Wine and War

"Remember gentlemen, it's not just France we are fighting for, it's Champagne!"

- Winston S Churchill, 1918

By Jim Rink

Contributing Editor

In the waning days of World War II, with Germany in nearly full retreat, the American 21st Army Corps and the French 5th Tactical Group joined forces with marching orders to Berchtesgaden - a small alpine village in the Bavarian Alps. But the mission was joint in name only. The French had an overriding objective - to get to Berchtesgaden first and then to penetrate Hitler's famed mountain lair, Das Kehlsteinhaus (The Eagle's Nest). There, illegally imprisoned in a vast network of old salt mines, were more than half a million bottles of wine from some of the best houses in France - Rothschild, Lafite, Mouton, Krug, Bollinger, Moët, Pommery - and they were in need of liberation.

Gleaned from eyewitness accounts and other historical data, this little-known wartime intrigue is one of many related in Wine & War (The French, The Nazis & The Battle For France's Greatest Treasure), by the husband-and-wife writing team of Don and Petie Kladstrup. Published in 2001 by Broadway Books, the 248-page paperback regales the reader with tale after tale of the French "wine resistance," and how the country's love affair with wine led to untold acts of bravery, defiance and, yes, even deception.

Take the great Carpet Dust Campaign. According to the Kladstrups, the Chevalier Carpet Company, based in Paris, made a comfortable living buying, selling and cleaning rare and unusual carpets from across the globe. Well...if you're like me, you take your carpet in to be cleaned once every hundred years or so, and that's exactly what was happening in Paris in the late 30s and early 40s.

"Many of these carpets hadn't been cleaned since they were made," said Don and Petie in an interview with Terrance Gelenter, director of Paris Through Expatriate Eyes. Some of the dust taken from these carpets was so old, said the Kladstrups, that the Institute Pasteur was able to use that dust to determine what elements were present in the atmosphere at various times in human history. I can relate to this. In fact, I am certain that a particularly nasty dust kitty from 1856 is lodged under my bed, home to untold numbers of dead or dying dust mites from the same era.

In any event, as part of their patriotic duty, the Chevalier Carpet Company began providing this centuries-old dust to restaurants throughout the city. The wait staff sprinkled the dust on inferior bottles of wine to make them look older (and more valuable). The Germans were completely fooled. The sole exception, according to my own less reputable sources, was Sgt. Heinrich Heinstuber, from Bad Kreuznach. As luck would have it, Heinstuber worked in his father's carpet cleaning firm as a young boy. While pouring his second glass of a mediocre Burgundy shortly after arriving in Paris, Heinrich spied a small wool carpet fiber from a blue Bergama mixed in amongst the dust. The wait staff was taken outside in the alley to be summarily executed, but Heinrich's gun jammed, twice, and he stormed away cursing his rotten luck.

As a highly valued commodity, wine, it seems, has seen more than its fair share of armed conflict. Today, of course, we kill each other over oil. In the near future, I am led to believe, Velcro fasteners will lead to ethnic cleansing in Greenland.

CHAMPAGNE CAMPAIGNS

According to INTOWINE.com, the winegrowing region of Champagne has served as "the chosen path of many invaders" over the centuries, due to its strategic location. The area serves as a gateway for armies from Northern Europe to: the Mediterranean, Paris, the English Channel and Western Germany. In June 451 A.D., Attila the Hun engaged the Romans and lost his last major campaign in what was then known as the Catalaunian Plains. The all-day battle proved to be a turning point in the westward expansion of the Hun Empire. General Flavius Aetius forced Attila's retreat to the northeast and the great Hun died a couple years later after taking a newer, younger bride (Hmmmm). The Hundred Years' War and the somewhat shorter, but no less important, Thirty Years' War1 were both waged in Champagne, decimating the vineyards, the wine industry and an important source of trade.

According to Lynn Harry Nelson, Emeritus Professor of Medieval History at the University of Kansas, wine was a vital commodity that may have directly contributed to the fragile balance of power that led to the Battle for Flanders, circa 1328, just prior to the Hundred Years' War.

"Flanders (Belgium) had grown to be the industrial center of northern Europe and had become extremely wealthy through its cloth manufacture," said Nelson. "It could not produce enough wool to satisfy its market and imported fine fleece from England. England depended upon this trade for its foreign exchange. During the 1200s, the upper-class English had adopted Norman fashions and switched from beer to wine."

The problem, said Nelson, was that England was forced to import most of its wine because local winegrowing conditions were less than adequate, a condition that plagues the country to this day. As a result, English fleece was traded for Flemish cloth, which went to southern France and was exchanged for wine. A power struggle between France and Belgium erupted, culminating in a civil war in Flanders that soon involved England, desperate to protect its primary source of foreign exchange (fleece), which yielded its primary source of vitamins and yeast (wine).2

For Champagne, the end result of all these power struggles was that, by the 17th century, the city of Reims had seen destruction seven times and Epernay - 25 times.

World War I brought yet more devastation to the region:

"The enormous caves - Roman chalk quarries - beneath Reims that were used for the storage and production of champagne, now became shelters from the 1,000 days of bombardment the city endured from 1914 to 1918. After the war, the city had to be completely rebuilt (INTOWINE.com)."

As World War I dragged on, the morale of the French troops hit rock bottom and desertions became frequent. The only solace during this dreary, bleak period was the soldier's daily ration of wine. During the Second World War, even a thimbleful of the poorest of vintages was welcome by French prisoners of war (and there were many). Given these harsh circumstances, one can imagine the uncontained ecstacy experienced by Bernard de Nonancourt of Champagne, when his commanding officer told him to climb 8,000 feet above Berchtesgaden to raid Hitler's cellar:

"There was every great wine I had ever heard of," related de Nonancourt in Wine and War, "every legendary vintage." What impressed him the most, however, was a 1928 Salon - it seemed an eternity ago when de Nonancourt watched as German troops forcibly removed the champagne from its original home in Champagne, across the street from where he worked.

Every bottle of wine they retrieved that warm May day was carefully carried back down the mountain on stretchers, in tanks, trucks and canteens - every conceivable mode of conveyance. When the Americans arrived, they demanded that the Stars and Stripes replace the French tricolor flying over Eagle's Nest. The French were only too happy to comply. They had gotten what they had come for.

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1This was a real war. The Thirty Years' War consisted of a series of declared and undeclared

wars that took place in Central Europe from 1618-1648. It involved the House of Austria, the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperors Ferdinand II and Ferdinand III and his Spanish cousin Philip IV.

2According to Nelson, "beer and wine were important elements in the medieval diet. Both contain vitamin and yeast complexes that the medieval diet, especially during the winter, did not provide."

ONLINE RESOURCES

Thirty Years' War

http://www.pipeline.com/~cwa/TYWHome.htm

History of Champagne

http://www.intowine.com/champagne.html

Wine & War, The French, The Nazis & The Battle for France's Greatest Treasure

http://www.amazon.com

A Paris Conversation with Don and Petie Kaldstrup

http://www.paris-expat.com/interviews/interview_kladstrups.html

Lectures for a Medieval Survey

http://orb.rhodes.edu/textbooks/Nelson/hundred_years_war.html