Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World's Greatest Wine (15 page)

Second, and this was the more official explanation, and the one he gave to folks when he didn’t feel like explaining the rest, his doctors had told him that the more outdoor physical activity he did, the better it would be for his recovery. Nothing was more therapeutic than good old-fashioned labor in the outdoors. In California, where the weather was mild, without the harsh winters of France, he could work
en plein air
year-round.

The truth was Aubert had what the philosopher in him would call a new existential purpose. On the other side of his coma, he had begun to sense his life bending back to Burgundy, and Aubert wanted to be sure. He wanted to be absolutely certain it was, in fact, his calling. He figured that time away—his time in the United States—would either alter what he was now coming to accept was his life’s course, or would amount to taking the long way home.

Aubert had some idea of who and what was in store for him at Almaden when he arrived. He knew a bit of history—Theé and Lefranc, Masson. Of course, Benoist’s reputation preceded him. When he left France, Aubert had known where he was going, but he didn’t fully understand that this is where he would be—which was wonderfully fine by him, especially since he was still open to the possibilities of where he might end up.

He watched his hosts flutter about to make their historic nest a home for him: Mrs. Benoist talking about how he must be sure to do this and must see that; Mr. Benoist, with his reddened face, eyes blue and mischievous, flashed Aubert a look and said he had just the girl in mind for him. Aubert could practically hear bossa nova in the sunlight pouring through the windows. He felt as if he had stepped into a contemporary world created by Lewis Carroll or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Aubert in a Wonderland of Jay Gatsby.

Certainly, he was now in the mix of an ensemble cast of fiction-worthy characters who were emerging as some of the most influential figures in wine. Along with Katey and Louie, he was scheduled to visit with Robert Mondavi. He was also looking forward to his time with Professor A. J. Winkler. Much of his American experience, including his time at Almaden, had been made possible thanks in large part to winery stakeholders Frank Schoonmaker and Frederick Wildman, who had helped liberate France from the Nazis and then, one could say, helped liberate Burgundy’s winegrowers.

While Theé and Lefranc were the first to plant high-quality French vines in Northern California, Schoonmaker and Wildman were the first to successfully import burgundies for a wide American market. Critical to accomplishing their mission, the two men had undone an oppression put upon Burgundy’s vignerons by changing the way Burgundy’s wine business had operated for at least two centuries.

Schoonmaker was born in 1905 in Spearfish, South Dakota, a town that was about as far removed from wine, or for that matter, about as far removed from anything, as it gets. His family traveled east, where his father, a classics professor, joined the faculty of Columbia University and his mother emerged as a prominent feminist of the time. Young Schoonmaker seemed destined for a similar urbane path when he was accepted into Princeton University in 1923.

That changed dramatically two years later when he dropped out, telling his dad he wanted to “see the world.” Schoonmaker went off and roamed postwar Europe for several years, writing travel guides, like
Through Europe on $2 a Day
and
Come with
Me Through France
, books that would be the inspiration for the travel-guide business Arthur Frommer would start a generation later. Schoonmaker researched France’s wine regions on foot and bicycle, and learned to speak French as well as a native. He became equally as conversant in wine. Frequently, between his trips to the rural wine regions he would stay in Paris.

It was that time between the world wars when the city served as a muse and meeting place for countless American expats, writers, and journalists—Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein among them. This was the “lost generation,” as Stein had labeled them all, a phrase Hemingway made famous in
The Sun Also Rises
, as if he had snatched a butterfly from the air and pinned it to the page. Being lost, as far as Schoonmaker (and Aubert) was concerned, was a fantastic journey of discovery.

In Le Roy Gourmet, one of the Parisian restaurants that was a favorite among expats, Schoonmaker wandered upon Raymond Baudoin. Very recently, in 1927, Baudoin had started
La Revue du Vin de France
, which in short order became the magazine of French wine. The two men got along well enough that they began to travel France’s wine country together.

They both believed America would soon drop their ridiculous Prohibition laws and when the inevitable happened, there would be opportunity to be had. Under the mentorship of the native expert Baudoin, Schoonmaker received a wine education and developed a network of contacts far superior to that of any other American, except, perhaps, Colonel Frederick Wildman.

A generational peer of Schoonmaker, Wildman had an affinity for France that developed in parallel with Schoonmaker’s, though in a very different manner. After World War I, Wildman was a young U.S. Army lieutenant stationed in Germany. One of his missions was to travel the wine regions of Europe buying up
his selections for the officer’s mess hall. He, too, sensed that the repeal of Prohibition in the not-so-distant future could mean big business for the French wine trade.

Fourteen years after the war ended, in 1933, when the prediction came true and Americans had the good sense to terminate its “Noble Experiment” and legalize alcohol again, Wildman and some partners bought the New York–based import firm of Bellows & Company and hired Schoonmaker as a salesman.

Schoonmaker and Wildman started by picking up with an effort Baudoin had begun years earlier, which was to persuade Burgundian vignerons to bottle and sell their own wines. This was a seismic shift from the way the region had operated for at least two centuries.

Since the 1700s, before the French Revolution, the central figure in what was then considered the “modern” wine trade was the
négociant
. These middlemen agents, with either their own capital or staked by financiers, bought the vigneron’s wine, racked it, stored it, marketed it, sold it, and delivered it under their own
négociant
label.

The arrangement could be a very good one for the vignerons, especially during lean times. The vignerons received quick payment for their product from a single transaction and were spared the cost and hassle of all the rest of what was required to sell bottles on the market.

However, such a deal wasn’t necessarily the best. The
négociant
system left the fate of the vignerons in the hands of these brokers who were far more familiar with the actual market prices. While a
négociant
with integrity was an invaluable partner in profit, brokers didn’t always operate in good faith.

Another troubling development was that as the wealth of the
négociants
increased, they could conspire to set prices and perhaps
even force a vigneron to sell away their vineyard—a vigneron might be funding himself off his vineyard livelihood.

Even in the best of circumstances, the
négociant
system exacted an emotional tax from vignerons. After laboring so hard in the vines and
cuverie
to birth their wines, the vignerons watched a well-heeled agent walk off with their babies and then do as they wished with them. Almost always,
négociants
blended wines from various vineyards, which diluted the purity and unique quality of a
climat
’s
terroir
, which undermined the very essence of a burgundy, which undermined the very essence of a vigneron. With each sale to the
négociant
, a vigneron might feel as if he were selling away not only his long-term security, but also his soul.

Already, in the early part of the twentieth century, some domaines had begun to bottle their own wines and negotiate their own sales with buyers representing import-export companies and distributors. However, these domaines were very few and tended to be the more established wineries with brand recognition and market demand, such as the domaines of Marquis d’Angerville, Henri Gouges, Armand Rousseau, and Edmond de Villaine. It was under Edmond’s man-of-action leadership that the DRC began bottling part of the Romanée-Conti vineyard in the latter part of the 1920s and started selling directly and negotiating their sales.

Schoonmaker and Wildman developed relationships with the big domaines—they got to know Edmond and Monsieur Leroy and then Henri de Villaine quite well. Schoonmaker and Wildman would point to them by way of convincing the rest of the Burgundian vignerons that domaine bottling was the future. The two Americans pledged to the vignerons that if they made the investment in bottling, Bellows & Company could find the market in America.

Of course, the estate-bottling strategy served Schoonmaker and Wildman. The two men were stealing the business away from the
négociants
. The vignerons were fine with that as long as it gave them more control over their own product, provided Schoonmaker and Wildman could deliver on their end of the bargain. That’s where everything got a bit sticky, at least for a while.

The market analysis Schoonmaker and Wildman offered was, at best, overly optimistic. During the fourteen years of Prohibition, Americans had grown accustomed to going without—or rather, let’s be honest, most of them were happy to drink whatever was available. They weren’t exactly savvy or discerning or willing to spend good money when it came to their booze. Grapes were grapes and wine was wine. California, French, Martian, made no difference.

Schoonmaker set out to educate and inspire the American market to recognize the difference and pay for it. He became a one-man publicity machine. In 1933, the very same year he was put in charge of sales for Wildman’s Bellows & Company, with Wildman on the ground in Burgundy, Schoonmaker published his first book on wine,
The Complete Wine Book
, which was based on a series of articles he had written for the
New Yorker
. The book became something of the twentieth-century wine bible. That, combined with his magazine work, spawned a wine industry press.

Of all the French wine regions, there was no question that Burgundy was Schoonmaker’s favorite. “Heartwarming and joyeux, heady, big of body, magnificent and Rabelaisian, this is Burgundy,” he wrote. “The most celebrated poet of Bordeaux, Biarnez, wrote of the châteaux and the wines so dear to his heart in cool and measured Alexandrines reminiscent of Racine.
Burgundy is celebrated in bawdy tavern songs.” In other words, if pomp and pretense are your thing, you’ll love Bordeaux. If you’re looking for passion and one hell of a good time, Burgundy is where the action is. Burgundy also happened to be where the majority of Schoonmaker and Wildman’s business was.

Their plan worked. Bellows & Company primed a clientele of a national network of fine wine retailers, elite hotels, the best restaurants, and more, a new market of sales direct to high-end customers throughout the United States. Their business came to a halt with the start of World War II. Bellows was sold to U.S.-based National Distillers; Wildman rejoined the U.S. Army Air Force; and Schoonmaker was recruited into the Office of Strategic Services.

The OSS was the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency, and it drew, like the CIA would, from Ivy League universities for its recruits. Schoonmaker may not have had an Ivy League degree, but he had a PhD in European wine and his occupation of wine buyer provided the perfect cover: Schoonmaker could travel in and out of occupied territories without raising suspicion. He undertook several missions into Spain and France to aid with the resistance, so deeply covert that the United States ambassador to Spain was often in the dark as to Schoonmaker’s whereabouts.

The Spanish police managed to arrest Schoonmaker, but he found a way to slip out of Spain and promptly signed on with the U.S. Seventh Army, which invaded southern France in 1944. Schoonmaker was injured when his jeep hit a land mine and was discharged honorably, and presumably very reluctantly, as a colonel, the same rank as his colleague, Wildman.

With the war won, Schoonmaker and Wildman returned to the United States and to the wine business, experts like never
before in the channels necessary to acquire information and wine. Each took his own path back into the business, but those paths intersected at Almaden.

It turned out that all those houses, yachts, planes, helicopter rides, exotic trips, and God knows what else Louie bought had him and the winery running a little low on capital and in need of a serious sales mind to get the place in the black. In the early 1950s, Benoist brought on Schoonmaker as investor-partner, which worked doubly well for Schoonmaker, who wanted a home base from which he could run his own import-export endeavor. With Schoonmaker’s guidance, Almaden acquired a 2,200-acre ranch in Paicines, California, planting what would become the largest premium vineyard in the world.

Premium wines just happened to dovetail nicely with Wildman’s strategy. After the war, he signed with the company that had bought his Bellows & Company away, National Distillers. Wildman worked for National for a few years before starting his own premium import-wine business, Frederick Wildman & Sons, where, thanks to his long-standing relationships and respect in Burgundy, he landed the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti as a client. Wildman served as the Domaine’s exclusive distributor in the United States.