Maximillian Potter, “The Assassin in the Vineyard,” Vanity Fair, May 2011
“When Aubert de Villaine received an anonymous note, in January 2010,
threatening the destruction of his priceless heritage unless he paid a
one-million-euro ransom, he thought it was a sick joke,” writes Maximillian
Potter in this May 2011 Vanity Fair article chronicling “an unprecedented
and decidedly un-French” plan to poison the world’s most famous vineyard,
La Romanée-Conti. Considered the Holy Grail of Burgundy, the eponymous
wines produced by this 4.46-acre, centuries-old vineyard currently sell for
$6,455 per bottle, with 1945 vintages fetching upward of $38,000 per bottle.
According to Potter, it was only a few months before a record-setting auction
of Romanée-Conti that “word of the attack began seeping into the world
beyond Burgundy,” which has since sought to keep the affair quiet.
Potter traces the remarkable crime from early 2010, when vineyard owner
de Villaine began receiving anonymous ransom demands in the mail, to the
arrest of a career criminal known as Jacques Soltys, who later committed
suicide in prison. Soltys evidently had a background in winemaking and used
his expertise to target other topflight wineries as well as the Domaine de
Romanée-Conti, where he drove home his threats by poisoning several of the
priceless vines. As Potter explains, “from what the police had discovered, the
criminal, or criminals, used a syringe to inject the poison. This was especially
significant—over the centuries, vignerons had used such a pal or syringe-like
technique to inject liquid carbon disulfide into the soil and save the vineyards
from devastating infestations by the phylloxera insect.”
With the arrest of Soltys and an accomplice, however, the region’s vineyards
have apparently pledged themselves to resolving the matter without trial.
In addition to fearing that further media attention “would inspire copycat
crimes,” they have expressed concern that rumors of poisoned vines would
compromise the reputation of their wines. As one Cote winemaker told Potter,
“’Wine’ and ‘poison,’ these two words do not belong in the same sentence.”
