Unfortunately, those vines were in miserable shape. The years between the wars had brought mostly misery to winemakers, who suffered through a string of horrible vintages—and not just because of the weather. Battles that had raged during World War I had rendered vineyards, especially those in Champagne, practically lifeless. They had been sliced up by trenches and blown apart by artillery and mortar shells, which left enormous craters in the ground. Worse were the chemical shells that leaked into the soil, poisoning the vineyards for years to come.
World War I had arrived just when winegrowers were beginning to recover from another crisis. Phylloxera, a tiny insect that attacks the roots of grapevines, had invaded France in the middle of the nineteenth century, reducing vast areas of vineyard to what one winegrower described as “rows of bare wooden stumps—resembling huge graveyards.” Over the next thirty years, the disease would spread to every vineyard in the country, prompting the government to offer a 300,000-franc prize to anyone who could find a cure. All kinds of ideas were suggested, ranging from the bizarre—planting a live toad beneath each vine—to the hopeful—watering vineyards with white wine. Some growers flooded their vineyards with seawater; others sprayed their vines with a vast array of chemicals or simply burned them. Nothing seemed to work.
The remedy, as it turned out, was something totally un-French. Growers discovered that by grafting their vines onto American rootstocks, which were naturally resistant to the root-eating louse, they could save their vines. It was a long and costly process. Vineyards had to be uprooted and replanted. Then growers had to wait several years for their vines to begin bearing fruit, and even longer for them to reach full maturity.
Just when things began looking up after World War I, disaster struck again. This time it was the Great Depression, and the effect on the wine industry was devastating. In Champagne, major houses could no longer afford to buy grapes from their growers. In Alsace, huge numbers of winegrowers went bankrupt. Those in Bordeaux were forced to accept prices that were below the national average—the first time in history that had happened. In Burgundy, wine production fell 40 percent as nearly half the vineyards went uncultivated. Even the great Domaine de la Romanée-Conti was floundering, but the family which owned it was determined to hold on to it. “My father felt it was like a beautiful jewel a woman has in her jewelry box,” Aubert de Villaine recalled. “She would not wear it every day, but she was determined to keep it so she could pass it on to her children.”
To do that, de Villaine’s father did what many other winegrowers were forced to do to survive: he took on another job. It was his third. He was already managing the family farm and running Romanée-Conti; now he started working in a bank as well. “My father was constantly busy; he never stopped,” de Villaine said, “but that is how much he loved Romanée-Conti and he spent every spare moment working there.”
Although the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti would not begin showing a profit until 1959, it was still considered the standard-bearer of great Burgundy, a property that never cut corners or sacrificed quality for the sake of making money. That was something Maurice Drouhin admired and deeply respected.
With no one making much money anyway, Maurice decided to take a huge risk and create a business that concentrated on one thing only: great Burgundy wine. “My father had a vision of quality,” Robert said, “a desire to create wines that were a pure reflection of the terroir.”
Maurice had inherited a maison du vin classique, which meant he sold a little bit of everything and made a little bit of wine himself, but that was about to change. “From now on,” he declared, “not one drop of anything but Burgundy wine in my house.” And he insisted that all those drops be good ones. He looked at the great wines being made by the struggling Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and thought, “This is the future.” So, in the mid-1930s, Maurice began buying 60 percent of the domaine’s production each year and distributing it. At the same time, he pushed his winemakers to improve the quality of wines of his own house, Maison Joseph Drouhin, adopting the philosophy of Monsieur de Villaine at Romanée-Conti, who believed that the winemaker was no more than an intermediary between the soil and the wine and that he should interfere as little as possible.
In opting for quality at that moment, Maurice had, unknowingly, placed himself at the forefront of a movement that would herald major changes in French winemaking. Until then, winemaking had been haphazard, more instinctive than scientific. There were few rules—no limits, for example, on the use of sugar that winemakers usually added to boost the alcoholic strength of their wines when grapes failed to fully ripen. Too often, however, winemakers used it as a crutch for picking their grapes too early. Quantity, not quality, was their motto and the surest way, they believed, to make money. They planted high-yielding vines that produced inferior grapes and, predictably, inferior wine. To cover up faults, they dumped in sugar and syrup, which resulted in huge beefy wines more suitable for chewing than drinking. Often, a good Burgundy was not Burgundy at all because it had been “arranged,” or mixed with wines from the Rhône Valley and Algeria.
Some, including Maurice Drouhin, decided that was no longer acceptable. The solution, they decided, rested with three words: Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée, or “controlled place of origin.” That meant wine should be what it says it is. Burgundy should be made only from grapes grown in Burgundy; the same was true with Bordeaux and wines from other regions. They should not be mixed.
But AOC embraced much more than geography. It also stipulated which vines could be planted, how they had to be pruned, what fertilizers and chemicals could be used and when harvesting could begin. Rules were also laid down for vinification, or winemaking.
None of this happened overnight. As Remington Norman, a Master of Wine who has written extensively about Burgundy, points out, the AOC system “did not spring ready-made from the mind of some enlightened lawgivers, but evolved over nearly four decades before being progressively codified from the 1920s onwards.”
Effective enforcement was the biggest headache. With only a few dozen inspectors, it was virtually impossible to keep watch over thousands of winemakers who labored creatively, if not scrupulously, in their cellars, blending a little of this with a little of that. As the famous French wine writer André Simon pointed out, blending “is to some extent like kissing—it may be quite innocent, but it may lead one away from the narrow path of duty and propriety.” That was particularly true in Bordeaux, where, in some years, only a third of the wine sold with a Bordeaux label was actually made in that region.
To curb such practices, in 1935, Drouhin and other winemakers created the Comité National des Appellations d’Origine, forerunner of the Institut National des Appellations d’Origine, or INAO, the governing body of French wine. Many growers, however, even those who were inclined to support the INAO, resisted at first, fearing it could work to their disadvantage by forcing them to pay more taxes or set their prices too high. No one wanted to drive off their customers, especially not then, but advertising for new ones was anathema. “Advertising is wrong,” one winemaker said. “We should never advertise. If our wine is good, people will come to us.”
Such a philosophy may have worked in Burgundy, where vineyards were small and most of the wine produced was consumed locally, but it would never have worked for producers in Champagne, who depended heavily on international markets and knew they had to advertise. They had learned from bitter experience how quickly the fizz can disappear. They saw, for instance, how tastes changed rapidly when Parisians discovered cocktails during the Roaring Twenties. They also saw how suddenly markets dried up, first in Russia when the czar was overthrown during the Russian Revolution, and later in the United States when Prohibition reared its head.
Marie-Louise Lanson de Nonancourt, however, had more urgent concerns: her family. Her husband had died of wounds after World War I, and she had been left with three sons to raise, one of them a baby named Bernard.
“My mother felt lost; she d
id not know what to do,” Bernard recalled. Nevertheless, she was about to demonstrate that she was another of Champagne’s strong-minded and talented widows, like the famous Veuve Clicquot and Veuve Pommery.
Marie-Louise had spent her entire life in Champagne and, as part of the family which owned Lanson Père & Fils, one of the oldest champagne houses, she knew the business inside out. When she looked at Lanson, however, she saw a business with too many heirs. Two of her brothers, Victor and Henri, were in charge of running it, but there were some ten other brothers and sisters in the family as well as twenty-six or twenty-seven nephews and nieces. Under France’s inheritance laws, Lanson would be broken up into tiny pieces with each member of the family getting shares. “It will never be enough to support all of us,” Marie-Louise thought.
Like Maurice Drouhin, she was confronted with a difficult economic situation and decided to take a chance. In 1938, Marie-Louise found a run-down champagne company, Veuve Laurent-Perrier & Cie, whose owner had died some years earlier without heirs. It was in extremely bad shape and on the verge of bankruptcy. There was little equipment and even less champagne. Out of 100 houses, it was ranked almost at the bottom, number 98.
Marie-Louise was not discouraged. On the contrary, she was thrilled. “It is exactly what I have been looking for,” she said. To the shock of everyone, especially her brother Victor, she poured her life’s savings into buying it.
“Have you lost your mind?” he exclaimed. “Everyone is struggling! How do you, a woman alone, hope to make any money, especially from a place like that?’’
Marie-Louise believed the answer was standing right in front of him, her three sons. They were tall, strong young men who had already started to learn the champagne business. She had insisted they learn all aspects of it, starting at the bottom by packing cases and loading trucks.
“That’s not enough,” Victor warned. “Don’t you realize there’s a war coming? Your sons could be called up at any moment, and you of all people ought to know what that means. My God, you can already hear the sound of it in the distance!”
Indeed, Marie-Louise had heard the sounds. She shivered when Hitler, after annexing Austria earlier that year, vowed “to smash Czechoslovakia by military action”; she watched as he carried out that threat, taking over the Sudetenland and then marching his troops into Prague.
Nevertheless, Marie-Louise was convinced she was doing the right thing. As her son Bernard later said, “My mother always believed that if war happened, France and its allies would win.”
But she did have qualms. By the spring of 1939, she along with everyone else realized that the Munich Conference had been a failure. Hitler had not been appeased when Britain and France ceded the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia to him; it merely whetted his appetite. When Hiter’s forces marched into Prague, Britain, in response, launched the first peacetime draft in its history. French industries went from a forty- to a forty-four-hour workweek (German ones were already working sixty), while French Prime Minister Daladier called on the United States to send fighter planes. In Washington, President Franklin Roosevelt, his hands tied by the U.S. Neutrality Act, sent Hitler a list of twenty-six countries, demanding that their territorial integrity be respected. Hitler delivered his answer in Berlin. The Führer read the letter to the Reichstag, his voice dripping with sarcasm and his hand going up and down like a hammer as he ticked off the countries one by one: Hungary, Albania, Yugoslavia, Poland . . . As each name was read, the audience roared with laughter.
Five months later, Hitler sent his army into Poland. Two days after that, war was declared against the Third Reich.
It was a grim backdrop to yet another crisis unfolding in France’s vineyards. The harvest of 1939 had just begun and it was as bad as everyone feared. In Burgundy, Robert Drouhin remembered a “vendange sous la neige,” or a harvest under a blanket of snow. In Bordeaux, the problem was rain, which resulted in thin, diluted wines, prompting one grower to complain, “This isn’t wine, it’s dishwater.” In Champagne, Marie-Louise de Nonancourt did not have any grapes to pick. She had put her new domaine en sommeil, literally “to sleep,” deciding it was better to leave her new firm in a state of dormancy than try to begin operating in the midst of war. Those Champenois who did pick had to do so with inexperienced women and children because most of the young men had been mobilized. The grapes they collected were largely unripe. The region worst hit was Alsace, where one grower described the grapes as “complete rubbish.” Our best wine, he said, had only 8.4 degrees alcohol, nearly four degrees less than normal. “We might as well have poured it down the drain.”
To most, it seemed as if the peasants’ legend about war and wine was coming true. To announce the coming of war, the Lord sends a bad wine crop, the peasants said. While war continues, he sends mediocre ones. To mark its end, he bestows a fine, festive crop.
In 1939, as war loomed on the horizon, winegrowers faced a harvest that almost everyone would eventually call the worst of the century.
As it turned out, winegrowers need not have worried about completing their harvest before the battles began. After war was declared on September 3, nothing happened. There were no battles, no threats of retaliation from Berlin, nothing except a few German planes which flew lazily over Paris. French forces launched a halfhearted thrust toward the German front but quickly drew back to more secure positions behind the Maginot Line, confident that this series of concrete fortifications which ran from Switzerland to the Luxembourg and Belgian borders would provide all the protection necessary. Considered unbreachable, it had been constructed between the two wars to deter a German offensive into France. It was also a symbol, a static reminder of French defensive thinking.
For the next eight months until the spring of 1940, France would languish behind the Maginot Line in what Janet Flanner of The New Yorker described as a “curious form of lethargy,” waiting and wondering what Germany might do and behaving as if it were business as usual. The period of inaction was called le drôle de guerre, or Phony War.
“This is a queer war so far,” she wrote. “Were it not for the existence of war, the knowledge, for example, that it is against the law to go onto the street without your gas mask, this Sunday would just be a beautiful Indian-summer day. . . . Certainly this must be the first war that millions of people on both sides continued to think could be avoided even after it had officially been declared.”
Maurice Drouhin, however, had no such illusions. In the years following World War I, he had stayed in close touch with his army friends, including some in the United States such as Douglas MacArthur. Occasionally, he was asked by the French government to accompany an army delegation to the States to prod Washington to end its policy of isolation. Those trips were something he feared German intelligence might be monitoring.
As a precaution, Maurice had begun teaching his wife, Pauline, a code he learned in World War I. It involved making tiny pencil dots around letters or words in a book to create messages. “Whatever happens,” he told Pauline, “do not leave Beaune. If war comes and I have to leave suddenly, stay here; I will always find a way to contact you. The places that are deserted are the most vulnerable, the ones that will be looted first.”
Throughout the country, winegrowers like Maurice were beginning to worry about the vulnerability of their stocks of wine. With tens of thousands of bottles in his cellar, Maurice decided he had to try to protect at least some of it, especially his complete stock of Romanée-Conti from 1929 through 1938, which he felt represented the family’s security.
Maurice’s cellar was made up of a labyrinth of caves under Beaune, some of which had been carved in the thirteenth century. All the odd twists and turns made them perfect for hiding large quantities of wine. In one section, he decided to build a wall and hide his most valuable bottles of wine behind it. “Not a word to anyone else about this,” he told his family. Building the wall was a family project and one that Maurice’s son Robert, who was eight years old, found terribly exciting. �
�While Papa laid the bricks, my mother, my sisters and I ran around the cellar collecting spiders to put in front of the wall. The spiders would then spin webs and make the wall look older.”
Similar efforts were under way in Champagne, only on a much larger scale. With miles and miles of limestone caves underpinning the region, producers secreted away not only huge amounts of champagne but also hunting rifles, furniture and even cars.
At Laurent-Perrier, Marie-Louise de Nonancourt did not need much space since she did not have much to hide, only 400 pièces, the equivalent of about 100,000 bottles, merely a drop for most champagne houses but all she had been able to afford when she purchased the domaine. Unlike other champagne houses, however, Marie-Louise not only built a wall; she also called on some extra help: her namesake, the Virgin Mary. After sealing up her champagne, Marie-Louise brought in her own personal devotional statue of the Virgin and cemented it into a niche of the wall where it was clearly visible.
“Now it is in her hands,” she told her sons. “There is nothing more I can do to protect our future.”
Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France's Greatest Treasure Page 3
