Wine And War: The French, The Nazis, And The Ba... File

For the French, protecting their wine was about defending the very "spirit of France". Winemakers employed various daring and creative tactics to thwart the occupiers:

: Many producers built fake walls to conceal their most precious bottles or buried them underground. The owners of Paris's famed La Tour d'Argent restaurant, for instance, rushed to build a wall to hide 20,000 bottles before the Germans arrived. Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Ba...

Immediately after the fall of Paris in 1940, the Nazi leadership began a widespread campaign to pillage French wine, which they viewed as one of the country's most valuable national assets. For the French, protecting their wine was about

: The collaborationist government sometimes acted to keep France's vineyards in French hands, even preventing the Nazis from seizing Jewish-owned estates like Châteaux Mouton-Rothschild and Lafite-Rothschild to preserve the nation's economic interests. Key Perspectives and Regions Covered Immediately after the fall of Paris in 1940,

: Beyond protecting bottles, some vignerons used their vast cellar networks to hide Jewish refugees and smuggle members of the Resistance across the Demarcation Line inside wine barrels. The Moral Complexity: Collaboration

: Some figures, like Bordeaux merchant Louis Eschenauer, were convicted and imprisoned after the war for doing extensive business with the enemy.

: The Reich dispatched official German wine merchants, known as weinführers , to every major wine region (such as Burgundy, Bordeaux, and Champagne) to coordinate the massive collection and resale of fine vintages at a profit.