Whit Sheppard

You’re happy, healthy, and about to settle into retirement. Falling for a fraud scheme? No way. You’re way too sharp. You can spot them a mile away. Think again. Take William Webster—as in the William Webster. He and his wife, Linda, came perilously close to falling victim to an elder fraud scheme that began with an unsolicited phone call and a Jamaican lottery scam.

Sparkling wine maker Claude Thibaut received a rich cultural inheritance from his father—one of the first growers in France’s Champagne region to produce his own vintage in the late 1950s—while growing up on his family’s small vineyard two hours east of Paris. Thibaut, 60, is an expert in the méthode Champenoise, a labor-intensive method that produces the signature bubbles in Champagne and sparkling wines.

At first, it seemed clear who needed whom the most. Mosie came into my life a decade ago. I had moved to Richmond a year earlier after five years in Paris where I covered tennis for ESPN’s fledgling dot-com, work that sent me to exotic locales like Dubai, Rome and Moscow. But there’s no aloneness like bouncing between nondescript hotel rooms in far-flung places where few speak your language and even fewer know your name. I had toyed with the idea of getting a dog while still in France.