Shadows in the Vineyard

The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World’s Greatest Wine

Journalist Maximillian Potter uncovers a fascinating plot to destroy the vines of La Romanée-Conti, Burgundy’s finest and most expensive wine.

“A whodunit with a culprit worthy of a Woody Allen film, Potter’s first book is a rich study of a cinematic crime and bona fide page-turner…. Even the most devout teetotaler will have a hard time putting this one down.”
— PUBLISHERS WEEKLY (Starred)

“Maximillian Potter has taken a sinister plot and woven an intriguing story around the most revered wine estate in the world with the most respected winemaker at its helm.”
— DANIEL BOULUD

“This riveting story…instills a renewed appreciation of the Côte d’Or region, its people, and the passion that is the fortitude behind this incredible wine.”
— ERIC RIPERT

CHAPTER 1

The Grand Monsieur

The sun over Burgundy’s seemingly endless expanse of richly green vineyards belonged to late summer. What few clouds there were, were fantastical, fat, and luminous—giant dollops of silver and white acrylic paint that had not yet finished drying onto God’s vast canvas of sky. Plush canopies of leaves on the tens of thousands of vines fluttered in breezes so faint that if not for the subtle sway it would have appeared there wasn’t any breeze at all. Chirping sparrows swooped every which way, as if they’d spent the night drinking from an open barrel in one of the nearby cuveries. With the gentle rise and fall of the terrain, the vineyards resembled a slow rolling ocean of unpredictable currents.

The temperature that September morning in 2010, in the Côte d’Or region, which is the heart of Burgundy, and for many serious wine collectors the only part of Burgundy that matters, was already well on its way to sweltering. The humidity was as present as a coastal mist. Soon, the workers would spill from the villages to tend to the vines. The enjambeurs would arrive: The spider-shaped tractors, with their high tires to easily traverse the meticulously ordered vine rows, would scurry about dodging the tourists bicycling along the narrow ribbons of dirt road between the vineyards. For the moment, however, the landscape was quiet; as far as the eye could see the only person among the vines was the Grand Monsieur.

Dressed in shades of khaki—even his wide-brimmed, cloth hat—seventy-one-year-old Aubert de Villaine walked in the parcel called Romanée-St.-Vivant. Tall and thin, he waded through the vines as he had done for more than four decades: in bursts of long strides, arms out slightly from his sides, palms skimming the vine tops.

Every so often he would stop, fish the handkerchief from his pocket, wipe the perspiration from his brow, and look about. Monsieur de Villaine knew that everything and nothing was unfolding before his eyes, and that it was his challenge to determine which was the everything and which was the nothing—to find the clues in nature’s mystery.

At moments like this, surrounded by the sublime splendor of the vineyards before the harvest, the Grand Monsieur sometimes thought of the French masters—Pissarro, Renoir, Monet. He suspected they would have appreciated Burgundy and understood his work.

“One must have only one master—nature,” Pissarro had said. Renoir had put it this way: “You come to nature with your theories and she knocks them all flat.” And Monet—ah, Monet. Was it any wonder he described it best of all? “A landscape hardly exists at all as a landscape because its appearance is changing in every moment. But it lives through its ambiance, through the air and light, which vary constantly.”

Though Monsieur de Villaine would have insisted he was unworthy of such a comparison, he had much in common with Monet. When Monet first picked up his brush he saw and painted the natural world in pieces. He put the water here and the sky there; the field went here; flowers and trees went here, here, and there. Each was an element unto itself, existing almost independent of its surroundings, as if, just like that, any one of the elements could have just as easily been placed in another scene, transported to another painting.

As he matured, however, Monet’s work became less technical and more organic, spiritual. He came to understand nature’s power. It was as if one day, while standing alone on the banks of that pond covered in water lilies, Monsieur Monet discovered a crease in the universe, pulled it open like curtains, stepped inside, and turned and viewed the world from another dimension—from a perspective that allowed him to see the interconnectedness of it all, to see the light and air, and the flicker and flow of energy among all natural things.

It was then that Monet began to make the invisible visible. The lines he had once thought defined and separated some natural order dissolved into a liquefied oneness, filling the canvas for others to drink in, and, if only for a few moments, to experience the divine.

This was what the Grand Monsieur labored to do. Only with grapes. His life had been dedicated to transcending the technical and vinifying nature’s invisible energy.

As he studied the masterpiece of the landscape around him, the Grand Monsieur prayed for a sign. He prayed although he wasn’t as confident in the power of prayer as he once had been. Because of recent horrific events and the possibility of unsettling outcomes, the Grand Monsieur had begun to question God’s very existence.

You wouldn’t have been able to detect his fermenting anxieties just by looking at him. Or maybe you could have. If you were among the very few he trusted to know him well enough, and you happened to glimpse him in a moment like this—his long, weathered face and forlorn brown eyes—when he thought no one was looking at him, when he thought he was alone and could be himself.

Then again, it had been so long since Monsieur de Villaine had known what that was like: a private moment, unto himself. There was no himself. Only the tangle of what he represented: the vines, the families, the Domaine, Burgundy, France—the storied legacy of countless holy men and one unholy prince. A legacy subjected to the currencies of markets too often ignorant of how to truly appreciate a bottle of Burgundy, and that were instead driven by the whims of buyers who were obsessed with the bangs of auction gavels and status-symbol trophy bottles.

For the longest time Monsieur de Villaine had wanted no parts of any of it. He had resisted. It would be fair to say he had fled Burgundy’s vines. But crawling into a blackness that he believed was certain death, riding horseback into the starry night of the American West, repeatedly enduring the heartache of the unborn—well, these things have a way of altering a man.

Over time, like the best Pinot Noirs, within the bottle of his skin Monsieur de Villaine’s composition had become something other than what it had been. He matured. He came to accept and to appreciate what had always been his destiny—caring for his enfant vines, and producing the most magnificent and most misunderstood wine in the world.

His employés referred to him as the Grand Monsieur. The moniker signified their respect. A recognition of his grace and kindness. Monsieur de Villaine put up a reserved front, but his people knew it was a façade, his way of protecting the Domaine and also his own heart, broken several times over and patched together, it seemed, with rose petals.

Years ago, when one of their beloved fellow workers, distraught over a lost love, was found hanging from a rafter in the winery, it was the Grand Monsieur to whom they turned for guidance. The workers gathered in the winery and bowed their heads as he led them in prayer and reminded them that the Lord indeed works in mysterious ways. He told them this was part of God’s plan. He petitioned them to have faith, to believe.

When the torrents of rain came and lasted for days and drowned their scheduled vineyard tasks, as was often the case in mid-to late summer just before the vendange, it was the Grand Monsieur who assuaged their concerns. Although during such times he more than anyone else worried that they would fall behind or the crop might be lost, he exuded a serenity; he reassured his crew that when the skies would clear they would be able to complete the work. In due time, he would tell his men when their partners, God and Mother Nature, were ready. Have faith, he would say to them. Believe.

Although the Grand Monsieur presided over the Domaine that was above all other Burgundian domaines, a national treasure—a “cathedral” of a winery, as a French official in Paris had once put it—and a winery that had made him one of the wealthiest men in France, Monsieur de Villaine carried himself with equal parts dignity and humility. He emanated gratitude and took nothing for granted. He was ever mindful of the time when the Domaine’s wines made no profit at all, and he never lost sight of the fact that such a period could easily come again.

He was often one of the first to arrive at the Domaine in the morning, in his silver Renault station wagon, and he was among the last to leave. His back was just as sore as theirs; his hands just as calloused. He was the kind of Grand Monsieur who once, when his wife, Pamela, asked him to travel into Paris to meet her at a party hosted by an American starlet, he lingered at the “farm,” as he called the world’s greatest Domaine, for as long as he could, and then only grudgingly attended the soirée. He arrived late, as one of his family members recalled the evening, dressed in his khaki farmhand clothes.
During the long days of the vendange, the Grand Monsieur made sure his pickers were paid much better than the other domaines’ crews were paid; he contracted a locally renowned chef to prepare their meals. Rather than ensconce himself in an air-conditioned office, he opted to be in the cuverie, or in the vineyards for the clipping and sorting, often inquiring about his employees’ welfare and their families. He asked, his people knew, because he cared. As far as the Grand Monsieur was concerned, anyone who worked at the Domaine was family; they grasped they were part of something very special.

One day during a harvest, as the Grand Monsieur’s vendangeurs picked the Domaine’s vines in the parcel called Richebourg, one of his workers approached me. Squat, husky, with a nose that looked as if it got smashed crooked and flat by a barroom one-two wallop. He wore shorts, a white T-shirt tank top, work boots, and a skullcap. A cigarette dangled from the side of his mouth. He struck me as someone who would be more at home as a stevedore on the docks heaving bags of coffee beans or bundles of bananas rather than given over to the painstaking, delicate detail work of harvesting tiny bundles of berries.

He shouldered a backpack pannier and was tasked with transporting the picked fruit from the vineyard to a nearby flatbed trailer. “Pannier! Pannier!” The pickers called for him when their harvesting baskets were filled. For days as he worked I’d watched him stealing peeks at some of the female pickers as they bent over using their wire-cutter-like secateurs to clip off the clusters of the Pinot Noir. At least once he’d caught me watching him. I’d gotten the impression this Monsieur Pannier didn’t care to be observed. I thought he was going to tell me as much when he approached me.

“Can I tell you something?” He spoke to me in English. By then I’d been around the Domaine for two harvests and for enough months that everyone at the Domaine knew I spoke very little French. He stood with his face inches from my face. I could smell his sweat and the nicotine on his breath.

“Bien sûr,” I answered. Of course. I tried to use what little I knew of the language.

He flicked his cigarette onto a nearby ribbon of road. I reassured myself that it was unlikely he would pick a fight with me here, in front of everyone.
“The big boss,” he said, nodding in the direction of Monsieur de Villaine. The big boss was well out of earshot, over on the back of the flatbed, alone, sorting through the grapes that had been picked and carefully poured from the panniers into the plastic crates that would be transported to the cuverie.
“Oui?” I said.

“Son cœur est dans la terre.”

Pannier could see I was trying to process his French. He knelt down in front of me. Genuflected was more like it. He took his right hand and pressed his palm flat to his chest, over his heart. He looked up at me, his eyes locking on to mine, to make sure I was watching his gesture.

“Son cœur,” he said.

“His heart?”

“Oui, son cœur.” He removed the hand from his chest and pressed it into the soil. “Est dans la terre.”

“Is in the earth?”

“Oui.” He stood. He looked into me until he was satisfied I understood.
He softly punched my shoulder and said it again:

“Monsieur de Villaine, le Grand Monsieur, son cœur est dans la terre.”
With that, Monsieur Pannier smiled in the big boss’s direction and walked off back into the vines to see the sights and wait for his next load of fruit.
On the quiet morning in mid-September 2010, as the Grand Monsieur walked through the vines of Romanée-St.-Vivant and looked to the sky, he searched for clues that would help him determine when to begin another year’s vendange.

Off and on, for centuries, ruling aristocrats and government officials had set the date for the start of the harvest for all of Burgundy. Typically, and most unfairly, this ban de vendange corresponded with the wishes of the wealthiest owners of the finest vineyards, which produced the highest quality grapes. In theory, the policy of a unified harvest period made sense, as the harvest took over the entire region. Horse-drawn wagons filled with grapes on their way to the wineries clogged the rural roads and tight city streets. Businesses closed, willingly or otherwise, to allow friends and family of vignerons to pick and sort. But in the way that mattered most, for bureaucrats to choose when the harvest would begin for all was inherently flawed policy.

Only the vigneron who tends his vines knows when his berries are ready. Only the vine farmer himself knows that the grapes growing in one section of his vineyard, say, where there tends to be more exposure to sunlight and wind, will mature faster than the berries in another section of that same parcel. An east-facing slope of vines likely gets more of the hot midday sun. And so on.

Then there’s the myriad farming techniques. Each Burgundian grower has his own way of doing things—a hybrid of science and metaphysical voodoo, informed by tradition and faith, and, of course, viticulture. So many nuances. In the end, no one understands the contours of a parcel of vines better than its vigneron. The way Mark Twain’s riverboat captains knew the secret shoals of the Mississippi. The way a husband understands the curves and mysteries of his beloved’s form.

France is relatively small country, eight thousand square miles smaller than the geometrically similar state of Texas. The Burgundy region, the mostly pastoral countryside to the southeast of Paris and comprising four “departments”—the Yonne, Nièvre, Saône-et-Loire, and the Côte d’Or—represents only about one-twentieth of the country. The roughly forty-mile-long by three-mile-wide corridor of Côte d’Or wine country, which stretches from the city of Dijon to just south of the city of Beaune, is little more than a wrinkle in the universe.

Yet within that wrinkle, the temperature and the terrain vary dramatically. The Côte d’Or is divided into two regions: Vineyards in the south belong to the Côte de Beaune, and the vineyards in the north are in the Côte de Nuits, which at the time was where all but one parcel of Monsieur de Villaine’s vines grew. Although the two côtes (literally, slopes) are in such intimate proximity, they may as well be on different planets when it comes to late summer weather. So the officials in Beaune ultimately surrendered to the reality that the decision of when to harvest should rest where it does now, with the vignerons themselves.

When Monsieur de Villaine walked his vines he would sometimes picture the prehistoric ocean that covered this part of France. Visions of ancient fish floated like sunspots before his eyes. He watched the creatures swim, then, as the earth’s crust moved apart and came together, pushing up mountains and cracking off faces of cliff—as the ocean receded—he watched as the sea creatures fossilized, atomized, sprinkled down, and vanished into the soil. He saw the holy ghosts enter the wild land—the monks in their pointed hoods cutting away brush, raking the earth, then kneeling and putting the earth in their mouths, and then marrying their vines to the soil.

Monsieur de Villaine sensed the energy in the veins of the earth around him, an energy that would infuse the Burgundy wines that King Charlemagne had so very long ago declared worthy to be consecrated the blood of Christ. The Grand Monsieur imagined the princely namesake of his Domaine pacing these vines, ensuring his parcels were not too densely planted, insisting that quality never be compromised in favor of quantity. Of course, too, the Grand Monsieur would see himself as a boy in these vines, disinterested and trailing behind his own father and grandfather.

Like virtually all Burgundians, the de Villaines were Catholic. The Grand Monsieur had spent a fair amount of his life in churches. He likened the many thousands of vineyards of Burgundy to the shards of a stained glass window. Thousands upon thousands of parcels divided, seemingly without rhyme or reason, and within those parcels, a range of asymmetrical climats that were at once unto themselves and yet exquisitely pieced together into a meticulously engineered, breathtaking whole.

So far, the growing season of 2010 had brought much rain and humidity. Which could mean disaster for the Pinot Noir. “Pinots” are so named because the clusters of this grape varietal resemble a pinecone. Just as the structure of a pinecone is as dense as it is delicate, the Pinot grapes grow in tight bunches that leave little room for the flow of air between the berries. Under the shade of the canopies of leaves, within the tight cone-shaped clusters of 2010, because of the humidity, moisture had set in.

If Monsieur de Villaine timed his harvest too late, rot and mildew might eat away the grape skins. The botrytis fungus might render the grapes so many white, dusty cadavers that would turn to dust during picking. It was bittersweet irony that as the berries matured to peak ripeness and sugar levels, just when they would have the best to offer, they were simultaneously decaying, soon fit only to be left on the vine, to fall off and die into the soil.
At this stage of his life this viticultural reality was something Monsieur de Villaine understood quite well. Many who knew him, or thought they knew him, whispered that he was beginning to appear frail and often seemed fatigued; that his vision and instincts were not quite as sharp as they had been. There was the story circulating in the vineyards that driving home one evening he had struck a young girl on a bicycle. It was nothing serious. And of course, according to the talk, the Grand Monsieur felt terrible and had visited the young girl in the hospital. In short, people had begun to wonder how many vintages Monsieur de Villaine had left in him.

He was aware of the talk. He pretended not to hear it or care, but he did care. Such whispers raised the question of whether he was leaving himself too long on the vine.

Truth be told, there were times when he thought of the talk and it caused him to doubt himself. More often than not, when he considered the gossip it emboldened him. He would shrug and blow the air from his cheeks—as the French like to do—and he would tell himself that he still had much of his best to give.

Besides, he thought, what was the alternative for the Domaine? Whenever the question of his successor crept into his head he told himself he had more pressing matters to resolve, like now, the decision of when to harvest. He persuaded himself to believe that on the matter of his retirement and his heir apparent, the longer he waited the better.

The soft September breezes that rustled the waist-high leaves surrounding him were welcome. The winds dried the moisture, combated the fungi, and prolonged those last critical days of ripening, enabling the grapes to reach maximum sugar level and balance; giving them just that much more time to swell on the vine like so many sweet supernovas, which in turn, so went the hope, would infuse the wine with marvelous flavor.

In that September morning’s air, though, Monsieur de Villaine sensed the sort of stealthy humid heat that he had come to learn often foreshadowed violent rainstorms, perhaps even hail. This raised more questions that required immediate consideration: Were storms imminent? At what pace were the humidity and rain spreading rot on his fruit? Could he give his berries more time on the vines or did he need have his vineyard manager, Nicolas Jacob, call in the pickers?

The Grand Monsieur wiped his brow with his handkerchief. The sound of the rustling leaves reminded him of the soft winds that blow across the tiny whitecaps on his favorite fly-fishing spot, the Loue River, to the east, in the Jura region. If he closed his eyes Monsieur de Villaine could see himself there, standing in the current with his rod, with the music of the birds and the wind and water. He cast his line, his hope, forward. A flick of the wrist and he watched his line soar and then dance down onto the water’s surface of brisk currents. He would either catch a prize or, just like that, his line would float back to him, giving him the chance to cast again. In the fly-fishing stream there was no such thing as failure, no family shareholders or critics to disappoint. No pressure.

This was not the case standing in a vineyard contemplating a harvest. Monsieur de Villaine would tell you that every growing season affords the chance for new beginnings, another opportunity to conjure forth from nature and then vinify and bottle some new interpretation of the terroir.
Terroir meaning the sum of the natural characteristics unique to each parcel or climat of vines: the amount of sunlight and rain an area receives, the pitch and composition of its earth, and, of course, the vines. Roots pull the energy from the earth below, while the leaves harness heaven’s sun and draw the rising sap. All of this together, the essence of terroir, the very essence of Burgundian winemaking. Although the French Impressionists did not think in such terms, what their very best paintings capture is the magic of terroir.

This idea that each vineyard, and then even each climat within each vineyard, is its own spiritually charged ecosystem wherein everything is connected in unique alchemy—the grapes merely a manifestation, a by-product of this divine collaboration—is a philosophy that skeptical outsiders have oft dismissed as nothing more than a marketing ploy or misguided pretentious hooey of the French. For the Grand Monsieur the mysterious power of terroir was as real as the Savior’s death and Easter rising.

In every harvest there was the chance, too, for the vigneron to be born anew, to catch a prize, to achieve poetry and forget, if only for a short time, past missteps, lost loves. Another opportunity to produce a wine more interesting, more pure, than the previous vintage. A chance, if necessary then, for the vigneron to achieve… validation, redemption, to rise again, or, perhaps, bottle what might be his final mark.

There was also, of course, the possibility of crushing disappointment, to fall short of fully harnessing the potential God had provided. Like those vintages the Grand Monsieur had bottled in the 1970s, when he was just starting. Many of those wines were technically correct—“drinkable,” as the French say when they are being polite about wine that is subpar—but some were remarkably unremarkable.

In theory, Burgundian winemaking is very simple. The vigneron’s greatest challenge is to do as little as possible, to get out of the way of the metaphysical, leaving the terroir to nurture and birth the fruit. The vigneron is merely akin to the midwife who facilitates the delivery.

Then comes the pressing of the fruit, where, again, the goal is to meddle as little as possible. Yet the Burgundian process done right must be synchronized to the rhythms of the moon and relies on the soul of the vigneron. At once it is all so simple, and yet maddeningly unpredictable and complex. Like love. Like poetry. Like philosophy.

As a young man, that was all Monsieur de Villaine aspired to do—to travel, to fall in love, to read and write poetry—to study and attempt to unlock the wisdom of the great thinkers. Farming vines, the young Aubert de Villaine thought, he would leave that to others.

As he walked through Romanée-St.-Vivant, Monsieur de Villaine paused, gazed in one direction. Then he took a few more steps, paused, and looked in another direction. He removed his hat and scratched his bald head. In the center, there was a pink spot rubbed raw from so much thinking.

Even the professional meteorologists regard forecasting the late summer weather in Burgundy as a fool’s errand. Hail. Rain. Sun. Warm breezes. No breeze. Gentle. Violent. One minute, there is peace; the sun warmly kisses the vines. The next, those storybook clouds turn dark and spit hail that tears through the leaves and pelts and pulverizes the grapes, destroying a whole crop.

In the days to come of this 2010 vintage, Monsieur de Villaine would write in his vineyard journal:

At the approach of harvest which we anticipated would begin September 20, it was hard to be optimistic. The weather remained uncertain, governed by west and south winds that brought recurrent humid heat, alternating with rainstorms. We were in the classic situation of the northern vineyards, when often at the end of the vegetative cycle, weather conditions install a well-known scenario: as the warm southern winds furnish the finishing touches to the maturation of the grapes, this heat is also the source of storms that favor the growth of botrytis.

The maturation had not been uniform. The June flowering—the floraison—which had filled the air with that sweet, familiar aroma that ever since he was a child he had likened to the scent of honey, had occurred unevenly throughout the vineyard. The fruit on some vines was further along than the fruit on some other vines. Were the least mature grapes mature enough?

Interestingly, in his vineyard journal, the Grand Monsieur made no mention of the evil that had occurred in his most prized vineyard.

Because the Grand Monsieur consistently produced the greatest wine in the world, everyone who knew anything about wine—and the many who pretended to know about wine—rightly considered him the greatest vigneron in the world. Some went so far as to liken him to a Buddha, to a shaman. For only a spiritual teacher, so went the thinking, could summon from the terroir such divinely balanced wines. In fact, it was about that time in the fall of 2010 that representatives of the wine magazine Decanter had informed Monsieur de Villaine’s representatives in the United States that the magazine wanted to put him on the cover as “Man of the Year.”
His advisers at the Domaine’s esteemed exclusive U.S. distributor, Wilson Daniels, urged him to seize the public relations opportunity. One of the firm’s owners, Jack Daniels, was advising him to go for it. Daniels had nothing at all to do with Jack Daniel’s, the famous American whiskey, yet he had a knack for pouring shots of the kind of American straight talk that Monsieur de Villaine had come to value.

The Grand Monsieur would never forget how Jack had stood by him when the Domaine’s wines were of such poor quality that they had to be quietly destroyed behind the Wilson Daniels headquarters in St. Helena, California. Jack had stuck by his side, too, when the family tensions threatened to tear apart the Domaine’s reputation and even the Domaine itself.

Still, the Grand Monsieur wasn’t sure about this award and magazine cover business. Grateful as he was, he didn’t want another award. The idea of posing for a cover photograph struck him as immodest and contrary to the Burgundian way. Hoping to entice him, the magazine’s people had pointed out that he would be the first Burgundian to ever receive the honor. Though at that moment he remained undecided, the idea that the Decanter exposure would be an opportunity for Burgundy to be honored and recognized so publicly dovetailed nicely with his “World Heritage” campaign.

Since 2008, Monsieur de Villaine had been leading an effort to have the United Nations add the Côte d’Or to its list of protected and cherished international landmarks. The list of some nine hundred sites included wonders such as Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the Athenian Acropolis in Greece, America’s Yellowstone National Park, and a select few wine-growing regions, such as Hungary’s Tokaj area and the Jurisdiction of Saint-Émilion in Bordeaux.

The Grand Monsieur believed the Côte met several of the criteria for World Heritage status, such as being an “exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition” and an “outstanding example of a traditional human settlement and land use.” And how could anyone deny that the Côte d’Or “contained superlative natural phenomena or areas of exceptional natural beauty and aesthetic importance”?

It wasn’t just the wine magazines and the worldwide legions of oenophiles and critics with their allegedly supernatural palates who regarded Monsieur de Villaine as something akin to the Shaman-Pope and Supreme Professor of wine. Most, if not all, of the world’s top winemakers held the same opinion. Certainly, all of Burgundy’s winemakers, whether they admitted it or lied and denied it, looked to the Domaine with awe and respect.

One of the neighbors to Monsieur de Villaine’s Domaine is the Domaine Georges Mugneret-Gibourg, a winery that itself produces some of the region’s most highly regarded wines. For the better part of a year and a half, I lived across the road from Domaine Georges Mugneret-Gibourg. It was comanaged by Marie-Andrée Mugneret-Gibourg. With her porcelainlike skin, youthful eyes, and pixie-style hair, the middle-age Marie-Andrée could have passed for a university student.

One afternoon while we visited and talked of the Grand Monsieur she spoke as if she indeed had a schoolgirl crush on him. Covering her mouth as if she were sharing a secret, she said, “Monsieur de Villaine. You know, you are very lucky to spend so much time with him and to learn about wine from him.” Then, in a reverential whisper, she told me, “I have only spoken to him once. Learning wine from him, you must realize, this is like learning physics from Einstein.”

Another nearby winery was the Domaine Faiveley, one of Burgundy’s most esteemed and dominant domaines, with vineyard holdings throughout the Côte d’Or. Domaine Faiveley is owned by François Faiveley, whose family had founded a company that had helped build much of the modern railway system throughout France and much of Europe. Even in his early sixties, François was a formidable ox of a man who appeared as if he could hammer a railcar together and lay a few miles of track himself if the need arose.
Not so long ago, when the world-renowned American wine critic Robert Parker, whose point-rating system dramatically shaped the modern wine market, crossed a line that François felt should not have been crossed, François led a campaign that single-handedly drove the critic out of Burgundy, essentially forever.

When François oversaw his family’s winery, his wines took on his personality. They were famous for being “bold” and “masculine.” Now that the winery was directly managed by his son, Erwan, Domaine Faiveley’s wines had a reputation for being more “ethereal” and having more “finesse.”
One evening, François was hosting a small group of wealthy American collectors at his domaine for a dinner, and as he poured a few of his son’s prized wines, he told the group that he believed the high point of the evening would come when he poured some wines sent over as a gift from Monsieur de Villaine. Upon hearing the unexpected news, Monsieur Faiveley’s guests were unable to restrain themselves. They clapped with delight and began to speculate among themselves which of the Domaine’s wines and which vintage they were about to “experience.” François benevolently nodded and smiled. “All of us in Burgundy aspire to what the Domaine achieves,” he said. “The Domaine is the standard.”

While his guests pretended not to be racing to finish their first pour of the 1999 La Tâche and positioning their glasses for a second, François nursed his first glass as if he were alone. I watched him take a sip, then he raised the glass before his eyes. He rolled the stem between his fingers and gazed over his bifocals into the Pinot. It was if he was pouring himself into the glass.
After a few long moments he turned to me with an apologetic expression on his face, as if to convey he was sorry for having drifted away.

In his gruff rumble of a voice François said: “When I drink this, when I drink the Domaine’s wines, what makes it special for me is I think of my dear friend, Aubert de Villaine. I see his face and I think of what he has gone through. I know the sacrifices he makes. During that crime against the Domaine, when the police were investigating, and no one knew anything, I never before saw him so distraught. In his face, you could see this was…”
François’s voice trailed off. He turned away and with his massive hand brushed a tear from his cheek.

Unlike the contemporary generations of vignerons who jockey for apprenticeships at the Domaine, Monsieur de Villaine had no degrees in oenology or agricultural engineering from celebrated French universities. Suffice it to say, Monsieur de Villaine could tell a lot from a grape just by looking at it, from considering the skin’s color and thickness. Tasting, he would tell you, was the truest way to know.

He squatted down between rows of vines where he knew the grapes were the least mature. He moved aside a canopy of leaves. He did this as lovingly as a parent might brush aside locks of hair from a small child’s forehead before a good-night kiss.

He plucked off a small bundle of grapes. He held them just so in his cupped hands, and carefully, with his long, slender fingers, he pushed apart the bundle to examine the quality of the interior grapes. He found only a modest and typical amount of moisture. He tugged off a berry, placed it in his mouth. He bit down on it, ever so gently, just enough to release the juice onto his palate, where he could savor it on the back center of his tongue, and deconstruct it, and cross-reference it with his forty years of tasting pre-harvest grapes.

He spit the grape onto his palm for examination. Poked at it. The purple skin mashed with the yellow-orange mush of the insides. The texture was good. The juice was good and sweet. Romanée-St.-Vivant was ready. If the weather held—and he judged it would—he could give these grapes even a few more days on the vine. For a moment, Monsieur de Villaine felt his hope float like a line cast high above the Loue.

Then he looked in the direction of his most precious vineyard, the most legendary vineyard in the world. It was just on the other side of the dirt road, marked by a tall concrete cross. Suddenly, everything he wished to forget came back: the ransom notes, the surveillance cameras, the midnight sting operation in the cemetery in Chambolle-Musigny—the murdered vines.

He felt uncertain and sick—and overwhelmed by an emotion he seemed incapable of—anger.

He wondered why God had betrayed him.

The Grand Monsieur walked toward the cross.

The Lord works in mysterious ways, he told himself.

Have faith. Believe.

CHAPTER 2

Unthinkable

The 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.

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:

MANY PEOPLE COME TO VISIT THIS SITE AND WE UNDERSTAND. WE ASK YOU NEVERTHELESS TO REMAIN ON THE ROAD AND REQUEST THAT UNDER NO CONDITION YOU ENTER THE VINEYARD. THANK YOU FOR YOUR COMPREHENSION.—THE MANAGEMENT

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.

CHAPTER 3

Conti

As 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.
Among the masses squeezed into the poorly defined Parisian city limits, wigged noblemen wore splendid collar-band waistcoats and polished, buckled, high-heel shoes; the powdered noblewomen were tightly corseted inside brightly colored hooped skirts of the finest imported fabrics, and many of them wore their hair styled in a towerlike fashion—the gravity-defying pompadour style made popular by the madame above all madames, Madame de Pompadour. Aristocrats promenaded on their way to doing positively nothing at all, doing their best to gracefully pass untouched through the masses.

The petites gens—the small people: workers, servants, artisans, shopkeepers—hurried about, fortunate to have jobs. Pickpockets, whores, and beggars in their tattered clothes, often infested with lice, ill and in some cases deformed by disease, assertively targeted their marks. Many nobles traveled in decorative, phone-booth-like sedans carried by servants or in carriages that rolled through the streets with footmen jumping from the carriage rails to shoo off the glut of commoners to make way.

As the rich and poor rubbed against one another, economic and religious friction sparked tensions that the media had lately fanned into flames. Reading had become more than the fad that French aristocracy thought it would be, or rather hoped it would be. For reading meant education and thought, and thereby enlightened challenges to the status quo. In the cafés and salons literate members of the Third Estate drank the “common” wine made from the Gamay grape, and read the papers and pamphlets and works by the likes of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Only a year earlier, in 1754, Rousseau had published his essay “What Is the Origin of Inequality Among Men? And Is It Authorized by Natural Law?” In it Rousseau wrote what those who had no voice longed to have heard:

Such was, or may well have been, the origin of society and law, which bound new fetters on the poor, and gave new powers to the rich; which irretrievably destroyed natural liberty, eternally fixed the law of property and inequality, converted clever usurpation into unalterable right, and, for the advantage of a few ambitious individuals, subjected all mankind to perpetual labor, slavery, and wretchedness.

It wasn’t just economic oppression—and oppression was now the word—it was also religious oppression. It was the Catholic state’s oppression of Protestants. On his deathbed, Louis XV’s predecessor had reaffirmed that Catholicism was the only religion in France. All subjects must kneel before Christ or else be regarded as traitors, and, as was the case for some Protestant pastors, be put to death. Protestant churches routinely were burned to the ground.

Rendered pariahs, the country’s community of Protestants peppered about the country gathered in open secret to worship and rallied one another in their treasonous conviction that they had a right to worship as they saw fit. Meanwhile, priests steadfastly preached the divine right of kings, now the authority of King Louis XV, who not surprisingly held the view that the Huguenots were a lesser species in need of conversion. Louis XV issued laws reinforcing Catholic hegemony, reiterating that only Catholic births, marriages, and deaths were legitimate—legislative genocide.

The Huguenots were not the only religious group feeling persecuted. Nudged by the church, Louis XV launched a political crusade against a Catholic splinter group. The Jansenists believed that God alone, through his mysterious and divine ways, determined who had grace, and that no man, no clergyman, not even the king himself could determine who was forgiven in the eyes of the Lord. As far as the establishment was concerned this was both religious and political heresy. Louis XV supported his bishops who banned Jansenists from receiving Catholic sacraments.

Protestant and Jansenist leaders appealed to their king and more directly to the magistrates of the French law courts, the parlements, and in particular, to the most influential of all the law courts, the Parlement of Paris, for equality, or at least some compromise that would allow them to live free, as citoyens. Parlementary magistrates wanted to provide a degree of what amounted to civil rights to accommodate the religious sects. To ease the tensions, the procureur général to the Parlement of Paris, Guillaume-François Joly de Fleury, suggested that the king consider recognizing Protestant marriages as civil unions. The reality denied by the monarchy was that Catholics lived quite nicely among Huguenots and Jansenists. Not only that, the Protestants were integral to the day-to-day French economy.
If the king would not reconsider his views for altruistic purposes or for reasons of economic necessity, the magistrates pointed out, there was the growing fear that the disenfranchised groups would coalesce into an uprising. Bloody riots already flared around the country. Passions were especially volatile in the south of France, where Protestant leaders like Crown-defined enemies of the state Pastor Paul Rabaut and Jean-Louis Gibert preached with rhetoric that was becoming more and more militant. Rabaut was of the mind that “the persecution is becoming stronger from day to day; and for quite a while, we have had so many reasons to cry, Lord, save us, for we are perishing.” Gibert was brazenly defiant. He proclaimed that his flock was prepared to “break the bonds of our captivity and uphold our liberty and that of our religion, even at the cost of our lives.”

Outside the echo chamber of the royal court, the reality had become so intense that in that spring of 1755 the Parlement of Paris refused to ratify Louis XV’s decision to allow the church to ban Jansenists from receiving the sacraments. Taking the position that the king’s policies required the approval of the parlement, the magistrates simply packed up and went on strike. In shutting down government business, the magistrates thumbed their noses at the king, also tabled approving his funds, putting a crimp in his debauchery. Louis XV dispatched musketeers to arrest four of the most vocal opposing magistrates, and he sent two hundred magistrates into exile.
The more steps Louis XV took to centralize his power, the more it fractured. While the French military was at war in several international theaters, by that summer of 1755 he feared a domestic revolt. Louis XV began to hear the protesting voices in his head like a relentless monastic chant, the vibrations of which began to shake his throne and his mental stability.

The king saw traitors where there were none, and trusted aides were there were traitors. As Pompadour’s personal handmaid wrote in her diary, the king had long been “habitually melancholy”; now he began to sense threats from all directions. While some members of the court whispered about paranoia, death was indeed coming for the king. Perhaps at that very moment it was choosing its weapon and path. A plot for assassination was under way.

In his private study, just as he had on matters of foreign affairs, the king turned to the man who had been his friend since they were children; the one person he trusted and respected more than any other; a man who was equally trusted and respected by the parlement, by the Protestants and Jansenists, by the French military, and for that matter, by the French people—his cousin, seven years his junior, the Prince de Conti.
During the day, when Conti’s carriage would travel through Paris, pushing through the crowds, his street-level perspective afforded him an intimate view of the volatility of the times. Everyone, everything, it was all right there in the streets of Paris: the people together before him, around him, so tightly mashed together, yet divided. Such that the country maybe could not stand. The inequity, the resentment, the hate: All of it was seething. He could smell it as plainly as he could smell the raw sewage dumped into the streets. The operative in Louis-François knew that such dissension could be a valuable tool. It could be harnessed; it was a power. He carried these observations with him into the darkness and his secret rendezvous.

The secret meeting had been facilitated by Conti’s aide, Nicolas Monin. Monin had served in the army under Conti and remained by his side when the prince returned to the royal court in the mid-1740s. It was as King Louis XV’s trusted chief of staff that Conti had been empowered to pursue delicate diplomatic missions and persuaded the king to agree that a network of spies was necessary to gather and relay intelligence throughout Europe via codes and other means. Monin had been an integral part of helping Conti build that infrastructure and managing reconnaissance assignments.
Recognizing the extraordinary nature of what was to be discussed that summer evening, Monin arranged for the treasonous appointment to take place down on the waterfront, in an abandoned building on one of the anonymous quays that wind along the banks of the Seine. Inside Conti greeted his visitor, none other than the Protestant pastor and wanted enemy of the state, Paul Rabaut.

It was the second meeting for the two, the first having occurred just a few weeks earlier. There was less of a need for small talk before getting to business. It would have been typically gracious of the prince to thank Rabaut for once again making the long trip from Nîmes to Paris. Rabaut, a man of devout faith and with immense respect for the prince, was always expressing his gratitude to Conti for his continued interest in the Protestant cause.

Because the meeting occurred around the prince’s August birthday, Conti would have had his age and mortality on his mind. Considering the endeavor in which the two of them were engaged, it was reasonable for Conti to wonder if he would live to see his next birthday.
Rabaut had contacted Conti months earlier, at first writing to him care of intermediaries, and then, having been assured that the prince sympathized with the Huguenots, to the prince directly. He had asked the prince if he would lobby the king to reconsider his policies regarding the Protestants. The prince had agreed.

The ostensible reason for the secret discussion now was a status report. The prince shared with Rabaut whatever progress he was making in his private sessions with the king. Rabaut briefed the prince on the state of affairs of the Protestants down south. In short, none of it was going very well. King Louis was unwilling to budge in any meaningful way and the Huguenots only grew more restless.

Before long, Conti began ever so softly exploring Rabaut’s interest in an armed uprising. The prince wanted to know just how united Rabaut’s parishioners were. He asked if they had access to arms. They did. He asked if they would they be willing to use them. Rabaut suspected they would. The prince wondered how often Rabaut or any of his colleagues communicated with their Huguenot brethren in England. More specifically, the prince was keenly interested in whether the Protestant leadership had any communication with the British military or government.

Indeed, the Protestants were communicating with England. It was likely that Conti already had some knowledge of this, as he had his own well-established lines of communication to London courtesy of the Secret du Roi network. The prince also had an idea, which he was now softly floating to his Protestant contacts like Rabaut: a nationwide Protestant uprising triggered by an English invasion on the southwestern coast of France.

Agents involved on both sides of the English Channel had begun to call the plan the “Secret Expedition.”

Excerpted from Shadows in the Vineyard by Maximillian Potter, published by Grand Central Publishing. Copyright © 2014 Maximillian Potter.

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