“I owe everything to my father. He believed that discipline was the key to education, and the most important principle was to train children, especially the girls, to know how to handle all the tasks they would face in life.”
Today, Madame de Lencquesaing runs Château Pichon-Longueville-Comtesse de Lalande, a property that was severely damaged during the occupation and was hovering near financial ruin until she took it over. Under her direction, this second-growth estate, as defined by the 1855 Classification, has produced brilliant wines that rival and sometimes surpass those of first-growth properties such as Château Lafite-Rothschild, Château Mouton-Rothschild and neighboring Château Latour. The wines possess great finesse, richness and depth of flavor, qualities enhanced by significant investments Madame de Lencquesaing has made at Pichon since the early 1980s.
“Those years during the war gave me all the basics,” she said. “We had the feeling as children that we were heroes, that even while bombs were falling we were helping in the liberation of our country.”
Bernard de Nonancourt was eighteen when he went off to war, inspired by Charles de Gaulle. Over the next four years, however, his youthful enthusiasm would be tempered by the grim realities he faced in the Resistance.
When the war ended, Bernard was faced with a completely different challenge, reviving a moribund champagne house his mother had purchased. In 1945, Laurent-Perrier was ranked at the bottom of the heap, 98th of the 100 major champagne houses.
Today, under Bernard’s guidance, it is one of the top 10 with a staff of 360 people and an annual production of nearly 11 million bottles. Bernard attributes his success directly to what he learned in the Resistance, “the knowledge of organization and how to make a team work together.”
There was something else he learned as well. “Keep a love of risks,” he says. “Don’t be too self-satisfied.”
Some years ago, when Bernard was trying to come up with a name for a luxury line of champagne he was planning to produce, he sent a list of possible names to President de Gaulle. The response came back immediately: “Grand Siècle, of course, de Nonancourt!”
Years later, after Grand Siècle had become the flagship of Laurent-Perrier, Bernard said, “I can still hear his voice whenever I read that mes-sage.”
Douglas MacArthur inspired him too. There is a plaque with a quote from the American general on his desk. “I look at it every day,” Bernard said. “It says, ‘Be young.’ I am seventy-eight now, but when I look back, I find that I miss those times. Although the war was awful for the world, it was the most beautiful moment of my life. I felt so full of patriotism.”
After five years as a prisoner of war, Gaston Huet quickly became one of France’s greatest winemakers. He also became mayor of Vouvray, a post he held for forty-six years.
At age ninety, he is still active. He spends a great deal of time visiting oenological schools and speaking to aspiring winemakers. His advice: “Forget everything you’ve learned in school. Get rid of bad habits. Come back to traditions.”
Until recently, the one other thing he treasured was the annual reunion with those who had been imprisoned with him at Oflag IV D. After the war, the men got together every year to share memories and remind each other that yes, they really had survived. Each year, however, fewer and fewer attended. The men had grown older; one by one, they began passing away.
In 1997, for the first time, there was no reunion. “There were not enough of us left,” Huet said.
Huet’s belief in tradition is something Jean Hugel fiercely embraced. Over and over again, he told his three sons that “a well-treated wine is an untreated wine,” and that the winemaker should allow Nature to follow its own course as much as possible.
Never were the wines he made better displayed than in June 1989. That is when the Hugels finally had their party—fifty years after they had planned it. The first one, scheduled to celebrate their 300th anniversary as wine producers in 1939, had to be canceled when war was declared. Now they were celebrating their 350th anniversary.
It was a glamorous event that included a tasting of some of the greatest wines from the Hugels’ cellar. They included the 1945 Gewürztraminer Sélection des Grains Nobles, a wine of extraordinary sweetness, complexity and concentration. “It’s a wine that tastes like it will live forever,” Johnny Hugel said.
The tasting followed a plan laid down by Papa Jean Hugel in 1967. “These wines,” he wrote, “should only be tasted under the following circumstances: on their own, outside the context of a meal, with your best wine-loving friends, in a respectful atmosphere and without the slightest reference to their price. In such a way, you will do homage to the skill and honesty of the winegrower, and equally to Nature, without whom the production of such jewels would be impossible.”
Sadly, Jean Hugel, who died in 1980, was not there for the celebration.
A few years after the war, young Armand Monmousseaux came running home from school waving his history lesson in front of him.
“Papa, Papa,” he hollered, “was this really you?” Armand’s class had been studying the French Resistance when the boy came across a passage describing how a certain Jean Monmousseaux used his wine barrels to help the Resistance by smuggling arms and people across the Demarcation Line.
His father looked at the article. It was about a winegrower from the Touraine who joined Combat, one of the earliest Resistance organizations, and risked his life by hiding weapons, documents and Resistance leaders in his wooden casks, and then transporting them on horse-drawn wagons past German checkpoints. When Jean finished reading, he looked at his son and rather sheepishly admitted that the story was indeed about him.
Jean’s wife, who was English and had tried to live “very quietly during the war,” overheard what had just been said and was furious. “All that time and you never told me?” she exclaimed. “How could you? Did you think you couldn’t trust me?”
“No, no,” Jean replied. “I just didn’t want you to worry or put anyone else in danger.”
Al Ricciuti was feeling restless; he had a stack of work waiting for him, but instead of attending to it, he started a letter. It was one of dozens he had written to Paulette Revolte in the years since the war had ended. “I am thinking of coming back to France,” he wrote. “I would like to retrace my wartime steps. May I stop by to see you and your family?”
Paulette’s response was enthusiastic. “We would love to see you again; please plan to stay with us. We have lots of new champagne for you to taste.”
Al packed his bags. Within two days he was back on Utah Beach, eighteen years after landing there with Patton’s Third Army. Memories came flooding back, some of them grim and others that made him laugh out loud. How could he ever forget the first time he met General Patton? “There were about a hundred of us, all naked and lined up, waiting to get into a portable shower, when someone yelled, ‘Ten-hut!’ We snapped to attention still clutching our bars of soap when Patton marched up. He stopped right in front of the guy next to me and barked, ‘Soldier, when did you last take a shower?’ The guy replied, ‘About a month ago, sir.’ ‘Good,’ said Patton. ‘Keep taking ’em regularly like that.’ ”
Following Al’s second “landing” in Normandy, he was off to northern France and into the Ardennes Forest in Belgium. Finally, he arrived in Champagne.
“That’s when it struck me, when I came back and saw her. It was love at second sight,” he said.
Al and Paulette were married on January 21, 1963, in Avenay-Val-d’Or. After a short honeymoon, they returned to Baltimore, where Al worked for the National Guard Armory and Paulette worked at not being homesick.
Seven months later they received a letter from Paulette’s brother saying he could no longer run the family’s champagne business. If Paulette did not want it, he was going to sell it.
Once again, Al packed his bags and, this time with Paulette, headed back to France. Al was planning on a U.S. civil service job there while Paulette ran the family business,
but it did not turn out that way. France suddenly closed down all the American military installations in the country.
Paulette could not have been happier. “I need the help,” she told him. “You can work here with me.” He agreed to give it a try.
Al started by following her around. “I made notes about everything and kept a diary every day,” he said. And he tasted as much as possible. “I didn’t really know anything about champagne but what appealed to me was seeing the end product. It wasn’t like other jobs where you work and work and never see what you’ve done.”
That is how Al Ricciuti became the first American to make champagne. However, it did not happen overnight. Some of the locals looked down their noses at him and wondered what an American could possibly know about making champagne. “They didn’t really show it outwardly but I knew how they felt,” Al said. “There were some sarcastic remarks.”
Over the years, jealousy and sarcasm gave way to admiration. “He was a good student,” Paulette said. “People were impressed with how hard he worked and how anxious he was to learn.” A spokesman for Mumm’s, which buys 25 percent of Al’s grapes, said Al was as much a part of the community as any French person. “The Champagne community is tightly knit,” said George Vesselle. “Penetrating the circle is difficult, especially for a foreigner, but Al succeeded.”
Al, however, is modest about his achievement. “I like to drink champagne but I do not have what you would call a good palate. My wife is the one with the palate.”
That brought a laugh from Paulette, who said, “I don’t have to taste champagne. It’s in my blood.”
Many of Al’s best customers are former army buddies. Usually, they sit in the kitchen, swapping war stories under the watchful eyes of President Truman and General Eisenhower, whose portraits adorn certificates commending Paulette and her family for saving the lives of U.S. airmen.
In 1959, the head barman of the Hôtel Meurice in Paris noticed a short rotund man “with impossibly correct posture” wandering around the bar. He seemed to be in a daze, almost as if he were in another world.
“May I help you?” the barman asked.
“Yes,” the man replied. “I once lived here for a short while and was wondering if I could see my old room again.”
The barman, Pierre Lévéjac, recognized the man and asked him to wait while he phoned the hotel manager. “Sir, you’re not going to believe this but Dietrich von Choltitz is here and he would like to see his room.”
The manager rushed to the bar, where von Choltitz, elegantly dressed in a dark blue suit, introduced himself and repeated his request. “I would be delighted to show you your old room,” the manager said. “If you will follow me.”
The two went to the fourth floor, where the former German commander of Paris once lived. Von Choltitz spent several minutes looking around the room, mostly in silence, before opening a door and stepping out onto the balcony overlooking the Tuileries. “Ah yes, this is what I remember,” he said.
Within a quarter of an hour, the manager had escorted von Choltitz back to the bar and suggested they open up a bottle of champagne. “We must mark this occasion of your return, mon général.” But von Choltitz declined. “I have done what I wanted to do and must now be on my way,” he said.
Von Choltitz had another engagement, this one with Pierre Taittinger, the wartime mayor of Paris. Taittinger had organized a luncheon in von Choltitz’s honor, but the old general, who disobeyed Hitler by surrendering Paris intact, refused to be treated like a conquering hero. “Von Choltitz was not an easy man,” said Taittinger’s son Claude, who attended the luncheon. “He was a Prussian and perhaps he felt uncomfortable about having once disobeyed his commander-in-chief. Later, however, while we were having coffee on the terrace, he told me something I shall never forget. He said, ‘I understood what your father was telling me. I made my decision not to destroy Paris after talking to your father.’ ”
Three years later, in 1962, Parisians were surprised to discover German flags flying alongside French ones on the Champs-Elysées. For the first time since the war, a French President was welcoming a German head of state.
That evening, Robert-Jean de Vogüé sat down to watch the news on television with his son Ghislain. When the cameras switched to President Charles de Gaulle as he was about to shake hands with Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, Ghislain jumped up and said, “Here, let me turn this off. I’m sure you don’t want to watch this.”
His father stretched out his arm to stop him. “No, stay where you are, leave it on,” he said. “This is what I have worked all my life to see.”
* * *
Notes
Most of the information in our book came from personal interviews with those who actively participated in the events of the time and whose families were directly involved. Material from published sources that could not be included in the main text is cited in the following notes. Publication information about those sources is contained in the Bibliography.
Introduction
Berchtesgaden . . . the “Valhalla for the Nazi gods’’: Stephen E. Ambrose, Band of Brothers; E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne, from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest, p. 271.
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“Behind those pleasant white walls’’: Robert Payne, The Life and Death of Adolf Hitler, pp. 351–54.
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The use of wine in war by Cyrus the Great, Julius Caesar and other wartime figures is described by Herbert M. Baus, How to Wine Your Way to Good Health, p. 182.
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”A ration of hot wine is not expensive’’: Bulletin International du Vin, October/November 1939, p. 109.
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wine’s apogee as a military tactic: Baus, How to Wine Your Way, p. 183.
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Wine as “a good counselor’’: André L. Simon, A Wine Primer, p. 11.
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The study of wine’s importance to the French character is from the article “La Vigne et le Vin,’’ vol. 2 of tome 3 of Nora Pierre (ed.), Les Lieux de Mémoire, which were part of a French government survey, pp. 796–97.
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Mirepoix . . . gave a speech . . . in which he described how wine “contributed to the French race by giving them wit’’: quoted by Robert O. Paxton, French Peasant Against Fascism: Henry Dorgères’s Greenshirts and the Crisis of French Agriculture, 1929–1939, p. 22.
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ONE To Love the Vines
Information about the International Congress of the Vine and Wine comes from Charles K. Warner, The Winegrowers of France and the Government Since 1875, p. 157, and from the Bulletin International du Vin, August 1939.
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“Our opponents are little worms’’: Paul Johnson, Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties, p. 360.
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Phylloxera, a tiny insect: discussed at length in Alexis Lichine’s New Encyclopaedia of Wines and Spirits, p. 31.
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Bizarre remedies and a 300,000-franc reward described by Warner, Winegrowers of France, p. 4.
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Vineyard conditions are discussed extensively by Warner, Winegrowers of
France, p. vii–x, 70–79. Also by François Bonal in Le Livre d’Or du Champagne, pp. 4–5, 174.
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The birth of AOC is described by Remington Norman, The Great Domaines of Burgundy, p. 244.
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blending “is to some extent like kissing’’: André L. Simon, A Wine Primer, p. 71.
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the peasants’ legend about war and wine: Janet Flanner, “Letter from France,’’ The New Yorker, September 15, 1945, p. 72.
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“This is a queer war so far’’: article by Janet Flanner in The New Yorker War Pieces, London 1939 to Hiroshima 1945, p. 6.
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xt.
The planting of roses and gardens on the Maginot Line comes from Jean-Pierre Azema, From Munich to the Liberation, 1938–1944, p. 27.
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“Since you don’t have anything to do’’: quoted by Herbert R. Lottman, The Fall of Paris: June 1940, p. 6.
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“Confidence is a duty!’’; and France’s reaction to an imminent German invasion is reported in an article by A. J. Liebling in The New Yorker War Pieces, p. 40.
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Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France's Greatest Treasure Page 27
