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.
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.