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

with the next vintage, even when this was not truly his mood. Just as De Gaulle had done in the face of trying circumstances, Edmond presented an indefatigable and dignified front.
    From the ankles up Edmond dressed like many men of his era, which is to say, a gentleman. That morning he wore, as he often did, a white dress shirt, a dark-colored three-piece suit, and a thin, dark tie. He could have passed for a banker or a lawyer from Beaune or Dijon. Then there were his shoes: well-worn, dirt-dusted leather boots, cinched tight. The boots were the only outward clue that Edmond was a vigneron.
    In the broadest definition of the term,
vigneron
means“winemaker,” anyone connected with the production of wine. The literal translation of the word is “vine grower.” In the true Burgundian sense, however, a vigneron is neither of these things. In Burgundy, vignerons do not make wine. On the contrary, they marry grapevines to soil; they work in a communion with nature to raise
enfants
in the spiritually infused ecosystem of
terroir
, hoping to produce thousands upon thousands of wildly diverse, complex wines. What makes the pursuit of such diversity especially interesting is that although there are more than thirteen hundred varietals of grape, Burgundian vignerons work almost exclusively with only two—the Pinot Noir, and the Chardonnay for white wines.
    Technically no French word even exists for “winemaker,” because the French philosophy is that man does not make wine, God does. Vignerons merely tend, harvest, press, and vinify what He has provided. They kneel and pray, work and wait.
    While the concepts of
vigneron
and
terroir
exist elsewhere in France, no community of vignerons takes all of this more seriously than the subculture, or perhaps, superculture of Burgundian vignerons. These philosopher-farmer-shamans strive to bottle the divine as the divine deserves, convinced that the blood of Christ flows from these veins of the earth.
Terroir
and
vigneron
, in Burgundy, are terms of a religion, and of all the sacraments and rituals Burgundian vignerons hold dear, none is more sacred than the marrying of a vine to earth.

    Little Aubert loved to be hoisted into Edmond’s lap and listen to his stories. There was the one about the World War I victory parade: Edmond was marching along with the French and Allied armies on the Champs-Elysées. Some friends of his were in thecrowd and when they saw him began to shout, “
Vive Villaine!
” Within moments, as Edmond told the story to Little Aubert, other onlookers joined in: “
Vive Villaine! Vive Villaine!
” Edmond continued to march in step, his eyes straight, and smiled.
    Although he never said as much to his grandson, for Edmond, watching his fellow soldiers in his formation spot their girlfriends and wives, listening to them call out their love, watching them blow kisses and cry tears of joy before their imminent reuniting and resumed lives together, must have been an extraordinarily bittersweet experience, a reminder that his Marie-Dominique was gone.
    Edmond had played no especially heroic role in World War I. He made that clear to his grandson. Edmond had simply been a man among men. The real heroes were the fallen, whose names would be etched in stone on the memorials erected in nearly every French village. But to hear his name, to be recognized as a small part of that campaign, well, that had made Edmond proud. Which made his grandson proud.
    The resemblance between the two of them was striking. The mannerisms. The physique. Aubert, too, was beginning to lean. Into what, exactly, was something to be determined. Most obviously they were alike in their faces. Aubert had those same arching eyebrows budding on his face; faint as they were, they gave the impression that the boy possessed a wisdom, or maybe it was a skepticism, beyond his years.
    The dominant method of populating the vineyards of France at the time was a viticultural technique called
provignage
: An