My second visit to France’s Château Belle Époque. When I first came here, my heart had swelled at the thought of owning a vast estate spanning sixty hectares—about 150 acres. But on my second visit, it felt a little different. There was pride in being the owner of land in a world-renowned wine region, and a certain awe toward the people here, who thought of nothing but wine.
Here, as if time had stopped, there existed only endless vineyards and people in shabby clothes who cared for nothing but grapes. Though their approach might differ somewhat from American farms that actively embraced advanced technology, one could not deny their purity.
That sense of awe lasted only a moment. When I arrived at my destination, Château Belle Époque, the one who greeted me was Daniel Grendel, sitting in utter despair beside an old pickup truck. His boots were a mess with the heavy clay particular to this Right Bank region, and his eyes were bloodshot as if he had gone several nights without sleep.
“Master... it’s my fault. It’s completely ruined.”
Where Daniel pointed stood the Sauvignon Blanc and Sémillon saplings that had been planted with such ambition after pulling out Bordeaux’s pride, Merlot. The young vines, barely thirty centimeters tall, were turning yellow beneath the harsh late-summer sun of September. The edges of their leaves had burned brown, and their stems drooped weakly.
“Let’s take a look first, then talk. Could you bring me a portable electrical conductivity meter and some litmus paper?”
“Of course.”
Daniel went inside and came back with the equipment I had mentioned. Taking it from him, I silently knelt in front of one of the saplings. I grabbed a handful of soil, mixed it with distilled water, and dipped the test paper into it.
“pH 8.2... strongly alkaline.”
I muttered it rather calmly, but anyone who knew even a little about farming would have been shocked by how fatal that result was.
“Hoo... I have nothing to say.”
“Forget blame. What do you think the reason is?”
At my question, Daniel answered with a distressed face.
“Normally, even if the soil on Bordeaux’s Right Bank contains limestone, the clay layer provides a buffering effect. But this time, in order to restore the soil’s fertility after pulling out the Merlot, we turned the earth over deeply, and that seems to have been the cause. A massive limestone bedrock that had been lying dormant beneath the surface was exposed, and it completely destroyed the soil’s chemical balance.”
“As expected...”
My thoughts aligned with his. I had worried that he might even misdiagnose the cause, but fortunately, Daniel was not that incompetent.
“Shall we go out and take a look?”
Daniel and I went deeper into the vineyard to examine the clearly diseased vines. It made my stomach churn to look at them one by one, but I did not avert my eyes. Then, suddenly, I stopped walking and knelt on one knee, examining a small sapling closely.
“Hmm...”
“Is there another reason?”
“The rootstock is the problem. This ‘SO4—Selection Oppenheim 4’ rootstock you ordered has strong disease resistance, but in such highly alkaline soil, its iron absorption would have been completely blocked. In effect, it’s no different from starving them to death through malnutrition.”
Just as golfers change clubs depending on their purpose, the rootstocks used in grape cultivation come in various types according to their use. Among them, SO4 is one of the most widely used rootstocks in the world, known for its fast growth and strong resistance to pests and diseases such as phylloxera and nematodes. The problem was that it was vulnerable to limestone; when the soil contained a lot of limestone and the pH rose, it could not absorb iron from the soil.
Realizing that the cause of the problem lay with him, Daniel clutched his head.
“Ahh, I had no idea the bedrock was so shallow here. I’m sorry. I was too complacent. The geological survey report said this section was clay down to a depth of three meters. That’s why I chose the stable SO4...”
“You didn’t know there would be such massive limestone bedrock underground.”
It was a mistake caused by an error in the geological survey report. After all, Daniel, a former deputy chief winemaker at Domaine Leroy, would never have used SO4 without thinking instead of the limestone-resistant 41B rootstock.
“Still... Hah, is this the god of Bordeaux rejecting us?”
“Don’t think too much in that direction just because the result is bad. Luck plays an important role in everything, and this time, we were just a bit unlucky.”
“Everyone around us is making a fuss, saying this is the price we pay for daring to make white wine on the Right Bank. People from Moueix have already come by too. They all laughed.”
“They’re probably praying for us to fail. We’ve identified the cause, so let’s go inside.”
Because I had heard the general situation before coming here, it did not take too long to determine the cause.
Rather than despairing with Daniel, I comforted him and walked toward the winery. But then, a silver Bentley glided smoothly through the farm entrance.
“Huh?”
As I tilted my head, Daniel said with a deathly expression.
“They must have heard rumors that Master was coming. They’re here to mock us.”
The person who stepped out of the car was Bordeaux’s living legend, Christian Moueix. Dressed in a perfectly tailored linen suit, he approached with an air of elegance even on the poorly maintained dirt road.
“Ah, Brian. You must have had a long journey.”
Moueix’s voice was as smooth as silk. Stopping in front of me, he looked at the yellowed saplings with pitying eyes and shook his head.
“What a shame. The California sun may be merciful, but Bordeaux soil is not so accommodating to outsiders. My heart ached from the moment you pulled out that Merlot, you know.”
I brushed the dirt off my hands and extended one.
“It’s an honor that you came all the way here in person, Monsieur Christian.”
“As a senior in this field, it weighs heavily on my heart to see a talented young man like you button the first button wrong. Could we talk for a moment? Perhaps over a glass of that California wine you cherish so much.”
“Why not? Please come in.”
For an instant, Daniel looked visibly flustered, but I ignored him and led Moueix inside.
After seating him on the sofa in the old château’s reception room, I opened a bottle of Quiet Hill I had brought in advance and poured it into a glass.
“It’s a single-vineyard Pinot Noir from the Russian River Valley in Sonoma, next to Napa Valley. It should be pleasant enough to enjoy.”
Christian sank deep into the sofa and lifted the glass I handed him. The sight of a Bordeaux master savoring a California wine created a peculiar tension.
He held a sip of wine in his mouth, swallowed slowly, then spoke.
“Excellent. As expected, you have a talent for making wine.”
“Thank you.”
He looked at me meaningfully, then brought up the main subject.
“To be honest, I came because I was a little curious. The limestone bedrock beneath Belle Époque’s land right now cannot be dissolved by any technique you possess. Wouldn’t this be nature’s rejection? The Sauvignon Blanc you planted will probably dry up and die before seeing next spring. In Bordeaux, there is a saying: ‘A farmer who fights the land can never win.’”
“I agree with that completely.”
At my words, his eyes gleamed.
“You agree?”
“Of course. When it comes to farming, it’s practically textbook. You can’t farm without understanding the land.”
He looked at me as if he found that odd.
“Strange. It feels as though you’re speaking of the current crisis as if it were someone else’s problem.”
“Haha, does it? I do consider it a crisis.”
“So it is a crisis? Can you explain in more detail?”
I topped off Christian’s glass, which had already been emptied halfway, and answered calmly.
“I said farming is about understanding the land, didn’t I? This time, I admit we lacked understanding of Château Belle Époque. It was clearly a mistake. So I intend to have a little more of a conversation with it.”
“What?”
Perhaps thinking it was a joke, Christian’s eyebrows twitched. But I gave a faint smile and continued explaining.
“It’s something like this. The land is screaming right now, saying, ‘I’m too thirsty, and I can’t breathe,’ but we failed to understand it.”
“And so?”
“Now that we understand, we’re going to tell it our side of the story.”
He realized that “our side of the story” referred to my plan to recover from this situation. Soon, he narrowed his eyes and leaned his upper body toward me.
“And what is that story?”
I burst into laughter.
“Hahaha! Monsieur Christian, you certainly have many questions.”
“I imagine everyone in Bordeaux who has anything to do with wine will be curious.”
“You’ll be able to hear the story I tell later.”
“So you won’t tell me?”
“It’s a rather confidential story.”
At the word “confidential,” the corners of his eyes trembled. It was not because anger had flared up, but because he was curious and could not openly beg me to tell him, so he was simply irritated.
“You have quite the talent for making people impatient.”
“I can feel your love for wine, Monsieur Christian. It makes me realize once again that calling you the king of Bordeaux is no exaggeration.”
His face stiffened at once. He must have understood that I was pointing out there were things even the king of Bordeaux still did not know. Compared to an American winemaker, no less.
He took another sip of wine and set down the glass.
“Quiet Hill, was it? It conveys the feeling of silence and being in a forest quite well. But it’s too dull. Old men would like it.”
With that single comment, essentially evaluating it as a stale wine only old men would drink and thereby making his displeasure known, he swept out of the château. From the rough energy radiating from his retreating footsteps, I could easily guess that he was quite irritated right now and would be watching Belle Époque even more closely from now on.
“I think you handled that well. It was obvious he came just to mock us, and watching that was so satisfying for me. Ugh... seriously...”
Perhaps because Daniel believed Belle Époque had ended up this way because of him, his face was still flushed red.
“Let’s forget about that and focus only on how to recover.”
At my words, Daniel rubbed his face dryly and nodded. He still did not seem to have fully escaped the swamp of despair, but I was focused solely on the farm.
“Daniel, send someone to a nearby construction site right now and rent two small auger drills. And gather as much agricultural sulfur powder and nitrate fertilizer as you can. Ah, we’ll also need at least two truckloads of charcoal and coarse gravel.”
“Drills? Sulfur powder? Master, what are you...?”
Daniel asked back with a blank expression. From the standpoint of Bordeaux’s traditional methods, it must have been an utterly unimaginable combination.
“I said the land can’t breathe, didn’t I? Right now, this limestone bedrock has become a giant water bowl, trapping groundwater. The roots are submerged and rotting, while the alkaline soil prevents them from absorbing nutrients. It’s a dilemma with no way forward or back. So we’re going to perform two surgeries at the same time.”
I drew a diagram with a twig in the dust piled on the floor and continued explaining.
“First, vertical aeration drains. We’ll use drills to make holes one meter away from each sapling until we pierce the bedrock. Then we’ll fill them with gravel and charcoal. That way, the stagnant groundwater will drain downward, and oxygen will be supplied to the roots. The charcoal will become a home for microorganisms.”
“You’re going to pierce the bedrock? That’s destroying the terroir! If the Bordeaux committee finds out, there will be an uproar!”
“To be precise, it isn’t destruction, but correction. We’re not removing the entire bedrock, only making precise breathing holes. And more importantly, the second step is neutralizing the localized rhizosphere.”
I drew a large square on the floor and wrote “nitrate fertilizer” inside it.
“We can’t pull out all the rootstocks, so we’ll forcibly acidify only the area around the roots. We’ll mix sulfur powder and nitrate fertilizer at a specific ratio and send it through the irrigation system. This is a technique that doesn’t change the entire vine, but maintains only the soil within ten centimeters of the root tips at pH 6.5. According to my theory, as long as the environment near the roots is right, plants can absorb nutrients no matter what the overall soil is like.”
Daniel could not close his mouth as he listened to my explanation. In Bordeaux, it was an unwritten rule that if the soil was limestone, one had to use rootstock suited to it. But I had proposed the reverse idea: not adapting the vine to the environment, but controlling only the chemical reactions around the roots.
“But if you use sulfur powder like that, the microbial ecosystem will...”
“That’s why we’ll introduce specific bacteria along with the charcoal. They’ll convert the sulfur into sulfuric acid and naturally regulate the pH. Daniel, this isn’t a gamble. It’s precision engineering. If the roots start absorbing iron before the heat of September fades, those yellow leaves will turn green again within a week.”
At my confident tone, life began returning to Daniel’s eyes. He asked no more questions and picked up the radio.
“Understood. I’ll secure the equipment and materials immediately. If it works as Master says... this will become the strangest planting site in Bordeaux history.”
“Miracles are always strange by nature.”
At this point in time, my method could not help but seem bizarre. After all, the method I was using was one of the core technologies of smart farms in the 2020s.