The blackmail against the vines of Romanée-Conti
Vosne-Romanée, Burgundy, France, 2010
This case is a work of fiction. The characters, names, places and events in the game do not portray real people. The account below is a factual summary, based on public sources, of the case that served as inspiration.
In January 2010, the co-director of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, producer of the most expensive wine in Burgundy, received at home a cardboard tube with a pencil map, on graph paper, of a stretch of the 1.8-hectare vineyard, and a note saying that the vines inside a circle had been drilled close to the ground. The next day he found two drilled and poisoned vines. A new letter demanded one million euros and threatened to poison the roots of the entire vineyard; the target, it said, was the reputation of Romanée-Conti.
The domaine alerted the police at the very first letter, and the investigation ran in secret. The last message set the money handover at a cemetery near the vineyard. The police prepared a bag of fake bills, left by a trusted employee of the domaine, and surrounded the place. In February, they arrested the man who came to collect the bag: a former student of the Beaune viticulture school, 57 years old, from the Champagne region, already known to the police for earlier crimes. His son was charged with complicity.
Sources
In the game
Hostage Vine
Côte de Nuits, Burgundy, Friday, February 12, 2010, 11 pm. In the cuverie of the Domaine du Clos-Sabrier, among oak vats, an open cardboard tube lies on the table next to an unrolled pencil map.
The accused said he had come up with the idea alone. There were no other poisoned vines besides the two on the map: the threat to the whole vineyard was a bluff, and the 2010 harvest was picked normally. He was also charged with trying to extort another neighboring domaine, in Chambolle-Musigny. Months later, while awaiting trial, he hanged himself in his cell in the Dijon prison. The case only became public in May 2010.
