Wine & War: The French, the Nazis & the Battle for France’s Greatest Treasure
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Product Description
In 1940, France fell to the Nazis and nearly immediately the German army started a battle of raiding one of the assets the French hold most dear: their wine. Like others in the French Resistance, winemakers mobilized to oppose their occupiers, but the tale of their extraordinary efforts has remained largely unknown—until now. Wine and War tells the alternately thrilling and upsetting tale of the French wine producers who undertook ingenious, daring measures to save their cherished crops and bottles as the Germans clogged in on them.
By rooting the narrative in the tales of five prominent winemaking families from France’s key wine-producing regions of Burgundy, Alsace, the Loire Valley, Bordeaux, and Champagne, journalists Don and Petie Kladstrup vividly illustrate how men and women risked their lives for a cause that meant saving the heart and soul of France as much as protecting its economy. It was a extraordinary partnership involving everyone from the owners of Paris’s famed restaurant La Tour d’Argent who rushed to erect a wall to hide their most precious twenty thousand bottles, to French soldiers who triumphantly reclaimed Hitler’s enormous cache of stolen wines at the conclusion of the war.
Wine and War describes the central role wine has long played in France’s military campaigns—how Napoleon ordered wagon loads of champagne to sustain the morale of his armies and how, during World War I, huge quantites of wine were shipped to soldiers in the trenches of Northern France. By the beginning of World War II, wine represented a living for nearly 20 percent of France’s population and the authors chronicle the Nazis’ determination to seize control of the French wine industry and its profits. At the same time, Wine and War brings to light the resourcefulness of wine producers who employed spiderwebs to “age” fake walls hiding their best wines, who foisted off their worst bottles on the Germans or gleefully misdirected shipments, sending champagne to Homburg as a replacement for of Hamburg, and who sabotaged trains transporting wine to Germany. It also recounts the heroics of winemakers who hid Jewish refugees and smuggled members of the Resistance across the Demarcation Line in wine barrels, as well as the villainy of collaborators who worked with Nazi occupiers for their own benefit.
Finally, Wine and War reveals that the French were not alone in trying to save their wine. They received help from unexpected quarters: the German weinfuhrers, the very men the Nazis sent to requisition wine, whose close ties to the French wine industry mitigated their actions, and even the collaborationist Vichy regime, which recognizable the importance of keeping France’s vineyards French, and prevented the Nazis from seizing the Jewish-owned Chateaux Mouton-Rothschild and Lafite-Rothschild.
Based on three years of research and interviews with the survivors who engaged in this epic enterprise, Wine and War illuminates a compelling, small-known chapter of history, and stands as a tribute to extraordinary individuals who waged a battle that, in a very real way, saved the spirit of France.
Amazon.com Review
Liberty, equality, and fraternity are all well and excellent, a champion of French culture once remarked. But, he nonstop, what made France truly superior to its neighbors was the French passion for wine, which “contributed to the French race by giving it wit, gaiety, and excellent taste, qualities which set it very much apart from people who drink a lot of beer.”
The commentator may have had a point; after all, write Don and Petie Kladstrup, it was a well-known fact that Adolf Hitler did not like wine. Still, their leader’s teetotalism notwithstanding, the Germans showed no distaste for French wine when they invaded France in 1940. Indeed, among the first acts of the occupying army was to seize fantastic stores of wine, sending tens of thousands of barrels to the Third Reich and ordering the conversion of thousands of hectares of vineyards into war production.
Some French vintners, the Kladstrups write in this enjoyable study, went along with orders. Many others, but, including the heads of distinguished houses like Moët et Chandon, engaged in daring and treacherous acts of resistance wherever they could. Some lied about their yields; others built fake walls to hide precious vintages; and still others fictitious elaborate ruses, such as sprinkling carpet dust into second-rate grades of new wine to give it a musty, distinguished flavor. Not every German was fooled, and some partisans of the grape died for their troubles. But some Germans, at considerable risk to themselves, also looked the additional way. The Kladstrups fill their pages with memories of the wine war from both sides of the struggle, tales sometimes dismal, sometimes amusing, that commemorate persons “whose like of the grape and devotion to a way of life helped them survive and triumph over one of the darkest and most hard chapters in French history.” –Gregory McNamee
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Incredible. While France, for the most part, collaborates with the Nazis and sentences its Jewish population to certain death, the French are concerned with WINE. Any way you look at it…there is something incorrect with this picture.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
As compared to “The Algeria Hotel”, which covers the same period, this book is nearly naive in its coverage of WW2, the Resistance and the relation the French had with the Germans.
The purpose of the book is to demonstrate that by hiding their wine, the French were “resisting”. This is as fake as the claims in the years after WW2 that the French resistance, the heroic Maquis, had defeated the German occupation. The American army defeated the Germans and liberated France. And the overwhelming majority of the French “collaborated”, actively or passively with the Germans. The reason the French winegrowers hid their wine was of pure economics, and proud business. (No one is more avaricious than the French peasants.) I’m not sure I blame them for preserving their estates. But to aver this was done for patriotic reasons is disingenuous, extremely disingenuous. One of the features of French who try to hide their “collaboration” is to aver that they “saved a Jew”. Even the apologists for Petain and Laval will tell you that their goal was to save the “French Jews”, but not the refugee Jews who were in Vichy France. Which is completely fake. As fake as the legend that all French fought in the Resistance. Even when they have medals, the medals of the Liberation. Any doubts? How about Papon, who claimed that he was just a bureaucrat signing papers to send Jews and French patriots to concentration camps.
The Kladstrups have swallowed, hook, line and sinker the lies of the French.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
If you are “into” wine, this is a fantastic summer read. You’ll have heard of most (if not all) of the major wine estates (if not people) mentioned, and it’s a diverting, enjoyable tale, especially if read with a glass of the appropriate wine. BUT if you are looking for serious past facts . . . forget it! This is “history-lite” and contains too many factual errors to be taken as History.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
I thought this was an original concept of a war tale. The authors tell of the French like of the national drink of wine and the German Occupation. The Germans took a part of the output of the vineyards, and the French were starved for wine. Various tales of the burgundies/champaynes and additional assorted wines were told in this conglomoration of a book about wine and WWII. French POWs in a Stalig camp throw a wine party after accumulating wine. Resistance facts siphon off wine from casks bound for Germany. Terrible wine is sent to the German occupation authorites. Collaborators sell the drink to the German authorities. Jews are hidden in the vineyards. These are all tales included in this fleeting book.
The concept of this book was appealing. This collection of tales does not lead to a very coherent book, although many of the tales are very appealing. This is more of a fluff book, unless you are interested in wine.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
Got wine?
If you do or don’t, you’ll like Wine and War. This book is a treasure and very excellent reading.
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5