It was the lowest of blows. In late September, Paul Bonin arrived early in the morning at his 2-acre vineyard in France’s Jura region to pick his first grapes of the harvest. The day before he had tested the grapes and found them perfectly ripe. He started on the first rows and realized the yields were off. Friends, arriving a short while after, noticed a few clusters on the ground.
At first Bonin thought it must have been ravenous birds. Then the group discovered that the stems of the dropped clusters had been cut with shears. Thieves had stolen most of his crop during the night.
“It was a huge, hard blow,” said Bonin, the owner of the nascent Totum et Nihil winery in Gevingey.
Sadly, wine and crime sometimes get paired. Thieves have been known to target bottles in winery cellars or restaurants. Vandals have emptied tanks of aging wine. And yes, they have occasionally resorted to stealing grapes right off the vine.
Bonin has toiled to construct his small holding since 2021, acquiring rows little by little, planting new vines, manually working the soil, nurturing modern and ancient grape varieties. “My philosophy is totum et nihil,” explained the former cytologist. That’s Latin for 'each holds everything yet holds nothing.' "I keep what nature gives and don’t take anything away."
He estimates that he walked 400 miles over the course of 2024 tending to his crop, which was to be his first significant harvest, yielding just under a ton of grapes. ‘It’s only since last year that I have had enough to produce a wine,” said Bonin. Instead, he ended up with about 20 pounds of fruit.
He’s been experimenting with small-batch vinifications along the way and, despite the dastardly theft, will bottle some wine this winter, relying on the Jura’s frigid temperatures to naturally clear the wine.
Determined and Focused on Uncommon Grapes
Unbowed by this bitter setback, Bonin is focused on planting more ancient varieties. His vineyard is already a mix of classic Jura varieties and forgotten wine grapes.
“[I have] old classic grape varieties, but not cloned ones, like Savagnin, Pinot Noir, Gamay and Gamay Teinturier, Ploussard [aka Poulsard] and many forgotten varieties like Chambourcin, Plantet and some that are unknown,” explained Bonin. The diversity is both intentional and the result of buying old family vineyards planted with field blends. His goal is to have an old variety conservatory. He already grows around 50 types.
But it’s unlikely he’ll ever know who stole his grapes. Without more clues, the police do not plan to investigate.
How will he protect his grapes from thieves in the future? After considerable research, he found a Swiss manufacturer of GPS micro-trackers. “I can slip one into a cluster, undetected,” he said. The thieves won’t know which clusters have micro-trackers. “Then I don’t have to sleep in the vineyard the night before harvest.”
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