Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World's Greatest Wine (29 page)

Monsieur de Villaine is wise enough to realize, and honest
enough to admit, that when he first took over the Domaine there were people who thought he might not have been the most obvious choice for the job.

And so the Grand Monsieur has been in no rush to leave the Domaine. When he asked about succession, he tends to change the subject. He chooses to focus on the most recent vintage, the ghosts that are before him.

Until I made my first trip to Burgundy in the fall of 2010, on assignment for
Vanity Fair
magazine to investigate the crime against the Domaine and Vogüé, I had never before drank a burgundy, at least not that I ever bothered to notice. I wasn’t a wine guy. It just wasn’t part of my
terroir
.

I grew up in Philadelphia. My neighborhood was cops and firefighters, nurses and hairdressers, and roofers. Lots of roofers. People sat on the steps of row homes and on stools in corner bars and they drank beer. Schmidt’s was big. Brewed in town and cheap. The only people I saw drink wine with any regularity were my mother—once in a while she’d sit in the kitchen and drink a bottle of something chilled and white that my aunt Elaine brought over—and my grandfather.

Barney McGrath was a little, fiery guy. Always wore a black knit cap. Spitting image of the actor Burgess Meredith, who played the cantankerous boxing trainer with the black knit ski cap in the
Rocky
movies. Barney sat in a brown easy chair by the front window in my grandparents’ row house, white radio earpiece channeling the ball game, chain-smoking Lucky Strikes and drinking red wine. Brand was Kingsport. Screw-top. Poured it in a coffee cup.

Smelled just like the Blood of Christ in the chalice I handled as an altar boy. Rubbing-alcohol strong—“hot.” After a whiff of the stuff I had to shake it off. Barney “hid” his bottles from my grandmother in the turntable compartment of their 1970s multimedia center, which was the size of a small aircraft carrier. “Do your pop a favor,” he’d say, “and get me my wine.”

He’d polish off a bottle in no time, then stagger into the dining room—radio earpiece dangling. He’d crawl under the dining room table and go to sleep, either because he was too smashed to make it up the stairs or because he rightly figured that when—if—he got there, my grandmother would refuse to let the drunk son of a bitch into the bed.

Those were my first impressions of wine: Ladies drink chilled, soft white while they gossip in the kitchen; old men drink strong, room-temperature red to get shellacked. And those impressions didn’t change much as I grew up and became a journalist. As far as I was concerned, journalists wrote about bad people who did bad things; then those journalists drank beer or whiskey to wash down all the truths they’d uncovered.

For twenty years, I worked as a magazine writer, reporting on all kinds of crime—Hollywood crime, law and order crime, military crime, terrorist crime, governmental crime—and I drank beer and whiskey. If someone ordered a bottle of wine, I’d happily drink a glass, but I didn’t ask about vintage or provenance. Was it expensive? I found that interesting and, more often than not, ridiculous. Fifty bucks for a bottle of this? Wow. Hundred dollars? You have got to be kidding me.

I thought that wine critics, the idea that people were gifted with palates so superior to the rest of us mere mortals that they could taste and therefore know wine better than the rest of us; that they could know which wines were truly good and the rest of us had mouths
too stupid to do the same—I thought that was absurd. Most of the time, when I found myself reading a bit of a wine review, it struck me as being as pretentious to the point of being worthless.

In preparing for my first trip to Vosne, I came upon this tasting note for 1987 Romanée-Conti by Allen Meadows, the self-anointed Burghound, who specializes in reviewing burgundies:

For the connoisseurs, this sort of review might be useful. It didn’t seem especially helpful for me. Was the wine any good?

There are no shortage of studies that have made a pretty persuasive case that wine criticism could be interpreted as bunk. There was the one done in 2010 by Brian Dimarco. Dimarco specializes in helping customers, collectors, and retailers choose their wines. He runs an import and wholesale company.

One day, he gathered together his staff, which included a master sommelier and some of the most knowledgeable oenophiles in the business. He put two bottles of the same $20 wine each in a brown paper bag. He told his staff they were different wines. He identified them only by price: a $10 bottle and the other a $50 bottle. He wrote the prices on the bags. He asked his staff to choose which one they liked the best. They all picked the $50 bottle. Then
Dimarco told his staff he wanted to do a second round with two more wines. He served the same wines again, only he switched the bags. Again, his staff went with the more expensive wine.

When he was a student at Harvard, Steven Levitt, coauthor of
Freakonomics
, belonged to an elite academic group, the Society of Fellows. Often they would meet and have wine tastings. Levitt had never been a wine drinker and thought much of the talk of the nuances of wine, and especially the high prices of wines, was absurd. For one of his society’s wine-tasting nights, Levitt put himself in charge of the wines. He arranged a blind tasting. At his local fine wine shop he had the clerk select two bottles of what were evidently very good hundred-dollar bottles, and he also bought the cheapest bottle of the same varietal.

He filled four decanters: 1 and 2 were the expensive wines; 3 was the cheap wine; and 4 was more of one of the expensive wines. His peers gave all four wines nearly identical ratings. They did not prefer the most expensive wines. Most interesting to Levitt was the fact that his highly intelligent peers, who insisted they could tell the difference in the taste of wines, gave the same wine that was in the two different decanters the most diverse ratings.

Robin Goldstein wrote a book called
The Wine Trials
. For decades he has studied the neuroscience of wine tasting and how price impacts it. He gathered data from seventeen blind tastings, based on six hundred studies involving more than five hundred people, ranging from amateurs to expert-master sommeliers. The overwhelming data from his studies showed that overall, people liked expensive wines less than cheap wines. In his opinion, the reason people rely so much on wine experts is that we have been convinced there is some expertise beyond our own sense of taste that is required to tell us what we think tastes good and what we think is a great wine.

Perhaps the most famous example of a wine expert famously going a long way to prove the point that wine tasting is entirely subjective is from the 1976 Jugement de Paris. One of the French judges, Raymond Oliver, who was the owner of the Le Grand Vefour restaurant and had a food television show in France, had a white wine in front of him. He looked at the wine, held it up to a light to examine the color, then took a sip. He held it up again and said, “Ah, back to France.” He’d just tasted a 1972 Freemark Abbey Chardonnay, which most definitely was from California.

During my first two conversations with Monsieur de Villaine, I shared with him that I’d never had a burgundy. I told him about growing up in Philadelphia and my absolute ignorance of wine and confessed my skepticism. After our second conversation, he asked me if I wanted to taste his wines.

“Sure. Thank you.”

He and Jean-Charles escorted me into the cellar. We wound our way through a labyrinth of dusty bottles, lying on their sides like so many ancient, sleeping gods. After several twists and turns we entered a room where there was a large oversize wooden cask; on it there was a single candle. Jean-Charles lit the candle while Monsieur Aubert de Villaine retrieved a dusty, unlabeled bottle. He poured some into a glass and handed it to me.

I didn’t know the etiquette of a wine tasting. But by then I had researched enough of the Domaine to know that whatever he was serving me was considered one of the top twenty wines in the world and certainly was among the most expensive. As I held the glass in my hand, I wondered what I would say if I tasted the wine and didn’t much care for it.

Secretly wanting to hate it, or at most think it was, eh, okay, I took a drink.

I held the wine in my mouth.

Monsieur de Villaine was standing next to me. I could feel his eyes on me. Jean-Charles was standing directly on the other side of the cask from me. He didn’t attempt to hide the fact that he was studying my face. I think Jean-Charles knew that I was smiling before I knew that I was smiling.

My immediate reaction, and I mean this, was I wanted to turn and hug Monsieur Aubert de Villaine. I mean, I wanted to right then and there turn and hug this old guy, squeeze him, and tell him that this wine was absolutely the most wonderful taste I had ever had in my mouth. But since I had just met Monsieur de Villaine and I didn’t want him to think I was insane, I did not. I turned to him—I was now smiling to the point of laughing—and said, “This is very good.” Without thinking, I found myself tilting my glass toward him.

“May I have a bit more?”

He smiled and nodded and poured me another glass.

It was a sensation more than it was a taste, I told Monsieur de Villaine. I said, “This may sound crazy to you, but when I was a kid there was a candy called Pop Rocks. It was like candied sand and when you put it in your mouth it sort of bounced around and filled your mouth. This wine is like that but it is like from heaven. It is like divine, liquefied Pop Rocks that make me feel lightheaded—the kind of happiness that I felt after I first kissed my wife.”

Monsieur de Villaine smiled and said, “That is good.”

I asked him what he had served me.

It was a 2008 La Tâche.

My first burgundy.

I could not wait to taste the 2010 Romanée-Conti. I sampled all of the other wines first, and saved it for last. As I drank, I could not help but think of Cedric.

After Jacques hanged himself, Monsieur de Villaine successfully persuaded the Ladoucette sisters to join with him and be represented by the same attorney. They agreed to ask the court to sentence Cedric only to probation and charge him a fine of two euros, one for each of the vineyards that had been attacked. In the French court system, civil and criminal proceedings are combined. The court agreed to the sentence Monsieur de Villaine had requested through his attorney. However, on the day of his hearing, Cedric did not show up, and the court felt obliged to sentence him to eight months in prison. The gendarmerie sent a car to Champagne to pick him up and transport him to prison. By the time of the 2010 tasting, he had been released, back on the job. I imagined him in his municipal uniform, wearing the fluorescent-yellow-colored vest, gently tucking flowers into the grass of a median while cars rushed by him.

Finally, I picked up the glass with the Romanée-Conti and I took a drink.

For a few long seconds, I closed my eyes and held the wine in my mouth. It was magnificent. It was a sensation more than it was a taste. I saw the Grand Monsieur’s face. I thought of all the ghosts that were in that glass.

I thought of a sunset I had witnessed one afternoon as I stood in the quiet at the stone cross of Romanée-Conti. The sky was covered over entirely by silvery gray clouds, the way it gets before a thunderstorm, but there was no chance of rain. All was deafeningly and wonderfully calm. There was a long horizontal seam in the clouds. It was just above the forest at the top of the
côte
, right above where Jacques had built his cabin. The seam was closing, as if being mechanically cranked shut. Behind the seam, the last bit of that day’s sun shone, but only through the seam. The cloud cover everywhere else was too thick. The sunlight pouring
through was the color of burnt orange, brilliant, mesmerizing. It was the most intense, the most divine light I have ever seen. The scene made you think that if you ran to the top of that hill and you got off a good jump, you would be able to grab the bottom of that seam, pull yourself up, and throw a leg over into heaven and on the other side of that seam, God Almighty himself would smile in your eyes and shake your hand.