1940s Archive

New Wines of France

Originally Published May 1946

This spring, after six long, weary years, we shall have them back—the old, well-remembered bottles, the familiar, famous names. Lordly Chambertin…Romanée Conti; the magisterial clarets of the Bordeaux country, Latour and Mounton-Rothschild at their head; gay, crackling Vouvray, with a single strand of wire holding down its impatient cork… venerable Hermitage… pale Chablis with its color of ripening wheat and its aroma of gunflint; the Alsatian white wines in their tall, slender green bottles.

A good deal of water and a fair lot of wine have gone under the bridge since these cheerful ambassadors of France were last with us. We shall have to cope with a whole generation of new vintages: 1940—the vintage of Dunkirk; 1941—the wine of Pearl Harbor; 1942—cuvée of North African landings… and so on through 1945, vintage of Victory and, appropriately enough, probably the best year since 1900.

During the German occupation, a few old scraps of “information” reached us regarding French vineyards and wines. Almost all of the news was bad.

The Germans have seized all the cognac in France and are using it for motor fuel…they have broken up the cognac stills for copper scrap…requestioned all the champagne in Reims and Epernay… there is no sulfur, and the French vineyards have been riddled with mildew…all of the Burgundian vineyards have been torn up and potatoes planted on the Côte d'Or…as a result of the manpower shortage, the vines have been abandoned over most of France…

Luckily, all this proved to be nonsense. The French, as was altogether to be expected, took great care of their vines; the damage in general was substantially less than during the war of 1914-18 and was extensive only in Alsace, around Colmar. The town of Chablis was badly hit in 1940, but the vines escaped injury; a few chais(wine-making plants) and cellars in Bordeaux were wrecked by Allied bombings; the village of Comblanchien on the Côte d'Or was burned to the ground by the Germans in 1944. That is about the total, and a remarkably small total it is.

Furthermore, France was exceedingly fortunate in the matter of weather. Never, certainly, in the last half century have the French vineyard districts known a comparable succession of dry summers ( which means a minimum of mildew) or a higher average of good or creditable vintage years.

Lastly, of course, the French did an extraordinary job of hiding and protecting their stocks, walling up portions of their cellars, burying their more precious bottles, bilking, cheating, duping, and deceiving the Germans on every possible occasion and in every possible way.

As a result, there is probably about as much fine wine in France as there ever has been in our lifetime.

This is not at all to say that fine wine (let alone vin ordinaire) is easy to come by in France, or cheap, for the wine merchants, but hidden way in the cellars of small producers. The thousands upon thousands of little reserves of this sort make up together a not inconsiderable portion of the hidden wealth of France; they are the fruits of frugality and they have been assembled with peasant shrewdness and great care. The bad bottles, most of the doubtful bottles, and in general those incapable of long life, were sold to the Germans of the rich collaborationists or the black market. What is left is the precious cream of seven bitter years. Despite any and all devaluations of the franc, and come what may in the way of export subsidies or bonuses, it will be sold slowly, in small lots, for high prices, and at what the grower feels is the propitious moment. This propitious moment will come when the grower finds it possible to buy what the needs—agricultural machinery, clothes for his family, coffee, sugar, tobacco—at prices he thinks are bearable.

It may, therefore, be considered certain that there will be no great abundance of good, cheap French wine on the American market in the near future. Our California friends have nothing to fear—any French wines which are plentiful here will be either overpriced or poor. But a certain number of small lots discovered, bargained for, and imported by our more knowing merchants, are likely to be of very high quality indeed.

Champagne, of course, is a case apart. Most of the large house have adequate stocks. Some of them will send their best—and some will not—to the American marker which, I think, is not generally regarded with sufficient respect in Reims and Epernay. One thing is sure: there will be no imported champagnes at $2.50 or $3 a bottle, as there were before the war.

Subscribe to Gourmet