Wine, lies and the Nazis

Grandpa Emile – 70 and still dapper with his moustache and boater – had been a toddler when Alsace-Lorraine was annexed by Germany in 1871. He was nearly 50 when it returned to French hands after the first world war, but he bore ardent allegiance to France – that Bastille Day just passed, during his speech as mayor of Riquewihr, he had boldly told the Hitler-admirers among the townspeople to get out of the village. Now he feared dying as a German citizen.

The Hugels of Alsace were just one of the characterful wine-making families who populated Wine and War: The French, The Nazis, and The Battle for France’s Greatest Treasure (2001), the work of former ABC and CBS News correspondent Don Kladstrup and his journalist wife, Petie. It is considered by many to be one of the great wine books. 

With the major vineyards all kept within the Occupied Zone, French wine was siphoned off to sustain German troops and to be sold for profit for the Reich. Wine and War set a narrative about the conduct of the vintners of France in the face of this affront – a story of heroic subterfuge and gleeful humiliation of the enemy. 

It is a rollicking, romantic tale of the plucky and stoic French. But it is also a story which has been challenged in recent years as alternative accounts have emerged. And, as we look east this Christmas, the harsh realities of the relationship between wine and war are more vividly apparent than ever.

Tales of the French getting rid of their plonk by passing it off as their best wines and flogging it to an enemy who were lacking in both wits and degustatory refinement loom large in Wine and War. We hear that the champagne houses put their worst produce in bottles labelled ‘Reserve à la Wehrmacht’ – the brutish rank and file would never know the difference. 

In Paris, where the invaders liked to live it up, resourceful restaurateurs sourced surplus dust from a carpet cleaning firm and threw it over the young wines they served up as rare vintages, lending them the appearance having been in the cellars for decades. 

“We would always send our worst, like the 1939, which was absolute rubbish,” Emile Hugel’s grandson, Johnny, confirmed to the Kladstrups. But such sleight of hand could be dangerous. 

The Nazi top brass had a taste in wine that didn’t match the vulgarity of their politics – von Ribbentrop had been a wine merchant, Goebbels was a connoisseur and collector, and Göring considered wine the “most precious treasure of France”, to be plundered just like the art of occupied Europe. 

When wine orders came from the Platterhof, Hitler’s guest house near the Berghof, the Hugels were sure to send the real thing. “There were a lot of people there who appreciated good wine,” said Johnny’s brother, Georges, “We didn’t dare cross them.”

The other appealingly cinematic trope in Wine and War is vintners carefully hoarding the best vintages against Nazi pillaging. The formidable Marie-Louise de Nonancourt – WWI widow, mother of four and owner of Laurent-Perrier – bricked up her stocks in the cellar and cemented a statue of the Virgin Mary into the wall to stand guard over them.

Meanwhile, other winemakers were seeking the aid of natural rather than spiritual forces. Andre Foreau of Vouvray buried his most prized bottles under the cabbages of his vegetable patch, we are told, while the decorated WWI veteran and Burgundian Resistance agent, Maurice Drouhin, got even more creative. His adoptive son Robert recalled helping wall up the valuable Romanée-Conti as a six-year-old: 

“While Papa laid the bricks, my mother, my sisters and I ran around the cellar collecting spiders to put in front of the wall,” he said. “The spiders would then spin webs and make the wall look older.” A more charming example of down-to-earth ingenuity would be hard to come by.

This was all seductive stuff, but the fact was that, for all the impressive legwork they had done in speaking to the scions of the leading winemaking dynasties of France, the Kladstrups built their narrative around those interviews without thought that it is a world built on both family and reputation.

The vested interest in positive spin was huge. It was perhaps inevitable that many of the anecdotes read like well-circulated myths. 

Their account also skirted uncomfortable truths. While they acknowledged the ardent Pétainism of many in the wine trade (the Burgundians even renamed a prime section of vineyard ‘Clos du Maréchal’), direct collaboration with the Nazis was not probed.

“Many papers” about the collaborators remained sealed or had been destroyed, the Kladstrups argued, and instead they focussed on the case of Louis Eschenauer, the giant of the Bordeaux wine trade who was imprisoned for two years for collaboration. The idea he was an outlier was implicit and he was extended considerable benefit of the doubt. In their account of the Beauftragter für den Weinimport Frankreich – the wine traders put in charge of purchasing wines to be resold for the Nazi war effort (the French called them weinführers) – the Kladstrups gave the French vintners a largely passive role.

This was the version of the history of the wine trade in France in WWII that endured for approaching two decades. Then historian Christophe Lucand came along. His Vin et la Guerre: Comment les nazis ont fait main basse sur le vignoble français (2017), translated as Hitler’s Vineyards in 2019, lobbed a hand grenade into the Kladstrups’ history.

“The history of wine in France from 1940 to 1944 is that of a tragedy that we have long wanted to forget,” he said. “Almost all wine professionals, merchants and growers participated in an active and prosperous trade with the Reich, to the detriment of the national interest. An incredible cupidity. Those who resisted were few.” He could hardly have been more unequivocal.

Lucand ranged himself squarely against “the most fantastic anecdotes, often drawn from an imagination worthy of the comedy La Grande Vadrouille”, the 1966 film set during the Occupation which influenced ‘Allo ‘Allo! (indeed, reading the Kladstrups’ book, one often expects Herr Flick and Co to appear any moment). 

Lucand’s account, certainly less appealingly novelistic than Wine and War, but more reassuringly based on the archives, argued that, after the poor vintages and worse economic conditions of the 1930s, many wine producers saw a golden opportunity not just to offload their cellars of bad wine at the Nazi’s expense, but to personally profit. Money talked, he said – there was no need for coercion.

Four years later, journalist Antoine Dreyfus published his Les raisins du Reich: Quand les vignobles français collaboraient avec les nazis (2021), the result of two years of investigation in Bordeaux, Burgundy, Champagne and Cognac. A documentary based on the book directed by Jean-Christophe Klotz (his past films have covered such granite-hard subjects as the Nuremburg trials and the Rwandan genocide), aired on France 2 this October. 

Dreyfus found there was still an “omerta” around the truth in les grands terroirs, and he confirmed Lucand’s uncomfortably ugly history of collaboration, driven by naked commercialism at one extreme and outright Nazi sympathising at the other. 

While many wine-producing families could claim real heroes – Resistance man Maurice de Nonancourt of Laurent-Perrier died in Sachsenhausen, the Miailhe family of Bordeaux’s Château Siran sheltered Jews – between Dreyfus and Lucand (the latter’s book Le vin des nazis revisited the topic just last year), the cheerfully defiant vintners of France doing only what was necessary to survive faded away and rather darker characters, some of whom emerged from the war as millionaires, took their place. 

Of course, what really happened is of virtually no consequence when you are dealing with national myth-making, and there are few things more charged with myth-making potential in France than wine. In 1957 semiotician Roland Barthes wrote that for the French wine is “an ornament in the slightest ceremonials of French daily life”, noting that when President René Coty had been photographed at home with a bottle of beer, not wine, on the table three years before “the whole nation was in a flutter; it was as intolerable as having a bachelor king. Wine is here a part of the reason of state.”

While it is universal that wars are foundational events in the forging of the national psyche, the combination with wine in France – the “totem-drink”, according to Barthes – was bound to produce doubly-potent myths. 

The ordinary French faced severe wine shortages during the war, and it was, in the context of its almost sacred importance, a particularly cruel humiliation that ate away at morale, and perhaps even national identity itself. Grapevines root deep into the earth – as far as five metres – thus they are a link to the very physical foundations of the nation, and the French had to watch the most precious product of their nation’s soil draining away like the blood of fighting Frenchmen. 

Parisian restaurateur Claude Terrail, who was highly decorated for his war service and had saved the best of the famed cellar of his La Tour d’Argent restaurant by walling it up just hours before the Nazis marched into the city, said, “To be a Frenchman means to fight for your country and its wine.” Perhaps this was where the crossroads between resistance and collaboration was situated – for some, the two goals seemed irreconcilable.

The Hugels had a hard war. Johnny and Georges were called up to fight for Germany, the business was forcibly closed by the Nazi authorities at one point, and their vineyards were strafed by the Allies then crushed under the tanks of the liberating Texans of the 36^th Infantry Division. But, along with the houses of Drouhin, Laurent-Perrier, Château Siran, and even Louis Eschenauer, Hugel exists to this day. 

As Riquewihr’s Christmas market buzzes this week, many bottles of their wine, especially the Vendange Tardive and Grains Nobles late-harvest dessert wines they pioneered which are festive favourites, will be sold. The Hugels, and their wine, survived.

Georges Hugel saw action – and the most abject conditions of the whole war – in Ukraine when he was sent to the Eastern Front. 1,300 miles to the east of Riquewihr, in the vineyards of Ukraine, today the fight for a country’s wine – and its connected nationhood – goes on. Half of Ukraine’s wineries were lost to the 2014 invasion of Crimea, but since the full-scale invasion, over 30 new businesses have been established and new markets abroad found, despite vineyards facing shelling and winemakers having to leave their grapes to take up arms. 

As it has always been in France, wine is symbolic of an ineradicable culture in Ukraine – it is a tradition that goes back to the ancient Greek colonies there, which was choked off under Soviet rule but then revived after 1991. Eighty years on from the liberation of France, one can only hope Ukraine’s own story of wine and war also becomes one of survival.