Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World's Greatest Wine (11 page)

On January 20, 2010, Henri Roch found that a second tubular parcel had arrived at the Domaine. Just like the last one, it was delivered by Colissimo. Once again Roch decided not to open it. Jean-Charles phoned Monsieur de Villaine, who was away for the day. When the Grand Monsieur returned to his home the following day, he found that there was a similar package waiting for him in Bouzeron. The Grand Monsieur sat down and, with hands trembling, opened it.

Once again the tube contained a map of Romanée-Conti meticulously sketched on graph paper, and a note. Again the note had been typed and printed out on a computer. This time, however, the map and the note were much more elaborate—this note even included footnotes.

Monsieur de Villaine read the note and examined the map over and over again, trying to break them down, match them to the footnotes—footnotes! Trying to make sense of the circle and two X’s in the upper left-hand corner of the map.

Black wires. Painted plugs. Holes just above the surface. Holes drilled in the vines deeper beneath the surface. He couldn’t stop his mind or slow his heart. What sense was there in all of this? What exactly was this person—or was it people—trying to convey? What was the threat? What had been done? What hadn’t been done? The more he read it, the more it terrified him. The horror was in what was made specific and what was left vague.

What immediately and clearly struck Monsieur de Villaine was that whoever wrote this knew viticulture.
Buttage
.
Decavaillonage
. These are the terms of the vigneron.
Decavaillonage
is the springtime chore of churning up and opening the soil around the base of the vinestocks to maximize the flow of air and water to the roots. It’s done by rake, by rototill, by tractor, but frequently in Burgundy, as was the case at the Domaine, by horse-drawn plow.

Buttage
is essentially the opposite. A task performed in the fall, it means to “earth up” the soil around the base of the stock in order to protect the vinestock from the winter cold and frost. This person, this evil being or beings—Monsieur de Villaine thought—clearly understood the botany and cycles of the vines to know that it is in early March that the sap begins to rise. What’s more, whoever was behind this knew the exact date of last year’s sap-rising.

They had accounted for every inch of the Romanée-Conti vineyard. They had noted every single one of the vines in the rectangular vineyard. Judging from the number of marked vines on the circle of the map that they had drilled… what?… Hundreds? Thousands? God knew how many; it was impossible to tell.

Had the vines been poisoned in the circle at the center of the vineyard or had he prepared them to be poisoned? If he had poisoned the vines already, was the poison seeping into the soil and contaminating the
terroir
?

Breathe
, Monsieur de Villaine told himself.

Slow down.

Read it again.

Slowly.

Slower.

This note seemed to imply that the circle on the map represented the approximate position of vines marked with black wire, and these had not been poisoned, only marked to show that
they could have been if that had been the intent, and to prove the “second part”: that indeed these vines had been poisoned and amounted to an incipient “crop circle” of dead vines, but vines that could be saved…

…
With what?… An antidote?

Is this even possible?

The note—footnote 2—seemed to indicate that a good place for Monsieur de Villaine to start in assessing the credibility of the attack would be to examine the two marked vines at the southwest corner of the vineyard. One thing Monsieur knew for sure: This was no joke.

Almost immediately after reading the second note, Monsieur de Villaine made three phone calls. The first was to Jean-Charles. He gave Jean-Charles a breathless overview of the contents of the package and unequivocally summed up by saying that the vines in Romanée-Conti might be dead and dying, and that the Domaine was being extorted. Monsieur de Villaine called an old friend in the French Ministry of the Interior, gave him a summary of what had been transpiring over the last couple of weeks, and asked for assistance on how next to proceed, stressing his hope that his call would be handled expeditiously and with extreme discretion. And Monsieur de Villaine called Pierre-Marie Guillaume.

P
ierre-Marie Guillaume is a meek, bespectacled man with what might be about as round a face as human genetics will allow. If you didn’t know any better, you might have guessed he was the cheerful high school calculus teacher loved by all of his students, or pegged him as the guy who every year wore the ugliest Christmas sweater because he sincerely believed it was festive.

Like his father and grandfather before him, Pierre-Marie lived in Charcenne, about a hundred-mile drive northwest from the Domaine. Charcenne is a sleepy village. Its heyday happened around the fourteenth century when the emperor gifted a castle, the Château de Gy, to the archbishop of Besançon, the same year that the town’s population hit its peak of three thousand citizens. Now only about nine hundred people lived in the town, which was about as quiet as the Château de Gy, which is now a museum—open only on Sunday afternoons. Suffice it to say, not too much happened in Charcenne, which was fine by Pierre-Marie.

He didn’t typically receive emergency phone calls. In fact,
near as he was able to remember, the call he got from Monsieur Aubert de Villaine on January 25, 2010, was the only such call he had ever received from a client, or, for that matter, from anyone.

Pierre-Marie had been doing consulting work for the Domaine for nearly two decades and he knew Monsieur de Villaine quite well. Every holiday, the Grand Monsieur sent his family two bottles of one of the latest vintages, typically La Tâche. (Pierre-Marie would open one and cellar the other.) Ordinarily, when Monsieur de Villaine would phone Pierre-Marie he would begin the conversation casually and inquire about his wife and kids. Not this time.

“Pierre,” Monsieur de Villaine said right away, “we are worried. Something strange is happening.” Without pause, as if to head off a question, Monsieur de Villaine continued: “I cannot tell you any more over the phone. Can you please come and see us at the Domaine as soon as possible, maybe tomorrow?”

Pierre-Marie knew Monsieur de Villaine to be a reserved man, unflappable and direct; he had never been one to be easily alarmed. And so Pierre did not ask Monsieur de Villaine any questions, nor did he mention that he already was booked with appointments for the next day. Perhaps a bit eager to step into a mystery, Pierre-Marie pushed his glasses up onto his nose, straightened in the swivel chair in his office, and answered that, of course, he would be there.

Like his father and grandfather before him, Pierre-Marie was the owner-operator of Guillaume Pépinières, a nursery. With a degree in agronomy and another in oenology, Pierre-Marie was not only an expert on grapevines; in the world of viticulture he was akin to J. Craig Venter, the father of the Human Genome Project. He served as a consultant to the finest wineries in France and beyond.

Officially, Guillaume Pépinières went into business in 1895, but really it got its start years earlier, when
Phylloxera vastatrix
invaded France and spread around the world. The Grand Monsieur’s worst fear was that Romanée-Conti might be in similar terrifying circumstances.

The
Phylloxera vastatrix
phenomenon began in 1863, but it was not until the summer of 1866 that it was formally recognized, in St.-Martin-de-Crau, what was an otherwise insignificant vineyard in the south of France, along the Rhône River. That year, in midsummer, leaves on a number of the vines abruptly turned from a healthy green to alarming blood red. Within weeks, the originally affected vines became an epicenter from which the discoloring spread to neighboring vines, in what quickly revealed itself to be a rapidly expanding circle of death.

Following discoloration, the vines with the blood-colored leaves withered; the grapes, which until then had been progressing nicely to the final ripening of
véraison
, shriveled and dried. As was discovered upon further inspection, so did the tips of the roots. Within a year, the entire five-hectare vineyard of St.-Martin-de-Crau was dead, and the circle of death spawned more circles of death, and those circles created more circles, and so on.

Astutely realizing what was brewing down in the Rhône, Jules-Émile Planchon swiftly traveled to the region from the University of Montpellier, where he worked as a physician and as a professor of pharmacy and botany. Planchon studied the ground-zero vineyard and vineyards in the surrounding Rhône area. He recorded a vivid description what he had witnessed:

Initially, it seemed that whatever
la nouvelle maladie de la vigne
was, was confined to the six departments, or regions, of the lower Rhône Valley, where the grapes were considered a lower-quality fruit that produced “drinkable” table wines.

But then the bloodred leaves spilled into Bordeaux’s Midi region, where it was becoming apparent that this plague was beginning to dramatically affect the economy and upend the lives of families. One vigneron from the Midi wrote this account:

“One downsizes equipment and material, lets people go, reduces expenses. One retreats into oneself as in a depression. The beast wins everywhere. In its wake solitude invades all the land. And the horizon takes on an unfamiliar aspect, made up of empty and desolate space. As a palpable sign of the plague, one sees all along the roads, huge carts overladen with dead vines, leading one to a funeral pyre.”

Despite these stark realities, because the dying vines were still mostly confined to southern France, Planchon was unable to galvanize much concern about the occurrence. Nevertheless, he was convinced it was a plague and that it needed to be understood as quickly as possible. He needed to discover the source.

A local agriculture board agreed and supported Planchon and a team of two others to unearth the cause. They began, as logic would dictate, with the dead vines. They examined the
shoots, the foliage, and dissected the roots. They came up with nothing. Then they figured, why not look at a neighboring vine that was healthy? Despite the objections of the vigneron of the vineyard, they pulled up a healthy vine and put their magnifying glasses over the roots—and were astonished at what they found.

As the team filed in their report, beneath the glass they found “not one, not ten, but hundreds, thousands” of tiny yellowish louses on the wood sucking the sap. Over the course of three days, every affected vineyard they visited, in St.-Rémy, at Graveson, at Châteauneuf-du-Pape, among others, they found these insects,
pucerons
, which Planchon named
Phylloxera vastatrix
, meaning “devastator of vines.”

It was both an awful and an awesome discovery. Vignerons rushed to the scene and passed around the loupe in order to see for themselves. They celebrated. For at last they believed they knew who their enemy was and they could make it perish. “Our vines can be reborn,” one of the local vine growers shouted. “Our ruin is no longer certain. At last, we can defend ourselves.”

In reality, a whole new struggle had begun.

Based upon what they had observed in the vineyards and then under a microscope, Planchon’s team was convinced that the bugs, which resembled winged termites, were absolutely causing the death of the vines, moving and killing in colonies. The rest of France dismissed the findings.

The contrarian majority did not discount that the phylloxera were a significant discovery; it was that they saw the bugs as a consequence, not the cause. The agricultural and economic and governmental powers elsewhere subscribed to the theory that it was the vinestocks themselves that were stricken with an
enfeeblement
, and this sickness left the vines susceptible to the bugs, and thus the bugs were drawn to them. It was an insidious sick-vine versus
puceron
egg debate that would rage for the next seven years.

While there were many reasons for the resistance to accept the opinion of Planchon’s group, some of it rooted in the age-old scientific establishment tradition of hubris, the ultimate explanation for why Planchon’s theory had such a challenging time gaining traction came down to regionalism and snobbery. In departments like Champagne and Burgundy, where they had not suffered at all, the thinking was that the vines in and around Rhône and Hérault were simply of lesser quality and/or their vignerons were lesser vignerons; and, Bordeaux, well, the Bordelais for once in their lives just had the misfortune of being in the wrong place and the wrong time.
C’est la vie
.

In 1870, four years after the first case of the plague was reported and two years after Planchon’s team discovered the phylloxera, Paris finally began to take
la nouvelle maladie
in the vines seriously. Someone in the Ministry of Agriculture woke up to these facts: twenty-three of France’s fifty-five wine-growing departments had been severely impacted; 50 percent of the country’s wine production had shut down; and 17 percent of the French population’s income was directly tied to wine production.

The French government, which was engaged in the Franco-Prussian War and was beginning to feel the pinch of plummeting tax revenues, did two things: First, it offered a prize of twenty thousand francs to anyone who could find a way to combat—and their phrasing here was wonderfully political, as it sided neither with Planchon nor those who opposed him—“the new malady characterized by the Phylloxera.” Second, it recommended that every wine-growing region establish an official commission, what
amounted to a town watch for vineyards. Still, many departments, including Burgundy, mostly ignored Paris’s call. The Côte d’Or didn’t bother forming its local committee until 1874.

By 1869, while Planchon and his opposing theorists still debated, the phylloxera epidemic spread everywhere, even to Burgundy. The vine growers grew tired of talk and wanted remedies. Burgundians now were sufficiently anxious enough that in November, a Viticultural Congress was convened in the Burgundian wine capital of Beaune. Louis Faucon, a respected grower from Provence, appeared and reported that he had had great success flooding his vineyard and drowning the little bastards. However, the two most intriguing and controversial proposed solutions came from guest speakers from Bordeaux.

When Leo Laliman walked into the congress filled with vignerons who had left vineyards that were barren or filled with vine carcasses, he brought with him an array of lush vines with shoots weighed down by robust bundles of berries. He told the crowd that while rows of vines in his vineyard had been ravaged by the devastators and were as barren and as dead as many of their vines were, right alongside those rows he had vines that were as alive and as robust as the vines before him. The difference between the vines was that the ones that had succumbed to the phylloxera were native French vines and the thriving vines were of stock he had imported from America.

As the crowd reacted with the inevitable mix of hopeful intrigue and nationalistic indignation, Laliman made clear that, of course, the wine made from his surviving native vines was far superior. Laliman wasn’t interested in generating controversy, at least any more controversy than he had.

By then, Planchon’s prevailing theory was that the phylloxera had entered France’s viticulture ecosystem on imported host
American vines. It was speculated, though never proven, that the American vines Laliman had been planting down south might very well have been the cause of the whole mess.

The only point Laliman was attempting to make that day, he made, which was that the American vines were resistant to the bug.

The other buzz-generating presentation came from Baron Thénard, a well-known chemist, who said he had discovered an effective insecticide, carbon disulfide. After several experiments of applying the chemical, which had only recently become available to French industry, Thénard had found that injecting it into the ground around the vines, by using a large syringe-like device called a “pal,” wiped out the bug and spared the vine.