Wine And War: The French, The Nazis And The Battle For France's Greatest Treasure Part 14

With the Hugels reunited and Alsace now completely liberated, the real celebrating could finally begin. "We went from cellar to cellar. We were plastered for three days," Johnny said. "Every day someone else, one of our friends, was coming home. Every day someone else came back."

But many did not. At least 40,000 young Alsatian men were killed fighting in the German army, most of them in Russia. Before liberation, death notices were required to state that the victim Gefallen fr Fhrer, Volk und Vaterland (died for the Fhrer, people and Fatherland). Now, grieving families could say without fear that their sons had died on the Eastern front.

As Alsatians reclaimed their French ident.i.ty, it was also safe to speak French. Instead of having to greet friends on the street by saying "Heil Hitler," people now could say "Bon jour." Men could also sport berets. Names of streets, businesses, towns and villages were restored as well.

Richenweer became Riquewihr. Hgel und Shne was once again Hugel et Fils.

Another name was about to be replaced too.

Ever since Burgundian winemakers had given one of their best parcels of vines to the now discredited Marshal Petain, they had been feeling increasingly uncomfortable.

Each day when they went to work, the imposing stone gate of the Clos du Marechal seemed to mock them. There must be something we can do about this, they thought. They called on a friend who was an attorney for advice. The Marshal's property has all been confiscated by the government, they pointed out. Isn't there some way we can get the vineyard back?

The attorney agreed to take their case to court and ask that the gift of the Clos du Marechal be declared null and void. Much to their relief, the court ruled in their favor, and the parcel of vines pa.s.sed back into the hands of the Hospices de Beaune.

A day after the decision, winegrowers armed with sledgehammers and picks converged on the vineyard and began knocking down the stone gate they had once so proudly erected.

Mademoiselle Yvonne Tridon, who had presented Petain with a gift of wine on behalf of the Beaune Syndicat des Negociants, admitted that it was all a little strange. "We French are sometimes very hard to understand," she said. "One day we are singing 'Marechal, nous voil,' and the next day we don't ever want to hear about him again."

Within an hour, the stone gate lay in ruins. But not quite all of it. During the bas.h.i.+ng and smas.h.i.+ng, Maurice Drouhin and his son Robert spirited away one of the posts.

Destruction of the Clos du Marechal gate, however, did not end the controversy. There were still the wines made by the Hospices de Beaune on the Marshal's behalf. The wines had the right to be bottled and labeled with Petain's name and a picture of the Hospices. It was an acute embarra.s.sment to those who once had hailed Petain as a savior.

Winegrowers, therefore, were alarmed when they heard that the government, which had confiscated Petain's property, had decided to put the wines up for auction. Before the auction could begin, however, the auction site was taken over by several groups protesting the sale. Among them were war veterans, Resistance veterans, the Federation of Deported Laborers and the Federation of Political Deportees. All complained vehemently that the sale was unpatriotic.

The auctioneer, Georges Rappeneau, a newcomer to the profession who had only conducted one other auction in his life, did not know what to do. He called the protesters into his office and tried to reason with them. They refused to listen and demanded that the sale be called off.

Then Rappeneau remembered where he was and how things were done in the heart of Burgundy. "Just a minute," he told the protesters, "I'll be right back." Rappeneau went outside and asked one of his a.s.sistants to find gla.s.ses and a corkscrew. Once the gla.s.ses were handed out, he began filling them. He was pouring Clos du Marechal. "Gentlemen," he said, "let's drink to a successful conclusion." It was not long before the problem was worked out and the sale went ahead.

And who bought the wine? The veterans themselves!

They bottled the wine with Clos du Marechal labels and resold it at a profit, the money going to support their organizations. One person suggested the Hospices could do even better by bottling the wine from Petain's former vineyard with the old Clos du Marechal labels but with "ex" printed in front. "A good way to garner a little publicity and raise some extra money," he suggested. The Hospices pa.s.sed on that idea.

Although Maurice Drouhin was glad that Petain's vineyard had been returned to the Hospices de Beaune, he was pleased that he and Robert had managed to salvage the gatepost from the ex-Clos du Marechal. "It's a piece of our history," he told Robert. "We ought to learn from it, not destroy it blindly as though we can change everything that has happened."

It was in that spirit of facing up to history that Maurice responded quickly to a letter he received from Dr. Erich Eckardt shortly after the war. Dr. Eckardt was the German judge who presided at Maurice's trial in 1942 and ordered that he be released from prison. Now, Eckardt was pleading for help, saying that the Allied authorities in Germany had refused to let him practice his profession. "Is there anything you can do, anything you can say that will help me?" he asked Maurice. Maurice remembered how Eckardt had been willing to listen to his defense at the trial. He had no hesitation about responding with a notarized statement saying Eckardt was a "decent man who had judged me fairly and impartially." Soon afterward, the Allies reinstated Eckardt as a judge.

Robert-Jean de Voge received a letter too. He was being summoned to court as a "hostile witness" against Otto Klaebisch. The former weinfhrer of Champagne had been brought before a postwar tribunal investigating economic crimes. The court was stunned when de Voge, instead of condemning Klaebisch, spoke in his behalf. He conceded that he and the weinfhrer had had many sharp disagreements but emphasized that Klaebisch had always been very correct. "He was in a difficult situation," de Voge told the court. "I don't believe for a minute that he himself would have ever ordered my arrest or those of my colleagues. It was the Gestapo."

Klaebisch was exonerated.

Baron Philippe de Rothschild felt his heart sink a little when he saw the German postmark on the letter he had just received. He opened it up. "Dear Baron Philippe," the letter said, "I have always loved the wines of Mouton, and I wonder if there is any chance you would let me represent them for you in Germany."

The letter was signed Heinz Bmers, the former weinfhrer of Bordeaux.

Although the war years had brought the baron sadness and pain, his response was immediate. "Yes, why not," he replied. "It is a new Europe we are building."

"The wind of the apocalypse that blew from the east for sixty months, driving away laughter and happiness from the kingdom of vines, and leaving only the silence of death, has finally ended." With those words, Grand Master Georges Faiveley declared open the thirty-second meeting of the Confrerie des Chevaliers du Tastevin. They called it the Chapitre de Resurrection. The Burgundy wine fraternity had been "put to sleep" during the war.

But on November 16, 1946, it was resurrected with all the pomp and ceremony the wine community could generate. Government officials, foreign dignitaries, military leaders and Burgundy's greatest winemakers gathered for a feast of wine and food and to hear author Georges Duhamel, a member of the Academie Franaise, extol the virtues and values of wine.

Like everyone, Duhamel had gorged himself on a seven-course meal and had been plied with half a dozen wines, including a 1938 Beaune Clos des Mouches from Maurice Drouhin, a 1940 Clos Blanc de Vougeot, a 1942 Nuits Clos de Th.o.r.ey, and a 1929 Nuits Chteau-Gris. Under such circ.u.mstances, it was not surprising that Duhamel positively overflowed in his praise.

"Wine was one of the first signs of civilization to appear in the life of human beings," he said. "It is in the Bible, it is in Homer, it s.h.i.+nes through all the pages of history, partic.i.p.ating in the destiny of ingenious men. It gives spirit to those who know how to taste it, but it punishes those who drink it without restraint."

William Bullitt, who had been the U.S. amba.s.sador to France at the beginning of the war, also had a message for the Confrerie. "Like everyone else, when I became amba.s.sador, I was told to keep my eyes and ears open and my mouth shut," he said. "Now, here I am doing just the opposite, opening my mouth to sing your songs and closing my eyes to savor your wine."

It was an evening of shared pleasures and reminiscences. Time had already begun to soften some of the memories of the war. As the wine continued to flow, people began telling stories. One guest recalled the experiences of a friend, a man from Chantilly who had served in the French army.

His friend, he told the others at his table, was a great wine lover who had been away from home for four long discouraging years. When the war ended, he could not wait to get back to his cellar, where he had locked up several hundred bottles of wine. With great antic.i.p.ation and some trepidation, he inserted the key that he had carried with him for four years into the lock. It turned. The door was still locked! Excitedly, he opened it and pushed into the dark room. Pulling a flashlight from his pocket, he s.h.i.+ned it around.

Everywhere there was a sparkle of gla.s.s from the bottles. Everything was just as he left it. Gingerly, he eased one of the bottles out of the rack. It was still corked. So was the next bottle and the next.

Carrying them from the cave out into the light, he saw that the bottles were all in perfect shape.

Except for one small thing-they were all empty.

German soldiers had indeed broken into the cellar, prying open the door without breaking the lock. They must have been ecstatic when they discovered what was there. After consuming as much wine as they could, the Germans pushed the corks back into the bottles and put the bottles back on the racks. Before leaving, one of the soldiers took time to leave a thank-you note in the cave. "Dear Sir, Our compliments. Your taste in wine is impeccable!"

When the laughter at the table had died down, the Grand Master of the Confrerie called on Duhamel to bring the evening to a close. The old academician and wine lover returned to the podium with pleasure.

"This celebration has given us optimism and confidence," he said. "It proves that our beloved France, so tested and so unhappy, still has resources on which she can count. In coming here tonight, we have proven that our France, this kingdom of wine, will live on."

Epilogue.

INTENSE HEAT, FREEZING TEMPERATURES, HAIL, THEN MORE HEAT. 1945 seemed like certain disaster.

But the peasants who worked the vines believed there was a special relations.h.i.+p between war and grapes. They had always said that the Good Lord sends a poor wine crop when war starts and a fine, festive one to mark its end.

And they were right. 1939, the year World War II began, was a horrendous vintage, whereas 1945, l'annee de la victoire (the year of the victory), was one of the best ever recorded.

Wine critics ran out of superlatives: "I give it six stars out of five!" one said. "These wines will not be ready to drink for fifty years," another predicted. Old-timers compared them to 1870, 1893 and other legendary vintages of the past.

Although the 1945 crop was minuscule, only half of what had been harvested in 1939, the wines were incredibly rich and concentrated, "a recompense," as one observer put it, "for the years of misery, war and deprivation."

Mother Nature did most of the work. Because winemakers lacked sugar, sulfur and other chemicals, the wines had to be made in an extremely natural way. To make up for sugar, winemakers increased the time that the must, or fermenting juice, remained in contact with the grape skins. Those skins had been packed with extra natural sugar by the hot weather. Because of a bottle shortage, wines remained longer in the cask, developing even greater character and complexity.

In a sense, 1945 was the last great vintage of the nineteenth century. For winemakers and winegrowers, the end of the war marked the beginning of the twentieth century, as high-axle tractors replaced horses, and bottling machines replaced women who traditionally did that job, leaving no doubt that a new era in winemaking had begun.

Vineyard life changed too. Time was no longer told by the church bells; vines no longer set the rhythm and pace of life. "Workers used to be part of the family; now they are employees," Robert Drouhin said. "Instead of a festival and big feast after the harvest, we pay them, give them a gla.s.s of wine and say goodbye.

"The increase in economic well-being has led to a change in mentality. More and more people are thinking about the profitability of wine rather than the quality. I think there used to be a lot more pride."

Robert fondly recalls the walks he and his father took through the vineyards and everything Maurice tried to impart to him. "He always said that when you are hiring someone, look at the quality of the person. It is very easy to find a good technician; it's much harder and more important to have a good person."

In 1957, when Maurice suffered a stroke, Robert, who was twenty-four, was forced to drop out of oenology school to take over the operation. It was a rough beginning. "I certainly made enough mistakes," he said.

Mademoiselle Tridon, who by then was working as Maurice's secretary, remembers Robert coming into the office for the first time after his father's stroke. "He was a very sad young man, but he listened very carefully to everything I had to say about the business, and he listened to others as well. That was something Maurice had always been very good at."

Maurice died in 1962. A few years later, while going through his father's papers, Robert discovered a letter Maurice had written to his wife from prison in 1941: In my meditations, I find that nothing in life counts more than the happiness we can give others, the good that we can do. This is what we must teach our children, to think of others more than they think of themselves, for it is in this way they will find the most n.o.ble satisfaction of all.

World War II was the defining moment in the lives of those who would run France's vineyards. It shaped not only who they were but all they would become.

Like Robert Drouhin, May-Eliane Miailhe de Lencquesaing credits her father with instilling in her the principles of hard work and commitment to quality.

"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 Chteau 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 Cla.s.sification, has produced brilliant wines that rival and sometimes surpa.s.s those of first-growth properties such as Chteau Lafite-Rothschild, Chteau Mouton-Rothschild and neighboring Chteau 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 Siecle, of course, de Nonancourt!"

Years later, after Grand Siecle had become the flags.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sing 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 Gewrztraminer Selection des Grains n.o.bles, 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 circ.u.mstances: 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 cla.s.s had been studying the French Resistance when the boy came across a pa.s.sage 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, doc.u.ments 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 Htel 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.