Amazon Best Publication of the Month, July 2014

Journalist Maximillian Potter uncovers a fascinating story to destroy the vines of La Romanée-Conti, Burgundy’s finest and most expensive wine.

In January 2010, Aubert de Villaine, the famed proprietor of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, the small, storied vineyard that produces the priciest, exquisite wines in the globe, received an anonymous notice threatening the devastation of his invaluable vines by poison-a crime that in the wonderful world of high-end about Shadows in the Vineyard: The True Story of the Story to Poison the World’s Greatest Wines wine is akin to murder-unless he paid a one million euro ransom. Villaine believed it to be always a ill joke, but that demonstrated a fatal miscalculation as well as the crime surprised this fabled area of France. The sinister story that Vanity Fair journalist Maximillian Potter uncovered would lead to a sting procedure by a few of France’s top detectives, the primary suspect’s suicide, and a dramatic analysis. This botanical crime threatened to destroy the fiercely traditional tradition surrounding the world’s ideal wine.

SHADOWS IN THE VINEYARD will take us deep into a captivating world full of fascinating people, small-town French politics, an memorable narrative, and a local culture defined with the twinned blood vessels of excessive and vitality as well as the deep reverent focus on the property that runs through it.