The night sky above the Côte d’Or countryside  is cloudless and  from dense woods over Vosne-Romanée a  man emerges.At this late hour, in early January 2010 no one stirs in the village below.
As the man descends the hill through  the vines, he has the air  of someone who knows precisely where he’s headed and what must be done when he gets there.  At one particular vineyard, the man stops. Unlike the vineyards around it, this one is marked by a monument: a tall, gray, stone cross that towers over the vines.

Here, in the vineyard called La Romanée-Conti, the man gets to his knees , reaches to his forehead, and a headlamp flicks on. He produces a drill and a syringe and begins to drill into the foot of the vine. He moves to a neighboring vine and does the same.
He takes up the syringe and injects its contents into the hole he has drilled in  the vine and  does the same to the other vine. The man collects his drill and syringe, turns off his headlamp, and makes his way  back up the hill and disappears back into the trees.

 Shortly thereafter Aubert de Villaine found himself reading an unsigned note informing him that the D.R.C. must prepare to pay a ransom or Romanée-Conti would be destroyed.With the  note  was  a cylindrical container  was  a detailed drawing of Romanée-Conti. While the 4.46-acre vineyard is  a rectangle, there are oddities to its shape. De Villaine noticed that whoever had sent this letter and sketched the vineyard knew its every contour, and what’s more, the author had noted every single one  20,000 vines. In the centre of the vineyard sketch was drawn a circle. The note stated that the vineyard would be destroyed unless  demands were met and  further instructions would be coming in 10 to 15 days.
De Villaine chose to  view the letter as a hoax, a kind of sick joke.Then, in mid-January 2010, he received another cylindrical container, and inside was the same sketch of the vineyard. Only this time there were two circles. In addition to the circle in the centre, there was another, much smaller circle in the upper left corner of the vineyard.
The note instructed de Villaine to leave one 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. The letter informed de Villaine that some 82 vines of Romanée-Conti had already been poisoned. According to the note, the 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, centre circle; however, those could be spared with an antidote—if  de Villaine paid up.
De Villaine called the authorities. He did not call the local police. Burgundy is too small, and  full of competitors who might use this against his Domaine. Investigators arrived at the D.R.C from Paris. The two vines supposedly poisoned were removed and it was verified they had been poisoned, and were dying. The other 80 or so vines in the large circle ,while they had been drilled  had not been poisoned. That part, at least so far, was a bluff.



On the advice of investigators, de Villaine did not drop off the money . Instead, a  employee left a note in the vineyard on the specified day, February 4. In the note, de Villaine relayed that he would pay as demanded, but it would take time to arrange the euros. Within days, de Villaine received another mailing which instructed him to deliver the money in a case to the cemetery  of Chambolle-Musigny. The suitcase was to be left inside the cemetery gates at 11 P.M. on February 12, 2010.
The week of the arranged drop-off, de Villaine was scheduled to be out of the country and the investigators  encouraged de Villaine to go about his normal business and to act as if nothing unusual were afoot. They reminded him, too, that the same D.R.C. employee who had left the note at the vineyard could serve as the drop-off man .This was Jean-Charles Cuvelier, the deputy manager of the D.R.C.

On the delivery day  of February 12, 2010 Cuvelier  traveled to the police station in Dijon, where he was briefed on the night’s plan. There would be about a dozen armed police officers hidden around  the cemetery. In the bag, along with a million  fake euro, there’d be a tracking device.be activated when the bag passed by a sensor embedded in the threshold of the cemetery archway. Cuvelier was instructed to keep the earpiece for his mobile phone in his ear  as a police officer would be in constant communication with him. Cuvelier dropped the bag in the flower box just inside the cemetery gate and left.
30 minutes later the would be blackmailer was apprehended.The man’s name was Jacques Soltys; he was in his late 50s.After Cuvelier left the bag, police spotted Soltys coming down a hillside on foot and heading to the cemetery. He retrieved the bag and  was caught less than 200 meters from the cemetery, on his way to a nearby train station. The  police learned that D.R.C. had not been Soltys’s only mark. He had  arranged a similar plot against another  highly regarded vineyard, Domaine Comte Georges de Vogüé, in Chambolle-Musigny. Police discovered this because the  package mailed to de Villaine had a Paris postmark. Footage from the surveillance cameras at that Paris post office revealed that another package,  similar to the ones mailed to de Villaine, had been mailed to de Vogüé. That vineyard, too, had lost two of its vines to poison.

Soltys had  built a shack deep in the woods atop the hills overlooking the vineyards. In the shack  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 , and a handgun.
Soltys had not been operating alone. He’d been able to mail the package to de Villaine’s home because Soltys had his son, Cédric, follow the wine-maker to learn his address. .


To show his thanks to the investigators, when de Villaine returned from his trip to America he invited them to the Domaine and uncorked a few bottles of 2006 Vosne-Romanée Premier Cru—along with a tasting of a 1961 Romanée-Conti—to toast their work.
As word of the crime leaked into the French press, de Villaine was hoping that the matter could be tied up quietly,  and that the criminal proceedings  would be resolved without trial.De Villaine was concerned that a trial would generate media attention, which in turn might inspire copycat crimes. Also, why would he want the world to think about the fact that weed killer had been injected into vines of Romanée-Conti? Five months after the arrests, the prosecution’s case against Jacques and Cédric Soltys became extremely difficult to pursue, because in July 2010, Soltys  hung himself in the  prison bathroom.