Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France's Greatest Treasure

by Donald Kladstrup

  Although it was, literally, a race against time, sometimes we had to go slowly. People from the generation that had fought in the war were not always ready to talk about it. Their first reaction was “Oh my, that was such a long time ago. I’m not sure . . .” and then their voice would drift off and silence would settle in. But then, suddenly, he or she might say, “But there is one thing I remember . . .” and then we would find ourselves listening to a wonderful story.

  Younger people we approached were sometimes hesitant too. “Please, I was only a child,” they would say, “I don’t remember anything.” But often they did, and their stories were among the most revealing, giving us very clear snapshots of a complicated era.

  For instance, Jean-Michel Cazes, owner of Château Lynch-Bages and Château Pichon-Baron in Bordeaux, showed us that the barometer of the war was on the playground as well as on the battleground. In the fall of 1940, when he and his friends returned to school, Cazes, who was then eight, recalled how they all wanted to play at being Germans. “The Germans seemed so strong and clever that we all wanted to be them in our games,” he said. Two years later, with the face of France already altered by the German occupation, the interests of the children had changed too. “By then,” said Cazes, “we all wanted to be the Maquis, the underground, fighting the Germans. It was much more romantic.” As more time passed and the Germans tightened their grip on Bordeaux, romance gave way to realism. “We used to peek out at the Germans marching and then they seemed not just strong but also very frightening.” When the fortunes of the Germans began to change in the last years of the war, so too did games on the playgrounds. “We all wanted to be Americans then,” said Cazes. By the end of the war, the change of heart was complete; the children in the playgrounds of France were playing at cowboys and Indians.

  Many of the people we interviewed belonged to families that had been making wine for generations. Not only did they know what wine was about but they also knew what war was about. They had lived through it, some more than once, and they were acutely conscious of what it takes to survive. For the Rothschilds of Château Lafite-Rothschild in Bordeaux, it meant fleeing the country before the Germans took over their property. For Henri Jayer of Vosne-Romanée in Burgundy, it meant trading his wine for food so his family would have enough to eat. For Prince Philippe Poniatowski of Vouvray, it meant burying his best wines in his yard so that he would have something to restart business with after the war.

  Survival, however, did not always require desperate measures; sometimes people just got lucky. For René Couly of Chinon, it was a flat tire that saved him. “My father had just been called up by the army and was made a truck driver, since he had lots of experience driving our trucks,” his son told us. “He was in his truck following his company to the front when he had a flat tire. While he stopped to fix it, the rest of the troops continued on and marched right into an ambush. Every single person was taken prisoner.” Everyone, that is, except Couly. “After changing the tire, my father turned around and went home to his vineyard.”

  Although most of the information we gathered came from interviews, occasionally it was the wine itself that did the “talking.” A 1940 La Tâche we tasted with Robert Drouhin, one of Burgundy’s most respected winemakers and négociants, spoke volumes about the wartime difficulties winemakers had to overcome in order to make good wine. Most Burgundies that year were decimated by rot and mildew because the Germans had requisitioned all metals including copper for their industrial war machine. Without copper, winemakers had no copper sulfate for treating their vines. The La Tâche from the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, however, was one of the survivors and a fitting climax to a wonderful dinner with Drouhin. Of the wine, our notes said: “Good color, spicy bouquet, fading a little but still elegant and charming.”

  Another bottle we shared with Drouhin on another occasion told an entirely different story. It was a white 1940 Clos des Mouches, extremely rare and one of the first white Clos des Mouches Robert’s father ever made. Alas, the wine was undrinkable. It was dull brown and totally maderized. “No good,” said Madame Françoise Drouhin, frowning slightly and putting her glass down. Her husband’s reaction was a little different. “Interesting,” he said. And he was right. We could literally sense, almost taste, the problems the Drouhins faced when they made the wine. There was a hint of fungus and a touch of death on the nose.

  And there was something else we noticed. The bottle it came in was pale blue-green instead of the usual brownish green, a color Burgundians describe as feuilles mortes, or dead leaves. “This wine was probably bottled in 1942,” said Drouhin, “when everyone had to recycle their bottles or get them wherever they could, which meant bottles were made with any sort of glass composition that could be had.”

  But wherever we went and whomever we talked to, the point that was always stressed—the one we could never ignore—was how important wine is to France. It is not just a beverage or commercial product to be poured from a bottle. It is much more than that. Like the flag, the Tricolore, it goes to the country’s heart and soul. “Wine makes us proud of our past,” said one official. “It gives us courage and hope.” How else to explain why vignerons in Champagne rushed into their vineyards to harvest the 1915 vintage even as artillery shells were falling all around? Or why King Louis XI in his first act after conquering Burgundy in 1477 confiscated the entire vintage of Volnay for himself? Or why a priest in a small village in Champagne not long ago admonished his parish to remember, “Our champagne is not just about making money. It is about bringing joy to people.”

  And perhaps something spiritual. “Our wines evolve slowly and nobly, carrying with them hopes for a prolonged life,” explained one winegrower. “We know our land was here before we came and that it will be here long after we are gone. With our wine, we have survived wars, the Revolution and phylloxera. Each harvest renews promises made in the spring. We live with the continuing cycle. This gives us a taste of eternity.”

  Recently the French government commissioned a study of what makes the French “French,” or, as one scholar put it, “to assess what makes up French historical memory and identity.” It was a vast work, in seven volumes. Part of it was a survey in which people were asked to define the qualities that made them French. Places one through three were what you might expect: being born in France, defending liberty and speaking French. But right behind them in fourth place was wine, specifically knowing and appreciating “good” wine. This came as no surprise to the survey’s authors, who concluded, “Wine is part of our history; it’s what defines us.”

  In 1932, a year before Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, Hubert de Mirepoix, president of the French Winegrowers Association, gave a speech at the organization’s annual convention in which he described how wine “contributed to the French race by giving them wit, gaiety and good taste, qualities which set it profoundly apart from people who drink a lot of beer.”

  Although this is a book about wine and war, it is not a wine book, not really, nor is it a book just about war. It is about people, people who indeed exude wit, gaiety and good taste, and whose love of the grape and devotion to a way of life helped them survive and triumph over one of the darkest and most difficult chapters in French history.

  * * *

  ONE

  To Love the Vines

  IT WAS LATE AUGUST 1939, AND FRENCH winemakers were fretting about the harvest. Two months earlier, the outlook had been bright. The weather had been good and there was the promise of an excellent vintage. Then the weather changed. For six straight weeks it rained, and temperatures plummeted.

  So did the mood of winegrowers attending the International Congress of the Vine and Wine in the resort of Bad Kreuznach, Germany. The weather was all they could think about—that is, until the next speaker was announced. He was Walter Darré, the Minister of Food Supply and Agriculture for the Third Reich. Winegrowers had been jolted when they first walked into the convention hall and discovered a large portrait of Da
rré’s boss, Adolf Hitler, dominating the room. Like the rest of the world, they had watched with growing alarm as Hitler annexed Austria, carved up Czechoslovakia and signed a military agreement with Italy’s dictator, Benito Mussolini. Many, fearful that full-scale war was just one step away, felt sure Darré would have something to say about the latest events.

  But when the Reichsminister took the podium, he did not speak about the war. He did not even talk about wine. Instead, he called for the Congress delegates to go beyond the concerns of wine and winemaking and work instead to “advance the mutual understanding of peaceful peoples.” Those in the audience were thoroughly confused.

  What they did not know was that at almost the same moment Hitler himself was giving a very different kind of speech—this one to his high command—in another German resort, Berchtesgaden, the favored vacation spot of the Nazi leadership. The Führer was telling his generals what was coming next and exhorting them to remember, “Our opponents are little worms. . . . What matters in beginning and waging war is not righteousness but victory. Close your hearts to pity. Proceed brutally.”

  Within a week, his forces invaded Poland. The date was September 1, 1939. French winegrowers at the conference were promptly summoned home. Two days later, France, along with Britain, Australia and New Zealand, declared war on Germany.

  For the second time in little more than a generation, French winegrowers faced the agonizing prospect of trying to get their harvest in before vineyards were turned into battlefields. As in 1914, the government mounted an extraordinary campaign to help. Winegrowers were granted delays in being called to active duty, military labor detachments were sent to the vineyards and farm horses of small growers were not to be requisitioned until the harvest was completed.

  Memories of that earlier war, “the war to end all wars,” still haunted them—the brutality, the hardships and especially the staggering loss of life. Out of a population of 40 million, nearly a million and a half young men were killed, men who would have entered their most productive years had they survived. Another million lost limbs or were so badly wounded that they could no longer work.

  It was a bloodletting that left almost no family in France untouched: not the Drouhins of Burgundy, the Miailhes of Bordeaux, the de Nonancourts of Champagne, the Hugels of Alsace, nor the Huets of the Loire Valley.

  Gaston Huet’s father returned home an invalid, his lungs permanently scarred after his army unit was attacked with mustard gas.

  Bernard de Nonancourt’s father also suffered the ravages of trench warfare and died of wounds soon after the war.

  The mother of Jean Miailhe lost her entire family when German troops attacked their village in northern France.

  The Hugel family, which had lost its French heritage and nationality when Alsace was annexed by Germany after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, sent their son away so that he could escape being drafted into the German army.

  Maurice Drouhin, a veteran of trench warfare, escaped physical injury but not the nightmares which haunted him for years afterward.

  Like nearly everyone else in France, these winemaking families watched with trepidation as the specter of another war approached. Although France had been the winner earlier, it had paid a terrible price. Could it afford another such victory? Many in France doubted it, especially Maurice Drouhin, who had witnessed the horrors of war close up.

  Thoughts of his family and vineyard were all that comforted him as he huddled with his men in the muddy blood-soaked trenches of northern France, peering at the enemy across a strip of no-man’s-land. Although the winter of 1915 still had that part of the country in its grip, Maurice knew that back home in Burgundy, the vines already would be stirring and workers would be busy pruning. If he closed his eyes, he could almost picture it, the men with their secateurs working their way slowly down the long rows of vines; and he could almost hear the church bells that called them to work each day.

  Those bells were the first sounds Maurice heard each morning when he awoke in his home in Beaune. For him, they were the background music to life in the vineyards. They rolled across the villages and wheat fields, they sent children racing to school and mothers scurrying to markets for the freshest produce of the day. They heralded lunchtime, dinnertime, and called people to worship, and to celebrate. But as World War I ground on, they were calling more and more people to mourn.

  Now, on the battlefields of northern France, the sounds that surrounded Maurice were artillery and machine-gun fire and the agonized cries of the wounded. In the heat of one battle, he saw a German soldier crumple to the ground, unable to move after being shot. With German troops too frightened to venture into the storm of bullets to retrieve their comrade, Maurice ordered his men to cease firing while he raised a white flag. Then, in impeccable German, he shouted to the Germans, “Come get your man. We will hold our fire until you have him.” The Germans moved quickly to rescue their fallen comrade. Before returning behind the lines, however, they halted directly in front of Maurice and saluted him.

  Later, in a letter to his wife, Pauline, Maurice described the incident. Pauline was so moved that she passed the story on to the local newspaper, which published it. Headlined “The Glorious Hours,” the article said, “The glorious hours sound not just for heroic action on the battlefield but also for those activities that occur in daily life, for it is when war is over that a soldier’s heart and character are also revealed.”

  Maurice was highly decorated for his military service. Among his awards was the Distinguished Service Medal from the United States government, a medal for which he had been nominated by Douglas MacArthur. But as proud as Maurice was of that medal and his life in the military, it was his life in the vineyards that held even greater meaning for him—one that beckoned him home when the “war to end all wars” had finally ended.

  That life was one of legend and myth, a life which, in many ways, had changed little since the Middle Ages. “It was a simpler time in the vineyards,” Maurice’s son Robert recalled years later. “We had a way of living, a way of making wine that was natural and très ancienne.”

  It was made the way their grandfathers and great-grandfathers had made it. There were no experts to rely on, so everyone followed the traditions they knew and had grown up with. Plowing was done with horses. Planting, picking and pruning were done according to the phases of the moon. Older people often reminded younger ones that the merits of pruning were discovered when St. Martin’s donkey got loose in the vineyards.

  It happened, they said, in 345 A.D. when St. Martin, dressed in animal skins and riding on a donkey, went out to inspect some of the vineyards that belonged to his monastery near Tours in the Loire Valley. He was a lover of wine and had done much over the years to educate monks about the latest viticultural practices. On this occasion, St. Martin tethered his donkey to a row of vines while he went about his business. He was gone for several hours. When he returned, he discovered to his horror that his donkey had been munching the vines and that some had been chewed right down to the trunk. Next year, however, the monks were surprised when they saw that those same vines were the very ones which grew back the most abundantly and produced the best grapes. The lesson was not lost on the monks, and as centuries passed, pruning became part of every winegrower’s routine.

  Days began early and lasted until the work was done. There were no fixed hours. As they pruned, checked for maladies, tied back shoots that had come loose—day after day, week after week, month after month—workers came to know each vine personally. There was an almost mystical connection as they let the vines set the rhythm and pace of life.

  After picking, grapes were crushed with bare feet. The must, or grape juice, was then poured into giant vats, followed by a process called pigeage, in which naked workers plunged themselves into the frothy liquid. Holding tightly to chains that had been fastened to overhead beams, the workers would then raise and lower themselves over and over again, stirring the must with their entire bodies so a
s to aerate the mixture and enhance the fermentation. It was a dangerous exercise. Hardly a harvest went by without some workers losing their grip and drowning, or being asphyxiated by the carbonic gas given off by the fermenting juice. Victims were almost always men, since women, in some parts of France, were barred from the chai, or winery, during harvesttime. Their presence, according to superstition, would turn the wine sour.

  Yet harvesttime was always the happiest time of the year. When the last grapes were picked and loaded onto a horse-drawn wagon, workers would gather wildflowers to decorate the cart and to make a bouquet for the lady of the house. She would hang the bouquet above the entry to the cave, where it would stay until the next harvest to bring good luck—and good wine—to the house. Others would even scatter grape leaves on the floor to encourage the “good spirits” not to leave.

  Time, then, was almost magical; it felt never-ending, Robert Drouhin recalled. During walks through the vineyards, he and his father often stopped for long, rambling conversations with the workers.

  “People seemed to have more character then. They never hesitated to tell my father what they thought or how they believed things should be done, and my father was always ready to listen. Those were the moments when I learned to love the vines.”