His lair was a hole in the ground, no larger than a shallow grave. Across the top a tarpaulin was pulled taught and camouflaged. The hole smelled like cheese.
For weeks in the late fall of 2009, he had emerged from this fox’s den in the dead of night, skulking around among the endless rows of grapevines in the Burgundy wine region of France.
The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World’s Greatest Wine”
by Maximillian Potter (Twelve)
Now it was time. At 1 a.m., with the nearby village dark and still, he clicked on his headlamp and picked up a battery-operated drill and a couple of turkey-baster-sized syringes.
In rubber boots and a long, hooded rain jacket, the shadow emerged from his lair and pulled the tarp tight to again make it indistinguishable from the forest floor. In the glow of the moon, he descended a brambly path for a half-mile. He hopped a stone wall and entered a vineyard, ducking low and gliding along rows of vines months past harvest and barren of any leaves or fruit.
He got down on all fours, dug away handfuls of rocky soil and then carefully pressed the drill’s bit into the vinestock. Into the pied de vigne — the foot of the vine — he quietly drilled with just a faint whirring.
As journalist Maximillian Potter describes in his new true thriller, “Shadows in the Vineyard,” the mysterious man injected the contents of one syringe into the vine’s root, sealed the drill hole with a tiny wooden plug and smoothed over the dirt. He repeated the act one vine over.
The domaine
Everyone’s heard of Bordeaux, the famed wine region in southwest France. The premier crus of Bordeaux were the tipple of choice of Napoleon, Louis XVI and even Thomas Jefferson.
But the wines of Burgundy are debatably better. Bordeaux does cabernet sauvignon and merlot blends, while Burgundy’s reds are the pinot noir grape. Remember the rhapsodizing in the film “Sideways” by Paul Giamatti about the precision of growing pinot in little tucked-away parts of the world — but how when that pinot is skillfully nurtured to its fullest potential, the wine is the most “brilliant” and “haunting”? That’s Burgundy, the Cote d’Or.
What’s not debatable is that Burgundy is a far smaller growing region than Bordeaux and therefore produces a fraction of the grape yield and thus far fewer bottles. As such, Burgundies are the most coveted wines in the world. And the consensus is that the most coveted Burgundies are from Domaine Romanée-Conti, known commonly as DRC or even just “The Domaine.”
It’s rare to even find DRC on store shelves. What little is produced at the tiny, postcard-quaint — you might even say “petite” — 4-acre vineyard is snapped up by distributors, private collectors and friends of the vineyard itself. On the “gray market” of secondary sales, the least expensive bottle of DRC could likely be had for under $1,000, but most would cost you closer to $10,000. A single aged bottle from a particularly good vintage, such as 1945, has gone for $124,000 at auction.
The DRC has been called a “cathedral” of a winery, and it’s common for oenophiles to make the pilgrimage on foot or bicycle from the village train station just to stand by the domaine’s stone wall and gaze at the vines.
On that wall is a sign in French and English that reads: “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.”
Pinot held hostage
The “Grand Monsier” of Domaine Romanée-Conti, the septuagenarian Aubert de Villaine, arrived home one night in January 2010 and leafed through his mail. Included was a cardboard cylinder, the type used for blueprints, and inside was a small note and a larger sheet of rolled paper.
It was a highly detailed map in pencil on grid paper, which Villaine recognized immediately as the DRC vineyard. As the man who directed the pruning of the vines, the picking of the grapes, Villaine knew immediately that this map was meticulous and accurate. Each grouping of the vineyard’s 20,000 vines was represented. A map this detailed didn’t even exist at the Domaine itself.
The note, printed from a computer, read, in part: “You just received a map of a part of Romanée-Conti in which you can see a circle . . . the vines inside this ring have been drilled a few centimeters under the surface of the ground . . . You will know why in about 10 days. In just enough time for you to realize this is not a joke.”
The next day, Villaine followed the map to the circled area and discovered the two poisoned vines. A week later, another tubular parcel arrived. This lengthier note explained that a sabotage operation had been under way for “a year” by a “team of six” conspirators. An unspecified number of vines had allegedly been poisoned deep at the roots and well concealed. In spring, as water and nutrients begin to rise from the soil, the poison would flow through the vines and leave them shriveled and dead.
The vines had been “kidnapped,” and the ransom was 1 million euros.
For that, the blackmailer would reveal the exact location of each sabotaged vine. But, Villaine thought, exactly what was the threat? Even if it was true, no grapes would be picked from visibly poisoned and withering vines, which in turn would be uprooted and replaced. That vintage’s yield may be lessened, fewer bottles of wine produced, but that’s hardly different than a year with unusually lousy weather.
The blackmailer had considered that.
“The target,” said the ransom note, “is the reputation of Romanée-Conti. If you wish to save the reputation of the vineyard, you need to neutralize the poisoned vines before the sap starts to rise. Know that it is possible to solve the problem in a fast, efficient and discreet manner.”
It was a fiendish yet brilliant caper. The world’s most legendary — practically mythological — vineyard could either buy secrecy or it could risk the inestimable damage of being labeled the poisoned pinot of France.
The drop
Working discreetly, lest DRC’s competition catch wind of the extortion plot, the French version of the FBI, the Police Nationale, began its investigation. Given the precision with which the saboteur had mapped the vineyard, the initial focus was on present and past employees. It had to be an inside job, the sleuths reasoned.
Cameras were installed around the Domaine. The phones were tapped. Nothing. For a month, the investigation was fruitless, not counting the occasional glass of wine offered to the police as a thank you.
The final note arrived in the mail with a time and place for the ransom drop. It was to be February 12, at dusk. The 1 million euros were to be left at a cemetery a short distance from the Domaine.
On the day of the drop, 1 million phony euros — as well as a GPS transmitter — was put in a duffel bag to be delivered by Villaine’s most trusted assistant. Officers in unmarked cars and vans and on foot patrolled the village. Others hid among the vines and in fixed positions in the woods.
“You’re doing great,” an agent told the DRC worker through an earpiece as he anxiously left the bag in the cemetery, as instructed, behind a row of bushes near the front gate. “We’re watching. We’re right here.”
For 30 minutes the police awaited the unknown: Would it be a motorcycle to snatch the bag and speed off cross-country, a van full of criminals packing AK-47s?
To their shock, through green-tinted night-vision goggles, the spotters watched as one man casually strolled out of the woods right past their positions. What hole in the ground could this guy possibly have crawled out of? He nonchalantly picked up the duffel bag and began walking down the country road.
Sour grapes
Jacques Soltys was the name police found on the credit cards in his wallet. And he was no master criminal. He carried no weapons. He had no accomplices, other than having talked up his schemes to a mostly indifferent son and wife he rarely saw.
After six unmarked police vehicles swept in and Soltys was arrested at gunpoint, police searched him on the roadside and found little more than a headlamp, a few hundred dollars worth of cash and a train ticket to Dijon.
Investigators couldn’t believe that what seemed like such a sophisticated extortion plot was perpetrated, basically, by a small-time smash-and-grab guy.
“I come from wine country,” Soltys said as he was grilled after the arrest. “I came up with the idea myself.”
Soltys had done some time for a bank robbery and a failed home invasion. It was during his nine-year stint for the home invasion that he’d come up with the Burgundy plan. The botched robbery was in Bordeaux, which he chose somewhat arbitrarily because he figured there were lots of rich chateau owners there. During the bungled theft, at one point he held hostages and demanded ransom.
In his cell, he began to think: Next time, don’t kidnap the vineyard owner. Kidnap the vineyard. He was so thrilled about his perfect-crime plot that upon being released from prison in 2008, he visited Burgundy for a quick look around even before returning home to his family in Epernay, about 300 miles away.
From magazines, he researched the top winemakers, those who would consider their reputation of paramount importance and be inclined to buy silence. At hardware stores, he bought the herbicides, drill, headlamps and other gear that he’d need to carry out his operation. Then, basically, he dug a hole in the woods of Burgundy and made himself comfortable.
In actuality, there were no other vines poisoned at DRC beyond the two revealed in the original threat note. It was all a grand bluff. As he awaited trial in the summer of 2010, 57-year-old Jacques Soltys twisted some clothing into a rope and hanged himself in his prison cell.
A few weeks later, on the slopes of Domaine Romanée-Conti, the grapes were picked and then pressed, blended, aged, bottled and cellared. It turned out that 2010 was a good year after all.