Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Plot to Poison the World's Greatest Wine by Maximillian Potter Page B

drive was sometimes a nuisance, but it provided both a real and a psychological buffer, enabling him to drive into and away from the world of the Domaine. Plus, Bouzeron had splendid if underrated vineyards of its own, wholly unlike those in Vosne-Romanée.
    The vineyards in Bouzeron had long been considered to have been the equivalent of fixer-uppers when he arrived. TheHoboken to Burgundy’s Manhattan. That was just fine with Monsieur de Villaine. From the moment he’d seen the landscape, felt it, squeezed the soil between his fingers, the young Grand Monsieur sensed their potential and the freedom they would afford him.
    In Bouzeron there were no expectations. He would be free to discover the
terroir
in his own way. There were no pressures other than those he chose to impose on himself. All in all, Monsieur de Villaine had quickly concluded that Bouzeron was the perfect place for him to raise his own
enfant
vines, and for him and Pamela to raise their own
enfants
, the children they so desperately hoped for.
    Monsieur de Villaine got out of his car, pushed open the gates by hand, got back in his Renault, and drove through. He parked in a stone barn just inside and to the left of the gates. Two large sheepdogs, Sibelle and Ethan, shaggy like giant mop ends, gathered around him as he walked to the steps of his stone home, where the windows glowed yellow warmth.
    Immediately inside the front door, he found Pamela preparing dinner. When they’d first met, she couldn’t make toast. Once, back in America, when Pamela had been briefly put in charge of a grill, she nearly set a wooden porch on fire. In Burgundy, she developed into a fine cook. She’d found a group of friends—one in particular, another American expat—who taught her to cook and, as a gift, given Pamela lessons with a chef.
    Monsieur de Villaine hung his jacket and hat on a rack just inside the door and approached a stack of mail. Those days he was eager for correspondence regarding the Côte d’Or’s candidacy for World Heritage Site status. The program is run by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization(UNESCO). Such a designation means a site is one of the most significant treasures in the world. UNESCO had already recognized French landmarks such as Versailles, the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, and the banks of the Seine. For the previous two years, Monsieur de Villaine had chaired a Burgundian committee to gain World Heritage designation for the Côte d’Or. If Bordeaux’s Saint-Émilion region qualified, Monsieur de Villaine had no doubt that the Côte d’Or met the UNESCO criteria of being an “exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilization which is living”; its vineyards “contained superlative natural phenomena or areas of exceptional natural beauty and aesthetic importance”; and it was one of the “outstanding examples representing major stages of earth’s history, including the record of life, significant on-going geological processes in the development of landforms, or significant geomorphic or physiographic features.”
    For a man considering his legacy, to have Burgundy recognized for all that it was, at least to him and his grandfather and father, as a World Heritage Site, well, the Grand Monsieur might be able to retire feeling that he had fulfilled his destiny, because Burgundy would have fulfilled its own.
    There was nothing that evening in the mail from UNESCO, but in the pile he saw a cardboard cylinder, the kind an architect might use for blueprints. It was addressed to him and had been delivered by one of France’s overnight delivery services, Colissimo. The ends were capped and thoroughly taped. He opened one end and removed the contents: a small note and large sheet of rolled paper. He spread out the large piece of paper on the table. It was a map drawn on grid paper. Monsieur de Villaine immediately recognized the design. He read the note. It hadbeen typed on a computer and was