Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World's Greatest Wine (4 page)

T
he chamber the man had built for himself was small and dark, filled with a kind of disquieting energy. The very same things could be said for his mind.

It was a late fall night in 2009, and inside that small, dark space, he began to stir. A barely audible click, then a light—his headlamp.

He had been lying down, not so much resting as he was waiting for nightfall. Now that it was about 1 a.m., just when he was certain the world around him was asleep, he rose and readied himself.

He was short and squat, with a thick neck and a head like a canned ham. He shuffled about as one tends to do in darkened, cramped quarters. He bumped into things. He was groggy. His breathing heavy. Always, there was wine in his blood.

As the man moved, his tiny spotlight moved with him, darting here and there, illuminating his surroundings in flashes: four walls, a couple of center posts, a roof. The framework formed a chamber no larger than eighty square feet. The limbs that served as vertical supports were anchored into a dirt floor. Wall and
ceiling unions bound together by rope and L-brackets. Exterior walls and roof made of blue plastic tarps stretched taut. Blue plastic also covered the floor and on top of the plastic, like a flower floating on a mud puddle, a brightly colored doormat. The overall aesthetic of the place was akin to Robinson Crusoe meets the Unabomber.

The interior felt vacuum-sealed. The trapped air was greenhouse humid, weighted atmosphere, invisible cobwebbing, stale. Tolerably uncomfortable. That the space was subterranean, burrowed into the earth like a giant weasel warren, was palpable. So, too, were the smells: plastic of the tarps, dirt, body odor, laundry in need of washing, pungent cheese, stale wine.

Along the east wall was a cot, also made of tree branches and topped with a foam mat and a sleeping bag. Against the west wall a hot plate, pots and pans, and a narrow table—a plywood top affixed to tree-branch legs. On the floor, around the interior perimeter, plastic bins were neatly stacked, even under the cot and table. Tight. Well organized. All in all, an efficient use of meager space, correctly giving the impression that this was someone accustomed to making use of a confined room.

An array of items was scattered on his makeshift table: a clock-radio, an MP3 player, work gloves, a jar of
moutarde
, a Tupperware container of
carottes
, a small wheel of Lepetit brand cheese, a pair of bent and smudged bifocals, a diarylike notebook. And there was a magazine—one of those large-format, richly colored glossies. In the headlamp’s light the magazine’s cover shined like a polished pearl. It was titled
Bourgogne Aujourd’hui
, or “Burgundy Today,” a periodical dedicated to
Les Vins et les Vignobles de Bourgogne
, “The Wines and Vineyards of Burgundy.” One of the stories in that issue was a feature on the legendary Domaine de la Romanée-Conti.

On just about any list of the world’s twenty-five top-rated wines, the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti regularly places seven: Richebourg, Échézeaux, Grands Échézeaux, La Tâche, Romanée-St.-Vivant, the Domaine’s only white
grand cru
, Montrachet, and the world’s very best wine, which is the winery’s namesake
grand cru
, Romanée-Conti. For its unparalleled and sustained excellence, the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti is known by wine critics and serious oenophiles around the world and frequently referred to by its initials, or simply as the Domaine.

The article noted the insatiable market—the legal and otherwise “gray” market—for the wine. This, despite the fact that not surprisingly the wines also happen to be among the very most expensive in the world. A bottle of the Domaine’s least expensive wine, Échézeaux, in the most recent vintage available, which is typically the least expensive vintage of any wine, was then going for about $350. For a single bottle of the Domaine’s priciest wine, Romanée-Conti, the cost was roughly ten times that of the Échézeaux, at $3,500.

As astonishing as those retail prices were, they were misleadingly low. Because the Romanée-Conti vineyard is so very small—4.46 acres—and because its yield is kept low, the wine is extraordinarily rare. What’s more, the Domaine itself keeps strict control over its allotted sales to distributors and select individual clients who buy up the wine in pre-sale orders before the wine is even bottled.

Frankly, there is almost zero chance of finding a bottle or Romanée-Conti in your local fine wine retailer at all. Thus the shady back-channel “gray” market and the wine’s booming Internet and auction sales, where the price for a bottle of the most recent vintage of Romanée-Conti—which for all practical purposes is the baseline price—was then more like $10,000 per bottle.

Bottle for bottle, vintage for vintage, Romanée-Conti is the most coveted, rarest, and thereby the most expensive wine on the planet. At auction, a single bottle of Romanée-Conti from 1945 was then fetching as much as $124,000.

In one of the photos that accompanied the article the Romanée-Conti vineyard indeed appeared to be a remarkably tiny patch of earth at the base of a gently sloping hillside. Nothing at all outwardly different from the ocean of vineyards around it. A low stone wall lined a portion of its borders. On top of the wall stood a tall, concrete cross, its elongated shadow swimming across the leafy canopy tops behind it.

In another picture, a draft horse tugged a plow between the vine rows. It was a contemporary photograph, to be sure, which made the antiquated farming technique appear all the more odd. These pages of the magazine were dog-eared and pen-marked, as if the man had lain in his cot studying the pages over and over again.

Also among the items on the makeshift table were three bottles of wine: a Côtes du Rhône, an Écusson Grand Cidre, and a Hérault. All of them drunk into varying degrees of fill levels. The label on the bottle of Grand Cidre promoted it as
cuvée spéciale
. This distinction, as the man had been formally educated and generally raised to recognize, was little more than one of the wine world’s many gimmicks.

There was nothing especially
spécial
or
grand
about the Grand Cidre, or, for that matter, the other two bottles—except maybe that they had been in the special sale section at the local
supermarché
. These wines were what the French referred to as “common.” The sort of plonk you’d pick up for a few euros at the local SuperU if you wanted to wash down a microwavable quiche, or, if you were in the market for something to polish off in order to forget, to ease nerves, or, as was now the case for the
man, to gin up what might pass for courage before executing the unthinkable.

His selection of wines from the Côtes du Rhône and Hérault regions of France, the man knew, amounted to a perverse irony. It was in the southern part of the Rhône-Hérault region, a century and a half earlier, that a trespasser had crawled into the vineyards and launched an attack on vinestocks that wiped out nearly every vineyard in France. It was a nationwide economic issue, a countrywide identity crisis. Authorities of the time dubbed that menace
Phylloxera vastatrix
—aka the “devastator of vines.”

And now here he was.

Over the years, for previous jobs—“projects,” as he liked to call them—the man had relied on pipes, handcuffs, guns. During the job he was on before this one he had made a point of laying out all three of those tools, piece by piece, ever so slowly, on the kitchen table of his female victim in order to terrify her into compliance.

On that job, which he executed in another famous French wine region, Bordeaux, the man had proven he would pull a trigger, even if it meant taking aim at
les policiers
of the gendarmerie. However, he had done enough crimes, done enough time, exchanged enough gunfire, to realize there were easier ways to take a buck. This current project with the vines, it was not that kind of job; those kind of tools and that kind of risk were not necessary. That’s what the man told himself. Still, he kept a pistol nearby, just in case.

His headlamp beam settled on a container not much larger than a lunch box. It was on the floor near the cot. He opened the
case. Inside was a battery-operated drill. A Black & Decker. Not far from the drill, a few syringelike devices similar in size and appearance to turkey basters. He grasped one of the syringes—his fingers were as stubby as hors d’oeuvres sausages—and reached for a plastic gallon container and from it clumsily poured a liquid into the syringe.

His heavy breathing became more strained as he pulled on calf-high green rubber boots. From a hanger dangling on one of the crossbar tree limbs he removed a long hooded rain jacket. Green and rubbery like the boots, it wasn’t so much a coat as it was a hooded cape. He put it on, tucked the drill and syringe into a pouch belted about his waist, and turned to the door.

The hatch, too, was made of sticks. He pulled on the door, once, then again. The bottom of the door, as always happened, had snagged on the dirt ground. He opened it just enough to squeeze through.

Outside, the chilly air sent a shiver up his sweaty back. He scrambled a few feet up into a small clearing surrounded by dense woods. The night sky was as black and as soft as tuxedo satin. So many stars. The moon was full and bright. Liquidy, as if the orb were filled with white lava. Wisps of clouds crossed its face. There was no need for the headlamp. He clicked it off. Doing so decreased the already slim chance of his being noticed.

He waited a moment to give his eyes time to adjust.

Sometimes, at about this hour, there were the sounds of wild boar cracking through the woods around him. Off in the distance, straight out in front of him, to the east, he could hear the faint whooshing whistle-groan of the TGV. The high-speed train streaked along tracks either bound for the city of Dijon in the north or heading south toward Beaune.

The train was how he would make his getaway. He was so
close. He just needed to finish this last critical bit, then collect the money, and take his cut, and be gone.

As he stood there above the shelter, it would have been understandable if the man felt a sense of accomplishment. Viewed from this perspective his handiwork was all the more impressive. His flat, square box of a cabin was inside a square ditch. The walls, which were about six feet high, were almost entirely below ground level. The exterior was wrapped in olive-colored plastic tarp. The roof, covered over with leaves and twigs, was indistinguishable from the forest floor.

Some of the most skilled detectives of the French national police soon would come to learn you could fly a helicopter over it a dozen times and not see it. Hell, you could be standing right next to it and never realize it was there. Investigators would marvel at the structure. The excavation alone, not to mention everything else involved in erecting and equipping the place—sturdy, water resistant, bivouacked into the earth, buffered from the wind, masterfully camouflaged… it had taken months.

The man headed off into the woods.

Within minutes he emerged from the forest and stepped into a panorama that was as expansive and as ethereal as his shelter was small and squalid. A silhouette in the hooded cape, he stood atop a hill, his pulse throbbing within his thick neck. As he had done so many nights before, he scanned the landscape to make sure all was clear.

In the moon’s glow, the view was empowering; the world was at his feet: Spilling down the hillside and then everywhere was a vast patchwork of vineyards. Sprawling straight out in front of him, to the east, and to the north and south, seemingly without
end. Row after row they unfurled, barely separated from one another by ribbons of fallow land or narrow road. The vines were frost dusted and barren, twisted and vulnerable, like the skeletons of arthritic hands reaching for spring.

Just as he had come to expect, just as it had gone on the previous nights, no one else was out. The only movement was the headlights out east, well beyond the vines. The cars traveled on Route Nationale 74. Beyond the RN-74, the train tracks. He could once again have his way without fear of detection. It never ceased to amaze him, to please him, that so much value was just left there unprotected.