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Private Notes
Swiss investment banker insists that Lebel must assess a Chateauneuf-du-Pâpe estate, once reputed, slipping since the later owner Castelnaut's daughters fired wine-maker Francis Ollier, who now runs a friend-partner's smaller estate. Benjamin rightly suspects the supposed reason given by the only rich heiress-sister, Kate Weller, who returns from abroad, is a front, and starts digging in the murky family and staff history even before vineyard sabotage and murder strike.
Benjamin Lebel is flattered that his youth-days poetry about the Cathar castles are to be published by a small firm in the Languedoc department Aude, so the drives there with assistant Silvère, who was promised a castles tout. They stay with Lebel's old friend, oenologist and former fellow 1960s revolutionary Janny Verniaud, who now leads a cooperative for biological wine-growing, but her young partners -especially hothead Arthur Gassard- are tired of her stickler obstacles to profitable production. The Montepelleir professor who piloted the Lebel poems projects, ...
Benjamin Lebel and his assistant Mathilde go to Cahors to evaluate the wine production of the estate of Mr. Edouard Perolles.When they begin the wine tasting, they have a bad surprise: the wine is very foul.In the wine tank No 13 they find a corpse.The man has been severely hit and put in the wine tank.Nodody knows his identity.The police captain Medraoui makes a lot of questions to Mr. Perolles (about the guests who have come to the estate or about the workers of the estate).On his side Benjamin Lebel begins his own investigation.
