Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World's Greatest Wine (7 page)

And so it was everywhere Aubert looked.

Sometimes, when he was in the car with his grandfather driving along the back roads that wind through the vineyards,
Aubert would stare out the window; if he stared at the vine rows long enough and allowed himself to become transfixed, he would find that the vines seemed to run alongside the car, as if they had uprooted themselves and were chasing them, like they did not want to be left behind, forgotten.

Little Aubert could imagine the vines calling after his
grand-père
, saying. “Monsieur de Villaine, take me, take me!” But the vines were never left behind, never forgotten. They always went with Edmond.
Les vignes
were always present with his family, coiled in the conversations of the adults. A perpetual source of concern and subject of great affection.

Aubert could not understand what was so special about grape plants. He did his best to ignore those conversations. If such talk became too intense and impossible to ignore, as it often did, he would get up and go elsewhere.

Edmond was lean and wiry, with knobby joints and a physique that bent forward, as if he were about to charge off into something. That was indeed how Edmond preferred to go at the world: straight into it, decisively. Politically speaking, he was a royalist. Not that he advocated for a return to anything like the days of the
Tale of Two Cities
, prerevolutionary
Ancien Regime
. It was more that he thought France benefited from a strong, dignified, and just patriarch.

He liked that General Charles de Gaulle had been moving more formally into politics. Only weeks earlier, riding the momentum of World War II victory and his role as the interim prime minister of the French Provisional Government, De Gaulle had galvanized a new political party, the
Rassemblement du Peuple Français
. The RFP’s overarching belief was that France
should view itself as a world power and conduct itself accordingly, that France should hold itself to the highest expectations and standards. De Gaulle presented himself as an alternative to the typical politicians. “Deliberation,” De Gaulle had said, “is the work of many men. Action, of one man alone.”

Edmond applied a similar philosophy to his family’s winery, home to the crown jewel of French winemaking. He believed it was his responsibility to be just such a leader of action for the Domaine. He was the monsieur with the plan. A vision for how the Domaine ought to be. Truth be told, Edmond had strong opinions on how just about everything ought to be. When Edmond made his opinions known, his family and the extended family of employees took them as orders and knew not to question “
La Pere.
” One of the few times, if not perhaps the only time, Edmond was challenged was by his eldest son, Henri.

Many years after Marie-Dominique had died, Henri had fallen in love with a very distant cousin, Hélène Zinoviev, whose family had fled Russia in 1918 and settled in England, but visited France often. The Zinovievs were among the last of the boyars. Growing up a member of the Russian aristocracy that served the czar, Hélène was raised like a princess. She was a classically trained ballerina and pianist, and Henri immediately fell for her, and she for him. But Edmond would not allow it.

Complicating matters was the fact that Edmond had fallen in love with Hélène’s sister, Olga, and already married her. Edmond thought it would be scandalous if his son married his sister-in-law, and so he forbade it. Edmond relented only after his son was called off to fight in World War II and begged his father to allow them at last to be together before he went off to fight the Germans.

As Edmond walked through the vineyard with his grandson,
he was walking toward his final years. There is a Nietzsche-like truism that is something of a cliché in Burgundy: The more a vine struggles, the stronger it becomes, the sweeter the fruit, the better the wine. If anyone could empathize with the vines of Burgundy, certainly it was Edmond. He might not have come to the Domaine a vigneron, but he had become one. Like the vinestocks planted there in that rocky soil ostensibly never meant for vines, Edmond, too, had endured and managed to flourish in inhospitable environments, between rocks and hard places, through harsh seasons. And when he was pressed, what Edmond gave of himself was elegant and pure and strong, like the finest Burgundy
grand crus
.

His hairline had receded, making his most notable facial features all the more pronounced. His dark, arched eyebrows, high above his eyes, almost connected at the top of his delicate nose. On someone else’s face the eyebrows might have seemed sinister. Not so with Edmond. At his most severe, he appeared pensive and concerned. More often than not, his face was creased by an expansive grin, which pushed his cheeks into points. In his eyes there was a vitality, a lightness. Despite all the tragedy he had witnessed, in his eyes there was always the hope that came with the next vintage, even when this was not truly his mood. Just as De Gaulle had done in the face of trying circumstances, Edmond presented an indefatigable and dignified front.

From the ankles up Edmond dressed like many men of his era, which is to say, a gentleman. That morning he wore, as he often did, a white dress shirt, a dark-colored three-piece suit, and a thin, dark tie. He could have passed for a banker or a lawyer from Beaune or Dijon. Then there were his shoes: well-worn, dirt-dusted leather boots, cinched tight. The boots were the only outward clue that Edmond was a vigneron.

In the broadest definition of the term,
vigneron
means
“winemaker,” anyone connected with the production of wine. The literal translation of the word is “vine grower.” In the true Burgundian sense, however, a vigneron is neither of these things. In Burgundy, vignerons do not make wine. On the contrary, they marry grapevines to soil; they work in a communion with nature to raise
enfants
in the spiritually infused ecosystem of
terroir
, hoping to produce thousands upon thousands of wildly diverse, complex wines. What makes the pursuit of such diversity especially interesting is that although there are more than thirteen hundred varietals of grape, Burgundian vignerons work almost exclusively with only two—the Pinot Noir, and the Chardonnay for white wines.

Technically no French word even exists for “winemaker,” because the French philosophy is that man does not make wine, God does. Vignerons merely tend, harvest, press, and vinify what He has provided. They kneel and pray, work and wait.

While the concepts of
vigneron
and
terroir
exist elsewhere in France, no community of vignerons takes all of this more seriously than the subculture, or perhaps, superculture of Burgundian vignerons. These philosopher-farmer-shamans strive to bottle the divine as the divine deserves, convinced that the blood of Christ flows from these veins of the earth.
Terroir
and
vigneron
, in Burgundy, are terms of a religion, and of all the sacraments and rituals Burgundian vignerons hold dear, none is more sacred than the marrying of a vine to earth.

Little Aubert loved to be hoisted into Edmond’s lap and listen to his stories. There was the one about the World War I victory parade: Edmond was marching along with the French and Allied armies on the Champs-Elysées. Some friends of his were in the
crowd and when they saw him began to shout, “
Vive Villaine!
” Within moments, as Edmond told the story to Little Aubert, other onlookers joined in: “
Vive Villaine! Vive Villaine!
” Edmond continued to march in step, his eyes straight, and smiled.

Although he never said as much to his grandson, for Edmond, watching his fellow soldiers in his formation spot their girlfriends and wives, listening to them call out their love, watching them blow kisses and cry tears of joy before their imminent reuniting and resumed lives together, must have been an extraordinarily bittersweet experience, a reminder that his Marie-Dominique was gone.

Edmond had played no especially heroic role in World War I. He made that clear to his grandson. Edmond had simply been a man among men. The real heroes were the fallen, whose names would be etched in stone on the memorials erected in nearly every French village. But to hear his name, to be recognized as a small part of that campaign, well, that had made Edmond proud. Which made his grandson proud.

The resemblance between the two of them was striking. The mannerisms. The physique. Aubert, too, was beginning to lean. Into what, exactly, was something to be determined. Most obviously they were alike in their faces. Aubert had those same arching eyebrows budding on his face; faint as they were, they gave the impression that the boy possessed a wisdom, or maybe it was a skepticism, beyond his years.

The dominant method of populating the vineyards of France at the time was a viticultural technique called
provignage
: An aging vine that historically had been reliably robust would be pulled down, buried under the soil, such that its shoots would push through the earth and grow into new vines. There could be no doubt that Aubert was a shoot of Edmond’s stock.

That was true especially since Aubert’s father had been absent
for the boy’s first six years. By the time Aubert had been born, Henri was already off at war. Through Aubert’s early years, his father was someone he had heard stories about, as a soldier, then as a prisoner of war, a mythical character to whom his mother wrote letters. During that time, Little Aubert and his grandfather developed an intense bond. They now could read one another.

That morning as they walked together into the vineyards, Aubert could tell that there was a briskness in his
grand-père
’s step. There was an uncharacteristic anxiousness in his grandfather’s manner. Aubert had observed enough over the years to know that there had been much happening at the Domaine to make his grandfather anxious.

Although little Aubert did his best to tune out the adult conversations about the vines, it was impossible to remain oblivious to Edmond’s troubles with the Domaine. Little Aubert didn’t understand all of what had been going on. What he picked up were facts and events without complete context—and as far as he was concerned, without any connection whatsoever to him.

When World War I began in the summer of 1914, Burgundy had been preparing for harvest. As it mobilized for war, the French government did its best to accommodate wineries, allowing vignerons to delay reporting for duty until after the grapes were picked. Wineries were even allowed to keep their horses until the work was complete. The government needed horses like Coquette to pull cannons and ammunition instead of plows and carts filled with picked fruit. Many of the men who went off to defend France came home injured; there was a shortage of vineyard labor and the vines suffered. That had made Edmond and Monsieur Clin’s work at the Domaine all the more challenging.

After that first war the Americans got the idea that drinking alcohol was bad for them and fell into the Great Depression. Wine did not sell. What did sell did not bring much profit. Barrels were stacked in cellars until the next vintage, and then the existing barrels were dumped to make room for more wonderful worthless wine. Wine and money were poured down drains.