Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World's Greatest Wine (17 page)

A few evenings later, however, Aubert had the best nights of his time in America. He joined Professor Winkler and a crew of Mexicans on a two-day-long chore. They rode on horseback deep into Almaden’s vineyards, where the terrain was especially challenging. Winkler needed to determine if these vines were ready
for harvest before the staff went through all the trouble of carting all of the pickers and gear out to these locations.

Aubert couldn’t believe it: He was on a horse, with gauchos, riding over the mountains of the American West. Just like an American cowboy. Because they were so far out and had many parcels left to examine in the morning, that night, as planned, they set up a camp. They built a fire and cooked over it. The sun disappeared on the other side of the valley, behind the mountains, then the day pulled behind the ocean.

The moon rose harvest white and strong. Stars appeared. There were many and they were brilliant. One of the Mexicans had brought a guitar. In the cool, clear night, around the fire, they sang. They pulled bottles of wine from their saddlebags and drank until the bottles were empty. They talked about where they had come from, their homes. The Mexicans were fascinated by the idea that Aubert had come all the way from France, and by the fact that his family had such vineyards and such history. The more Aubert talked about Burgundy, the more he realized he missed it.

Another highlight of his trip happened a few days later. It was his appointment with Robert Mondavi. Mondavi was then in his fifties, stuck between all that he had accomplished and all that he was yet determined to do. He was enmeshed in a ruthless feud with his family.

Mondavi’s father and mother, Cesare and Rosa, emigrated from Italy in the early part of the twentieth century, settled in Minnesota, and then, in 1923, moved to Northern California. After a solo reconnaissance trip to the region, Cesare, who was in the wholesale fruit business, had decided there was more opportunity in the California grape business. He also had discovered
he liked the climate better in California: It was much warmer than Minnesota and he encountered far less prejudice against immigrants.

By the time Cesare’s eldest child, Robert, graduated from high school, his family had already gone into the wine business, the cheap, jug-wine sort. Robert (with help from Rosa) convinced his father to seize the chance to buy the oldest winery in Napa Valley, Charles Krug and its vineyards, and get into the business of more upscale wines. The winery was in a state of neglect and disrepair. In relatively short order, the Mondavis made Krug profitable and popular with critics and tourists alike.

Under Robert’s influence, the winery focused more on public relations, most noticeable in its unique tasting room. In a grand celebration, when the reconditioned 1914 railroad car was opened at Krug it was christened “Rose of the Vineyard.” It was seventy-five feet long, with a semicircular bar at the center and striking views of the Krug vineyards. The Rose is where Robert and Aubert sat and talked. As he shared that day with Aubert, Mondavi had even greater plans. In fact, Mondavi was especially pleased to be talking with Aubert of the great DRC because Mondavi believed California’s bright future was in emulating France’s history and winemaking traditions, especially those of Burgundy.

Only two years earlier, Mondavi and his wife had taken their first-ever trip to France, visiting the great domaines of Burgundy and châteaux of Bordeaux. The attention that the Burgundians gave to their vines and wines astonished him. Robert saw the attention to quality that was given to the much smaller vineyards and production far exceeded anything he witnessed in Northern California, which, he now came to believe, put too much emphasis on quantity.

One dinner that Robert and his wife had in Lyon—the courses thoughtfully paired with the exquisite wines—confirmed for Robert, as he told Aubert, that California needed to think about wines more as the French did. Robert believed Krug and the Mondavi estate ought to aggressively move in that direction of artisanal, boutique wines.

Silently looming over their conversation that day was also an open secret. Robert was in the midst of a toxic fight with his family, in particular with his younger brother, Peter, and their mother, Rosa. Robert’s brother and mother, and his sisters, thought Robert had returned from France with impractical notions and quite full of himself, or rather even more full of himself than ever before. Cesare, who very much had been the dominant patriarch and arbiter of such disputes, was now deceased, and so the Mondavi family’s soap operatics raged and the family was unraveling.

Aubert had no idea of just how bitter the fight had become. He didn’t know at that very moment that Robert had been effectively banished from Krug and put on a monthly stipend, which would soon be revoked. However, Aubert, like just about everyone else who was in wine or picked up a newspaper, did have a general sense of what was happening in the Mondavi family. Listening to Mondavi talk, Aubert was impressed by his vision and by his energy, but he also saw that Robert wasn’t especially nice. He sensed in the man a desire to impose his will, perhaps even at the expense of his family.

Well into his trip to California Aubert picked up the phone to call his father in France. During his time in the United States, Aubert had begun to take stock of what he had learned there, about winemaking and the business of it, but really, he reflected on what he had learned about himself. The United States, New
York and Northern California, was a wonderful place. He loved all of it and he wanted to return, of that he was sure. But compared to France, California wine was like a promising adolescent; the wineries were still trying to figure out what they wanted to become.

Everywhere he turned, everyone he spoke with—Wildman, Benoist, Winkler, Mondavi—looked with envy and admiration to France’s rich winemaking history for guidance. Everyone—heck, including some of the Mexicans—told him how fortunate he was to be a part of such traditions at the greatest Domaine in all of France. Listening to Mondavi, Aubert recognized how fortunate he was to have the family he did. The Domaine was a business, yes, but first and foremost it was a family, his family; a family and their ancient
enfants
rooted in much more than a climate zone.

When Aubert’s father, Henri, answered the phone, they engaged in the usual small talk and then Aubert said he was ready to come home. He asked his father if he could work at the Domaine.

O
n a January night about a week after Monsieur de Villaine received the second package, Inspector Prignot parked her unmarked vehicle on a dark street that was between a row of stately mansions and a tree-lined canal (one of the many waterways of its kind that crisscross Burgundy). Satisfied she had kept a reasonable distance between her vehicle and No. 6 Promenade Aristide Briand, she began to watch and wait.

Prignot was in the village of Genlis, only a few miles from Vosne-Romanée. The mansions on the street were a mix of beautiful residences and run-down converted apartment complexes. No. 6, located behind a long brick wall, most definitely was one of the latter. On the seat next to Prignot was a file, and paper-clipped to the file was a photo of the man she was waiting on, Pierre Leduc. In the picture she’d pulled from his Facebook page, Leduc was in his late thirties, shaved head, with a pencil-thin Van Dyke. She looked at her watch: 7:35 p.m. Based upon their reconnaissance, Leduc was due home shortly. Prignot checked for a visual of her backup: a couple of cops in a car at the other end of the street.

If you had asked Prignot and her partner, Inspector Pageault, how they thought the case was going at that moment, depending on their mood they might have said they’d made quite a bit of progress or not much at all. Thus far, they were well on their way to ruling out that writer Bessanko had any involvement. They’d scoured Bessanko’s background, pulling his bank and phone records. There was nothing there. Bizarre coincidence. Almost every case has one, the veteran Pageault reminded his younger partner.

Most notably and troubling, however, the investigators had uncovered that the DRC wasn’t the only victim that had been marked. At the Police Nationale office in Dijon, an examination of the two parcels addressed to Monsieur de Villaine had revealed no fingerprints inside or out, other than his own, meaning whoever wrote the notes, sketched the maps, and mailed the packages had done so with gloves, indicating a certain level of sophistication. But the mailing information proved useful.

The tubes had been mailed from a Colissimo branch located in the Gare de L’Est, one of Paris’s busiest train stations. Based upon the time stamp on the mailing form on the second of the two parcels, police were able to pull a video from the store’s security camera. It showed that the person who had brought in the tube was a man, or at least appeared to be a man, dressed in a dark ski cap and dark jacket. The person was careful to never face the camera—another sign, as far as the inspectors were concerned, that whoever they were hunting wasn’t clumsy.

One of the details police could see in the video of the day was that the person had shipped not one, but two tubes. A search of the Colissimo tracking forms showed that the other tube was sent to Chambolle-Musigny, the tiny hamlet immediately north of Vosne-Romanée by two miles. Beyond that, the Paris branch
had no more information for the police. For the specific destination address, police would have to check with the post office that served Chambolle and hope someone there remembered. The postal clerk in Chambolle had recalled the package and was relatively certain it went to the Domaine Comte Georges de Vogüé.

Inspector Pageault promptly visited the Domaine de Vogüé, a stone, castlelike building on a narrow street in the center of Chambolle. He found Severine Godine, the domaine’s office manager. Godine, who also lived at the domaine, was stunned to receive a visit from an inspector with the Police Nationale. Pageault asked if the domaine lately had received any usual packages. None that she was aware, Severine said. Then again, she informed Pageault the domaine had not yet opened after the holiday and much of the mail was sitting unopened. Pageault said he needed her to look through that mail, now.

Severine found two tubular mailings, just like Pageault had described. One had been sent the same day the mysterious figure was seen on the Colissimo video; the other had been sent a couple of weeks earlier, mailed the same day as the first parcels mailed to Monsieurs de Villaine and Roch. Both of the Vogüé parcels were addressed to the Comtesse Claire de Causans, who co-owned the domaine with her sister, Marie Ladoucette. Severine had seen the packages before but she had not given them a second thought. She’d figured they were one of the many calendars that their vendors send every year.

Sure enough, when Pageault and his team opened those tubes back in the crime lab of the Police Nationale’s Dijon branch, they found maps, and notes of threats and the promise of a forthcoming demand, very similar to the ones Monsieurs Roch and de Villaine had received, only here the target was the
vineyard called Musigny, which like Romanée-Conti also had the most esteemed and most rare classification of a burgundy—
grand cru
.

Burgundy’s contemporary classification of wines was made official in the mid-1930s by a branch of the French Ministry of Agriculture, the Institut National des Appellations d’Origine (INAO), which was created in 1935 for the very purpose of overseeing the hierarchy of French wine.

In theory, the system the INAO codified for burgundies is straightforward. First, they determined which areas within the region merited recognition as a unique appellation. Then within each of those appellations, they determined which specific vineyards commanded an exalted status. The result was a ranking of four tiers. From least to most prestigious, there is
régional
,
village
,
premier cru
, and
grand cru
.

The ostensible simplicity belies a reality of considerable complexities. There’s the overarching question of why some areas within a region are recognized with the designation of appellation while others are not. And why is it, say, that wines from the appellation Volnay are judged to be lesser than those from the appellation Vosne-Romanée, with the latter home to six
grand cru
vineyards and Volnay none, when these communities are only separated by a few miles? Even more confounding, certainly to a non-Burgundian, how is it that the wine from Vosne’s La Tâche could merit the highest rank, and thereby be worth more, than the wine from Aux Malconsorts, when these vineyards are separated by a few feet?

Indeed, within the classifications are a wide range of nuance and variety, which, as far as the vast, international cult of
Burgundy’s devotees is concerned, is the result of much careful reflection, informed by the region’s unique spirituality.

Ultimately, the INAO’s methodology, as with all things in Burgundy, grows from that mix of science and mysticism—
terroir.
In order to fully appreciate the classifications for all that they are—and for all that they are not—one needs a bit of historical context and a willingness to take a leap of faith.

The INAO undertook their task having the blessing and curse of two thousand years’ worth of attempts to define Burgundy. The Roman Empire was responsible for the earliest vines in Burgundy, which was then Pagus Arebrignus. In the last century before Christ, Virgil and Pliny were among the first to ponder why the wines from this region were so superb. In the first century AD, a Roman farmer, Columella, flirted with the notion of
terroir
when he wrote, “The vine planted in fat silt yields abundant wine, but inferior in quality.”

Columella also may very well have been one of the first to recognize Pinot Noir vines planted in certain Burgundian soil was a magical combination. Experimenting with three different varietals, he determined that the grape that would be named Pinot Noir was “the best of the three… praiseworthy because it endures drought best of all, because it bears cold, if only it is free from rain… and especially because it alone gives a good name to even the poorest soil by reason of its own fertility.”

In the fifth century, with the Roman Empire collapsing, the era of the feudal lords emerged in concert with the Benedictine monks. The Black Monks, as they were known because of their hooded robes, were formed in Italy in 529 by St. Benedict, who by all accounts didn’t set out to birth an order. But as Charlemagne conquered and declared Catholicism the French religion, Benedictine monasteries sprouted throughout Europe.

The Benedictines adhered to a strict monastic life of work and prayer. “The Rule,” St. Benedict had called it. In France, the monks’ governing base, built in 910, was in Cluny, Saône-et-Loire, in western France. Constructed under the benevolent auspices of the Duke of Aquitaine, it was a grand edifice, emblematic of the coziness the Catholic Church enjoyed with the aristocracy. The French nobles fortified their alliance with the church with gifts of land.

In Burgundy, those gifts of land often didn’t seem like they were good for much of anything. Columella’s success with his vineyard, wherever exactly that had been in Pagus Arebrignus, undoubtedly took some doing, for the vine and the wine didn’t come easy in Burgundy. The region then resembled prehistoric wilderness. The soil was riddled with bits of marl and limestone and made gritty with the atomized, residual remnants of the ancient ocean. All of it was covered by a forest of dense thickets, among jagged hillsides that dipped into lowlands prone to wind and frost.

Toward the end of the tenth century, the concept of
terroir
became ingrained in Burgundy’s culture when two groups of holy men arrived. A band of exhausted, ragtag monks carrying a saint’s corpse came from the west, and a more orderly group of monks traveled from the north, led by a rebelliously righteous former noble from Champagne.

The more disheveled bunch toting the body was the Order of St.-Vivant, twenty-eight monks whom the Normans had chased from their monastery near the Franco-German border. When these holy men fled, they grabbed only the important things: household utensils, liturgical supplies, and the body of Vivant, the fourth-century saint who had founded their clearly committed order.

Their decision to settle around Vosne was a fortuitous one.

They received the gift of an
abbaye
from a dying nobleman looking to buy away his sins. Count Manassès, persuaded by his wife, Ermengarde, the daughter of the former king of Burgundy, gave them an abbey on a hillside directly on the other side of the
côte
from Vosne. And none other than Hughes II, the duke of Burgundy himself, gave the St.-Vivant monks, so said the lease, all of his “uncultivated lands, woods and fields in Flagey and Vosne.” Ironically, these St.-Vivant monks joined the Cluny, which was the order the other band of monks had just fled.

The other monks who had traveled to Burgundy followed Robert of Molesme. Molesme joined the Cluny sometime before 1060. A monk who held the Rule sacrosanct, he was horrified by what he saw at his order’s headquarters: There was corruption and concubinage among the brothers. After unsuccessfully agitating for reform, and repeated disagreements with the Cluny, Molesme hit the road, taking twenty-one monks with him. Evidently judging that Burgundy was far enough removed from Cluny, he set up a camp in Bourgogne in 1098.

Molesme’s order erected an abbey just to the east of the villages of Romanée, Flagey, and Vougeot. They christened it Cîteaux, after the reedlike grass. In their library, some of these Cistercians spent their days painstakingly, with quill and ink, making copies of scripture and other worthy works of the time. Other members of their order went out into the land that had been given to them, and put their backs into clearing the thickets and cultivating vines.

For monks dedicated to work and prayer, the gift of uncivilized land was indeed a godsend. The monks saw God’s presence, his wonder and beauty, in all things. It was a deeply Catholic spirituality informed by ancient overtones of the Druidic
philosophy of animism, which is the belief that all things possess a soul or living energy; and humans are but a piece of the natural phenomenon that God has provided, for His reasons, in His way, with divine purpose, all to be harnessed to serve Him, to honor Him.

Every patch of earth, then, every vineyard, with its specific soil and subsoil; with its particular altitude, pitch, and drainage; with its unique exposition to sunlight, wind, and rain, was singularly unique, as designed by God, and the vines there would produce a fruit and a wine like no other parcel.

With no commercial pressures, no pressure at all except to fulfill God’s plan, to honor Him with their work and the fruits of that labor, the Cistercians planted and prayed, pruned and prayed, harvested and prayed, pressed and prayed, and then tasted—not what they had made, but what the Lord had given them the opportunity to birth. The more sublime the flavor, the more purely it conveyed the
terroir
, the more divine the wine.

To determine where one
terroir
ended and another ought to begin, to be able to maximize the natural wonder that God had created within each, the monks would savor and interpret the fruit before the harvest; they would taste and study the wines. According to legend, they knelt in the vineyards and tasted the earth. They would keep extensive records. They would adjust and refine.

For at least four centuries of harvests, they explored viticultural techniques and a small handful of varietals. They found that the wines from some communities that would be recognized as appellations were better than some others. They discovered that the composition of the land in the south was different from that in the north. In the south, the soil is heavy with marl,
whereas in the north the earth is filled with limestone. In the south, the white Chardonnay grape grew better. In the north, Pinot was supreme.