Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World's Greatest Wine (5 page)

The hill—the
côte
—on which he stood is part of a formation that stretches through much of the Côte d’Or, some twenty miles to the north and twenty miles to the south. He turned right and took a footpath south.

With the vines to his left and the tree line on his immediate right, he took the path for about a half mile. He then descended the slope and entered the vines.

The vine rows continued as the hill flattened out and then right up to the edge of the small hamlet, less than a mile away. The tiny town’s skyline was humbly marked by a church steeple. Walking through the vines in the direction of the town, he exuded the purpose of someone who knew precisely where he was headed and what must be done when he arrived.

Midway between the hilltop and the town, on the upper edge of a vineyard that was at the base of the gently sloping hillside, he stopped and fell to his knees. Had anyone happened upon him he might have appeared to be praying. Which he knew would not have been unusual.

For months, he had been casing the vineyards, on bike and on foot. He watched as people from all over the world arrived every
day at that vineyard. Some were your typical tourists. Many, however, were zealots, passionate about Burgundy wines. Like pilgrims traveling to Mecca, these “Burghounds” came not so much to see the vineyard, but rather to behold its presence. Often these pilgrims quite literally would kneel. Always they would go to the tall, concrete cross towering over the vines and snap a photograph.

Affixed to the low stone wall, not far from the cross, was a sign. Words written in French and in English stated:

Truth be told—and the Management realized this—it was not unusual for a visitor to dismiss the sign; to throw a leg over the wall—wait for a moment as if they half expected an alarm to sound—then throw the other leg over the wall and timidly scurry a few feet into the vines and pluck one of the grapes for a taste, or to grab a handful of soil, or even to pocket one of the small chunks of white stone peppered throughout the vineyard.

It was with a mix of pride and benevolence that the Management had resigned itself to the reality of these occasional acts. Not that the Management encouraged such behavior or would ever look the other way if they were present to witness such an intrusion, but they realized these lawbreakers do what they do only out of admiration, adoration even; they meant no harm; they were misguided but well-intentioned. They were like the tourists
who ignore the many clearly posted signs at the entrance of the Sistine Chapel and nevertheless snap photographs of Michelangelo’s ceiling masterpiece.

Only this vineyard was more ancient; its history every bit as epic, and, to many, even more sacred than that of any of Michelangelo’s sixteenth-century paintings. Unlike a masterwork painting, this scene didn’t seem to come alive—it was alive. And while the wine it produced was out of financial reach for most mortals, locked away in cellars of wealthy collectors, as far as the vineyard goes there were no alarms, no security personnel, no cameras—the vineyard was right there in the open, just off to the side of a strip of crumbling road, within reach of everyone, vulnerable to anyone.

The man got down on all fours. His barely moonlit face hovered inches above where the vinestocks were married to the earth. The tendrils of his hot breath rose into the night. The topsoil was cold and hard, but scratch just beneath the surface, dig down a few inches as the man did and there was…

Mon dieu, le senteur.

Nutrient-rich, rocky soil that had been churned over and over again thousands of times, hundreds of thousands of times, so that the earth could breathe and the vines could drink, hydrating roots that at that very moment, every moment, pushed through, around the rocky geological layers below—pushing through both because of and despite nature.

Le senteur.

It filled his nostrils, cut to those parts of his brain that triggered memories of his childhood.

His father.

His earth.

His vines.

Here, though, the smell was different.

This earth emanated a musk. A musk infused with the scents of salty ocean, minced seashells, a wet minerality—like chalky stone damp with spring rain.

Here the geology was luscious. This earthiness, odd as it may sound, was mouthwatering. There was an aromatic come-hither temptation to taste the dirt, to want a “droplet” of its textures to roll and spread, and rest in the back of the mouth. A musk that caused the tongue to fatten with anticipation of… a sip.

He produced the cordless drill and the syringelike device. He pressed the drill bit into the vinestock, just where the vine disappeared into the earth, and he began to drill. Into the
pied de vigne
—the foot of the vine.

The sound, the soft whir of the drill’s motor, registered as nothing in the vast quiet. In the distance, the quaint town, with its shutters drawn, was too far off, too asleep, too trusting to notice. No one in all of Burgundy—really, no one in all the world—had ever contemplated that anyone would conceive, let alone execute, such an act, such a sacrilege.

Crouched among the vines, the man shifted his attention to a neighboring vinestock. It was less than a yard away from the one he’d already drilled. With the Black & Decker, he repeated the same procedure on the foot of that vine.

Next he took the syringe, inserted it into one the holes he had drilled, and injected some of the syringe’s contents. He did the same to the other vine, emptying out the rest of the liquid. From his pouch, he fished out two tiny wooden plugs; he pushed one into each of the holes he drilled and returned the soil around the
vinestocks, best as he could, to the way he found it. As if they had never been disturbed.

The man understood perfectly what he was doing in terms of the crime, in terms of the science of the vine—the viticulture. He could grasp the localized smallness and he understood destruction. The implications of his actions, the transcendent largeness of it, that was something he could not comprehend. For him, this was about the money. Well, if he had been forced to admit it, it may also have been about a personal vendetta.

Matter-of-factly, he collected his equipment and made his way up the hill. He emerged from the vines, traveled the brim of the
côte
, and again vanished into the dense tree line.

Inside his underworld studio he hung up his hooded cape on the hanger and poured himself a glass of the
supermarché
swill. A toast to the final stages. The two vines he had drilled were among the more than
seven hundred
vines that had been drilled in the vineyard of Romanée-Conti.

He lifted his MP3 player from the table and pushed the earbuds into his meaty head. Mozart, as the police would learn from the statement of someone else involved, was the man’s favorite. The music poured into him, flowed through him. The man knew that come spring, the sap travels through a vinestock, carrying nutrients to the outer extremities, infusing the precious fruit. Similarly, the music traveled through him.

According to the reams of information that would be gathered by investigators, viticulturists, and scientists, then photocopied, stapled, scanned, shared with the head of the Police Nationale in Paris and the courts, and then finally filed away in confidential
dossiers, where it was hoped the unprecedented case would quietly disappear as if it never happened, when this project on the vines was over, when the money was divvied up and the man had his cut, his dream was to buy an old church with an organ. His dream was to learn to play Mozart on the organ, which was how he believed Mozart was meant to be played.

A
s he stepped into a Paris night late in the summer of 1755, Louis-François de Bourbon presumed he was under surveillance. He figured spies had eyes on him that very moment. He had no doubt they had been intercepting and inspecting his mail. Someone had been clumsy about removing the seals on his letters. Melting away wax marques by candle heat and then replicating and reapplying counterfeit seals was an art that required surgical attention to detail. It was a task that needed to be assigned to the steady hands of a master; whoever had been slicing into his correspondence was no master.

Louis-François was an expert on such matters. That was why he rarely committed compromising words to ink. Instead, if he had to write such a note, he did so only by pinpricks. Furthermore, he took steps to ensure the recipient understood in advance to immediately destroy the correspondence after reading. Having noticed that his mail had been breached gave Louis-François a counterintelligence advantage: the opportunity to disseminate disinformation to throw them off his trail. He was quite good at that sort of thing, too.

No matter, he was confident they had no idea of his exact plans. Despite what some at Versailles thought of him, the prince was not so full of himself to believe he was infallible. The prudent course of action was to move under the cover of night and to not underestimate his adversaries. And so he considered the possibility of operatives lurking nearby.

Espionage was a game Louis-François played better than anyone. Really, it was his game. He was the French spymaster, by virtue of practice and by occupation. There would have been no Secret du Roi without him. He was the architect of that spy network of mid-eighteenth-century France. He was the one who oversaw the Secret du Roi’s recruiting and managing of the Crown’s agents throughout Europe.

There weren’t many, if any, tactics Louis-François had not seen or employed. Now that he himself was the subject of intense surveillance it concerned him, of course, but it most certainly did not unnerve him. Part of him found the irony of it, the personal challenge—and indeed he viewed it as a personal challenge—rather delicious. He carried on just as he would have advised his own agents to do: cautiously, but with typical Parisian, aristocratic composure, as if nothing at all were out of the norm.

Which was not the case. Moments that set in motion seismic historical events, that compel men to take up arms and kill, that change the balance of world power, that overthrow kings—this, he thought, was one of those. He had to believe that. Or else, what point was there in all of the risk?

It was August, the month of his forty-first birthday, and Monsieur Louis-François de Bourbon, the Prince de Conti—a royal-blood cousin of King Louis XV, and also His Majesty’s de facto chief of staff—climbed into a carriage bound for a
clandestine rendezvous that by definition of the king’s law constituted conspiracy to commit the highest treason.

More than anyone else it was the Prince de Conti who had the ear of King Louis XV. Their relationship was a subject of great interest within the corrupt and catty royal court. The nobles and their servants whispered about it, and noted it in their memoirs and correspondence thusly: “People are always astonished by the intervention of the Prince de Conti in affairs of the state.” His “intimacy” with the king, his access to His Majesty, and influence upon him are “quite remarkable.” The Prince de Conti, alone, would daily enter the king’s private study “by the backdoor carrying great portfolios.” Often not emerging until hours later.

There was no doubt the two men talked strategy for France’s foreign affairs, which were rapidly escalating into military conflicts. France’s claims in North America were being challenged. The previous spring, in 1754, over in America, a local British militia under the control of a Lieutenant Colonel George Washington had ambushed a contingent of French forces.

It was one in a steady stream of ongoing guerrilla battles between the two countries in that foreign land. This one, though, occurred in the critical Ohio Territory and became a spark for what was now, more than a year later, all-out war. This “French-Indian” battle exacerbated tensions between the two powers, already fighting over shipping routes; it contributed to their taking opposing sides in a war between Prussia and Austria, in which Russia and Spain were also invested. All of it one big, bloody international mess that was turning into a Seven Years War.

A testament to the truly top-secret nature of the meetings between the prince and the king, no one at the court had any
gossip about the specific discussions of their meetings. Due to the mystery shrouding their sessions, as one member of the royal court wrote, “people had difficulty understanding what can be the nature of their work.” That is not to say that Conti was someone who otherwise kept a low profile.

He distinguished himself as a character among characters. A prerevolutionary James Bond. The prince left such an impression on Madame de Genlis, a noted contemporary writer and noblewoman from Burgundy, that she mused on him in her diary:

“The Monsieur le Prince de Conti was the only prince of the blood who had a taste for the sciences and for literature, and who knew how to speak well in public. He was strikingly handsome, with an imposing figure and manners. No one was able to pay a compliment with more finesse and graciousness and, despite his success with women, it was impossible to discern in him the slightest nuance of fatuity. He was the most magnificent of our princes.”

Born on August 13, 1717, into a family with Burgundian roots, and one of the most noble of France’s families, Louis-François studied philosophy and the arts, having a particular fondness for Mozart. Most notably, perhaps, he was a lover of love, and, as was common for the noblemen of the times, more often than not with women other than his wife. Louis-François had been fourteen years old when he wed his cousin, the fifteen-year-old Louise-Diane d’Orléans, the youngest daughter of the duc d’Orléans, Philippe II.

Louis-François had married into quite a family. When King Louis XIV died in 1715, he had already buried his son and the grandson who would have been next in line for the throne. The monarchy, then, had to wait for his great-grandson, Louis XV, who was only five years old at the time of his grandfather’s death.
Until Louis XV was old enough to wear the responsibilities that came with the crown, the duc d’Orléans, Philippe II, served as the Regent of the Kingdom. The union of his daughter, Diane, and Louis-François was celebrated in grand fashion at Versailles and, of course, had been arranged for purposes of bloodline politics. The marriage did nothing to discourage the teenage Louis-François from promptly beginning an affair with a mistress inherited from his uncle. (Louis-François’s uncle was moving on to a Parisian dancer.)

The Prince de Conti was the type of renaissance man who continued to engage in picaresque, libidinous adventures, relishing every opportunity to insert himself into affairs of all sorts. Along with the women, there was the wine. At parties, whether at his cousin-king’s palace of Versailles, or at one of his own residences—the Palais du Temple, where he had a rank among the Knights Templar, or at his private residence, Hôtel de Conti in Paris, or at his retreat at the L’Isle-Adam, a couple of hours’ carriage ride south of the city—no soirée was complete without the prince filling a beautiful woman’s ear with charm and her glass with exquisite wine.

Not long after the covert business of that summer in 1755, the “inviolable secret,” as Conti himself had begun referring to it, would reach its stunning, almost inexplicable dénouement: The prince would commission a painter to memorialize one of his own dinner parties.

In the scene that Michel-Barthélemy Ollivier would paint, a dozen white-wigged nobles sit around a long table, amid the warm glow of candlelight. In a nearby corner, a harpist strums. In the room so vividly alive with the buzz of intimate conversation and cascading string music, Conti looks into the eyes of a woman on his right, his mistress du jour, while his left hand seductively
caresses the neck of a bottle of his private reserve, which was then known as La Romanée.

By the time the prince would acquire the Burgundian vineyard its Pinot Noir would already have a reputation for being sensationally smooth, stunningly complex, the perfect balance of seductive and powerful—much like Conti himself. However, legend would have it there were other reasons the prince would go to the great lengths he would to acquire the vineyard—also involving surreptitious maneuvering. Reasons that were only now in his present secret matter beginning to take shape. Before there would be Burgundy, there would be Paris, and if the prince had his way, there would be revolution.

That Conti was so openly dashing yet so politically discreet was one of his many dichotomies. The image of the bespoke, silver-tongued playboy belied the prince in full. He was a decorated war hero several times over, a murderer, a spy—a double, maybe even a triple, agent. He was a fiercely intelligent operator, and generally speaking, an illusive chameleon.

One of the prince’s fellow noblemen astutely sized him up as “a composite of twenty or thirty men. He is proud, he is affable, ambitious and a philosopher, at the same time; rebel, gourmand, lazy, noble, debauched, the idol and example of good company, not liking bad company except by a spirit of libertinage, but caught up in much self-love.”

Considering the prince’s shrewdness, he may have sustained such a colorful and charismatic dandy-man persona to distract from his covert and most grave sleights of hand. A misdirection by façade. By that August of 1755, Conti was someone whom his cousin-king and Louis XV’s omnipotent mistress, the Madame de Pompadour, had come to fear and mistrust. The king and Pompadour, Conti had no doubt, were the ones who had ordered
the postmaster to intercept his mail. They had put him under the surveillance of the French police.

The mission was overseen by Lieutenant Nicholas-René Berryer and a contract agent, Soulier de Puechmaille, aka Lagarde. Lagarde had been recommended for the task by none other than the archbishop of Avignon. The Crown, the church, just about everyone benefiting from the monarchy’s stranglehold on the people, considered Conti a threat to all that was royal and holy. Their suspicions were warranted.

That night, as the prince made his way to his clandestine meeting, if one of the spies would have found a way to casually emerge from the shadows and inquire the prince about his destination, Conti might have offered an explanation that he was en route to conduct official business of the king, a mission for the good of France. For it was exactly the sort of politically deft response for which Conti had such a gift: a shred of fact that provided just enough cover for the whole treasonous truth.

Rattling over the cobblestones, navigating Paris’s narrow
rues
, the carriage almost could not avoid jolting to starts and jerking to stops, twisting with expected unpredictability into the abrupt turns of the capital city. It would have been prudent of Conti to instruct his driver to make a few unnecessary turns along the way to make the route all the more circuitous and harder to follow. During the day, the urban labyrinth teemed with the activity; a mosh pit of nobles and peasants, where it was difficult to discern vice from virtue. In the words of a writer of the time, the city was “a rapid and noisy whirlwind.”

With a population approaching 25 million, France was three times the size of its mighty and increasingly nervous neighbor
England. Nobles and clergymen together—the First and Second Estates—formed the 2 percent of the population that controlled most of the country’s wealth. The poorest of everyone else, the Third Estate, labored to buy the bread they could already barely afford. Peasants had petitioned their aristocratic landowners to invest in agricultural improvements or, at least, to tax them less so that they themselves could modernize and more efficiently harvest grains and wheat, thus producing more bread and making it more affordable. Such requests had been met with indifference.

With the Catholic Church’s blessing, nobles openly scoffed at labor as something only bourgeoisie did, in order to earn the taxes aristocrats could “invest” in the church and their own leisurely pursuits: patronizing the arts, which were often odes to themselves or packed with messages to reinforce the necessity of classism; and building their grand palaces, like Versailles, where the Prince de Conti himself kept an apartment; and throwing decadent parties. In the tradition of the late King Louis XIV, every nobleman worth his unearned
livres
peacocked on the dance floor. Small fortunes were spent trying to outdo the Italians in the latest fashions.