieur de Villaine made clear he didn’t see any point in alerting the authorities, because there was nothing to alert them about. He reiterated his opinion that it was a cruel hoax. To what end he wasn’t sure, nor did he care. As was often the case, his staff deferred to his instinct and agreed.

It was settled then. There was nothing to worry about. They would all get on with their day and get on with the business of 2010. In the unlikely event there really was another letter to
come, well, they would deal with it then. And so it was business as usual—for eleven days.