A Story Idea Each Day for a Month — Day 21
This story is courtesy of Gabe Gomes, a writer from Brazil: The Assassins in the Vineyard:
Who would poison the vines of La Romanée-Conti, the tiny, centuries-old vineyard that produces what most agree is Burgundy’s ?nest, rarest, and most expensive wine? When Aubert de Villaine received an anonymous note, in January 2010, threatening the destruction of his priceless heritage unless he paid a one-million-euro ransom, he thought it was a sick joke. But, as Maximillian Potter reveals, the attack on Romanée-Conti was only too real: an unprecedented and decidedly un-French crime.
This story is from the most recent issue of Vanity Fair so it’s probably already under option somewhere, but it’s a pretty cool ass idea for a crime-thriller:
Here, in the vineyard called La Romanée-Conti, the man drops to his knees. For a moment, it appears that he might pray, that he might be one of the thousands of devotees who every year for decades now have come from around the world to see this patch of earth that oenophiles regard as a kind of mecca-Xanadu.
“A fabulous thing” — so begins one of the books about this vineyard. “Mysterious, sensuous, transcendental, the greatest wine in the dukedom of Burgundy, once reserved for the table of princes, its origins blurred in the mists of time — cannot help but spawn fabulists. For two centuries, no wine — no vineyard — has so deeply and so consistently motivated man’s mythologizing instinct as La Romanée-Conti.”
But the man has come for other reasons entirely. His breath puffing into the frigid night air, he reaches to his forehead, and a headlamp flicks on. From his shadow of a shape, he produces a cordless drill and a syringe. He begins to drill into the pied de vigne — the foot of the vine — the low whir of the drill’s motor lost in the cold, smothered by the overwhelming quiet. He moves to a neighboring vine, less than a yard away, and does the same.
He takes up the syringe. He plunges it into the hole he has drilled in one of the vines and injects some of the syringe’s contents. He performs the same procedure on the other vine. The man collects his drill and syringe, turns off his headlamp, and makes his way up the hill. He steps from the sea of vineyard and disappears back into the trees.
Just when you thought every interesting crime had already been handled in movies, along comes this.
Instead of vamping on where to take the story, what about this: From which point of view would you tell the story? A cop investigating the crime? The owner of the vineyard? A vineyard worker? The criminal?
What would you do with this story?