Read Bruno 02 - The Dark Vineyard for Free Online Page A

Mercedes and taken the presidential suite, at a cost of nearly a thousand euros a night. He had demanded an Internet connection the moment he checked in, then had ordered the
menu dégustation
and a bottle of Château Pétrus, followed by the best Armagnac. The booking had been made by the Dupuy consultancy in Paris, on the avenue Monceau. Bruno checked his notebook for the names he had scribbled down at the wine shop. The address and the phone number were the same. Monsieur Dupuy had booked a room at the hotel that night.
    Bruno fired up his computer, typed in Google.fr and looked up the name Bondino. A flood of page references came up, starting with Bondino Wines, Inc., in English and in Spanish. He understood enough to see that they ran vineyards in California, Chile, Australia and South Africa and were clearly a verylarge and rich company. He turned back to the main Google page and found articles in French from
Figaro, Marianne
and
Les Echos
, the business paper. The
Figaro
piece was an interview, which he printed out, marking the passage in which the head of the company, Francis X. Bondino, was asked if his global wine empire would ever spread to France.
    “France and Italy are the homes of great wine, and our ambition will not be satisfied until we return to the source of our craft in these great countries,” Bondino was quoted as saying. His son Fernando had added: “And frankly, the wine industry in these countries is suffering from too many small vineyards overproducing too much indifferent wine. They have not yet followed the United States and Australia into a rationalization of the industry with new techniques and modern marketing. Opportunities for reorganization are enormous.”
    Bruno read on in
Marianne
about a family feud that had split the business a generation earlier, with prolonged lawsuits and much bad blood, and a brother and sister disinherited.
Les Echos
had a story about the company’s buying new vineyards in South Africa the previous year, along with some figures that startled Bruno. Bondino had turned down an offer to sell the company for six hundred million euros; he had nearly three thousand employees worldwide—roughly the population of Saint-Denis—and had made a profit the previous year of thirty-eight million euros. Marveling at the amount of instant information that the computer brought to his desk, Bruno printed out the story from
Les Echos
and prepared a small dossier of his research for the mayor, while wondering what exactly a firm so large might want from his little town. He turned to his telephone and called Saint-Denis’s own expert on the wine trade, Hubert de Montignac.
    “Bruno, my friend. I’ve put aside a fine bottle for you to show my appreciation for your tact and good sense,” Hubertbegan as soon as he heard Bruno’s voice. “Really, I owe you a big favor.”
    “Just doing my duty. Listen, what can you tell me about an American wine corporation called Bondino?”
    “Bondino is very big, up there close to Gallo and Mondavi among the American giants. Worldwide operations—Australia and South Africa—and there was a rumor that they’re sniffing around one of the big Bordeaux châteaux. They make their money with mass wines they call varietals.”
    “What are varietals?”
    “It’s just the name of a grape, like chardonnay or cabernet sauvignon, with each brand made from a particular grape. It’s mass production, trying to make exactly the same product year after year, whatever the weather and terrain. Why are you asking about Bondino?”
    “He’s coming in to see the mayor. That’s all we know, so I thought I’d call you. What would Bondino Wines want with us?”
    “Could be a number of things. They don’t have much of an operation in Europe, and it might not be a bad idea for them to look around here. As you know, we used to be a big wine area before the phylloxera epidemic, and then we started growing tobacco instead. Now the tobacco trade is dying, so