There are a great many pitfalls which await the unwary in all this business. French wines have been, in the past, among the most consistent in the world. M. Dupont's 1929 Pommard was like a fixed star—if it was good it was always good, and if it was bad it would never surprise you by being better than you expected. Lafite 1928 was Lafite 1928 the world round; Lafite 1934 was another matter and superior to the 1928 not three times out of four but one hundred times out of one hundred. Well, it is useless to expect any consistency of this sort from the wines of the wartime vintages; granted the best will in the world, the growers were shorthanded, lacked material, lacked everything, including the most elementary necessities.
Just for example: red wines are customarily “candled” as they are packed for shipment. This process, which sounds mysterious and complicated, is not. It involves holding the bottle between a candle and one's eye to make sure that the wine is clear. In occupied France there were no candles to be had, and most of the time no electricity to light the cellars.
In the old days, fine red wines were generally clarified with white of egg, a matter of a half dozen egg whites being stirred into a barrel; settling, they carried with them any floating particles which remained. But in the hungry France of 1940-46, an egg was a meal.
Dry white wines, especially the good ones, decline rapidly in quality if not bottled after eighteen months or two years in wood, and red wines a little less rapidly after two years or three. There was a general and disastrous bottle shortage in France throughout the war, and some wines have been or will be bottles long after the termination of their normal stage in barrel.
There was no sugar shortage in France during the German occupation; there simply was no sugar. Period. Now sugar is absolutely necessary to the manufacture of champagne and is widely used in the production of Burgundies of poor vineyards or of mediocre years. Those who were not fortunate enough to have stocks of sugar on hand had… well, no sugar. This means that a good many champagnes, especially those of unknown brands, were held longer in barrel before than would normally have been the case, and some of them may well have suffered by it. On the other hand, may of the commercial Burgundies, which are often chaptalisé (given more body and alcohol with the addition of sugar during fermentation), had to be made as God and nature intended that they should, and you will find many of them somewhat lighter and less powerful, though no less bouqueté than you remember them.
Incidentally, this same sugar shortage is responsible for the continued absence of French liqueurs, as well as for a slight but significant change in the character of French cognac.
Most commercial cognac, before the war, was sweetened or “softened” with caramel or burnt sugar. There was nothing at all reprehensible about this practice, any more than there is about the “dosing” of a semisweet champagne. But with sugar unprocurable, many of the cognacs we are receiving today are drier than they used to be. A number of them, by the way, are also older and better than they were. And now that the franc has been devalued, they can be counted on to come down, at least a little, in price.
Whatever happens, however, it will be a long time before we wine drinkers find ourselves back in the easy atmosphere of the 1930's, with sound clarets at $12 a case and '29 Burgundies at $2 a bottle. Our old friends are coming back at last. They will be scarce at the beginning, and expensive, and not altogether as dependable as we might wish. But, God bless them, they are coming back—a sign, if you wish, that France, like the vine, will once again be green.
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