As one walks down the road in the village of Vosne Romanée, he passes through the pleasant scenery of grape vines meticulously arranged, carefully tended; they look like they have been taken care of by one’s loved one.

At one moment he stops, in front of him is a vineyard very different.  A vineyard guarded by a short stone wall, atop marked by a tall grey cross made of stone. Engraved on it is “1723”; and a sign affixed to it which in French and English 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. Thank you for your comprehension.

Here is where wine lovers bow as if it’s the destination to their pilgrimage. Thousands of devotees from all around the world visit this patch of land to bow down, as if its Mecca. The patch of earth is La Romanée-Conti and it’s where the wine made is of Godly stature.

But this is different, has come with entirely different intentions. Think of the Mission Impossible theme playing in your head; a cold night in Bourgogne, a man reaches out to his forehead and switches on the head lamp. In the shadow of his figure, he produces a drill and a syringe. He reaches out to a root and starts to drill; he moves to a vine nearby drills into the root again and injects the contents of the syringe in one of the vines. His concentration intact, breath gasping and the whirl of the drill lost in the cold wind. Does the same with the other vine, switches off his head lamp and through the stretch of the vineyard vanishes into the hill.

It was in the month of January 2010.

Aubert de Villaine arrived home one night in January 2010 and leafed through his mail. In the package was a large parchment in a cylindrical tube, something that is used by architects to carry their project designs. What Mr. De Villaine saw was a map of Romanée Conti, it was not just any map; it was a detailed blueprint of the 4.4 acres of vineyard, by pencil on a grid paper. A map pinpoint accurate to every corner, curve and featured nearly all the 20,000 vines in the parcel. The map with this detailed didn’t exist in the Domaine itself. In the center of the map was a circle, an indication of sorts. The package also had a letter which said that the vineyard would be destroyed unless certain demands were met; the note also stated that another letter with further instructions would be coming in 10 to 15 days.

De Villaine, thought of it to be unreal and a hoax; a silly joke that was played on him. A similar package was delivered to the home of Henry-Frédéric Roch, who was the co-director of the D.R.C. and represents the Leroy family.

In the mid of January, De Villaine was welcomed by another package. The package was like another blueprint and this time there was another circle drawn on the upper left corner of the vineyard.

The letter instructed De Villaine to leave a million Euros in a suitcase in the corner of the Romanée-Conti vineyard, right near the area represented by the small circle on the drawing. To show that he/they meant business; the letter informed him that around 82 vines of Romanée-Conti had already been poisoned.  The note was printed from a computer, read: “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.”

Two vines in the area marked on the sketch by two X’s in the small circle had been killed by poison. The other 80 vines were marked by X’s in the much larger circle in the center of the map. The due date to drop off the money was 4^th of February 2010.

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 prolonged note explained that an operation to sabotage DRC had been under way for “a year” by a “team of six” conspirators. 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.

This sent De Villaine into a panic. While he wanted to investigate, he wanted it to be handled properly. He called the police based in Paris, avoiding the local police as he wanted to avoid any gossip or leak. It was unimaginable or rather he knew, what could have happened if the word spread out that DRC has been compromised. Who knew if it was a valid threat or not.

He met the senior officials of the Police Nationale in Dijon and explained the situation. Investigators arrived at DRC; provided the precision with which the vandal had mapped the vineyard, the initial focus was on present and past employees. The police were guessing an inside job.

 The two supposedly poisoned wines were removed, once checked they found that indeed those two vines were poisoned and were dying. While the other 80 odd wines were a bluff; while they were drilled, they hadn’t been poisoned. There was one thing about which De Villaine was sure; that the extortionists knew the importance and value of DRC. It was someone who had entered the vineyard multiple times, to know every nook and corner of the vineyard. It was also someone who knew a great deal about wines as the letter used words like décavaillonnage and démontage.

Décavaillonnage : Decavalage; is a plowing technique that allows the strip of earth located at the foot of the vine stumps to be turned over.

Démontage : Vine removal. Removal of excessive from vine.

It was also confirmed that the culprit/s used a syringe. A tool that was used by vignerons to put lifesaving carbon disulfide in vines to save them from various diseases was in turn now used to kill the very vines.

On the advice of the investigators, De Villaine didn’t drop the money, instead he took his trusted employee Jean-Charles Cuvelier (Director of Administration at DRC) in confidence to set a trap. On February 4^th, Cuvelier left a note at the given spot promising that the ransom would be paid after a period needed to gather such a large sum; that they will have to call a meeting with the shareholders from the Leroy and De Villaine family.

A third letter was received in a matter of few days; a letter that was now polite and asked him to “please” deliver the money, in a suitcase to the cemetery in the nearby town of Chambolle Musigny, at 11pm on February 12, 2010.

During the time of drop-off De Villaine, was scheduled to visit UAS for business. The police asked De Villaine to attend to business and suggested Cuvelier is involved in the next step of the plan; they said he seemed to be” capable and cold blooded”; maybe it came from his loyalty for DRC.

A little background on the man himself; Cuvelier was Aubert de Villaine’s trusted right hand man for a long time, since 1993 to be exact. He was man who could proactively understand De Villaines needs. For his loyalty to De Villaine and DRC he was pretty much called “the guardian of the temple”.

He was also a widower, after he lost his wife in 2008. Also being the perfect excuse for anyone to see him going to the cemetery, maybe he is just going to see his wife. When given the task, he made himself wonder what his wife would have said if she could see him now. Trying to give himself some courage. Not knowing what was going to happen, he could only hope she would watch over him and keep him safe.

Earlier on the D-day, Cuvelier met the investigators in Dijon who laid out the plan to him. There will be around a dozen of armed police men hidden around the cemetery keeping an eye on him. In his bag will be fake notes worth a million euros with a tracking device in it.  The tracker will get activated as soon as the bag passes the threshold of the sensor laden archway of the cemetery.

The investigators instructed Cuvelier to keep his cellular earpiece on as he will be constantly instructed by the police squad there.

The cemetery is on the outskirts of the town. It’s square, surrounded by a stone wall, and not much bigger than a public pool. The entrance of the cemetery is an arch, green wrought-iron fence.

Come to the moment, picture the Sherlock theme on, pitch dark of a night. Breathing heavily, fearful and perspiring, Cuvelier walks through the squeaking cemetery gate at 11:00 PM as instructed by the conspirator/s.

As instructed, he placed the bag in the flower box and exited the cemetery. Sits in his car and drove off from the location. In around 30 minutes, he receives a call from the police that they got him.

Cuvelier immediately called Aubert de Villaine in the USA and informed him. After Cuvelier left the bag, police spotted a man coming down a hillside on foot, heading toward the cemetery. He retrieved the bag and walked off. He was caught less than 200 meters from the cemetery, on his way to a nearby train station. With him he had few hundred dollars in cash and a train ticket to Dijon.

The man was Jacques Soltys; in his 50’s now. He knew a decent deal about winemaking. In his childhood was sent to the Lycée Viticole de Beaune, a school that specializes in winemaking. During his school days he was in trouble for smoking and cursing and had been expelled.

He was a career criminal in his youth, part of armed robberies. Was in prison for a part of his youth when he realized that there was an easier way of making money by extorting wine makers.

Soltys had made a very detailed plan, he had built a temporary cabin deep in the woods on the hills overlooking the vineyards. In the cabin, among other things, police found a sleeping bag, a couch, a hot plate, a change of clothes, the clothes of a vineyard laborer, batteries, a headlamp, a cordless-drill kit, syringes, many bottles of the weed killer Roundup, and a handgun.

He was not operating alone; his accomplice was his son Cédric. Jacques Soltys was able to deliver the mail to De Villaine as Soltys had his son, Cédric, follow the winemaker and learn his address.

The D.R.C. had not been Soltys’s only target. He had simultaneously devised a similar plot against another very highly famed vineyard, Domaine Comte Georges de Vogüé, in Chambolle-Musigny. Investigators tracked this because the first package delivered to De Villaine had a Paris postmark. Footage from the surveillance cameras at that Paris post office revealed that another package, a very similar package, had been mailed to the owners of de Vogüé. Their vineyard, too, had lost two of its vines to poison.

After his return from the USA, De Villaine invited the investigators to the estate to thank them for their effort. He uncorked a few bottles of 2006 Vosne-Romanée Premier Cru along with a tasting of a 1961 Romanée-Conti.

The trials continued and then couldn’t be pursued as Jacques Soltys was found dead in Dijon prison. According to officials, as he awaited trial in the summer of 2010, 57-year-old Soltys twisted some clothing into a rope and hanged himself in his prison cell.