While some winegrowers had mules or oxen to replace their horses, the Miailhes were left with only cows. It was a pitiful sight. The cows strained at their yokes, bellowing in protest, as they struggled to drag the plow between the vines. “Oh, those poor cows, they had a terrible life, and they had to give milk too!” recalled May-Eliane.
Loss of their horses, however, was not the only problem the Miailhes had to face. There was no copper sulfate either. The powdery substance, sometimes called bluestone because it turned workers and vineyards blue when carelessly sprayed, was used to combat oidium and mildew, fungal diseases that attacked grapevines in wet years. The chemical had all but vanished from the marketplace after the Germans requisitioned France’s copper and other metals for its war industry.
That was when Louis Miailhe asked his son Jean to drop out of school. “I need your help,” he explained. “I want you to stay home and work with me.”
Jean, sixteen, took a close look at his father, and saw a tired man who was aging too quickly, his heart condition exacerbated by the strain of two years of German occupation, two years of struggling to keep his family fed and the vineyards producing. As much as he loved school, especially his science classes, Jean knew he could not refuse.
“What do you want me to do?” he asked.
His father replied, “Find a way to make copper sulfate.”
When the occupation began, the Germans had allowed vignerons to exchange copper products for copper sulfate. Growers scoured their homes and cellars for whatever they could find, copper wire, old pots and pans and finally even decorative ornaments they stripped off their walls. But that exchange system quickly became impractical, and the copper sulfate ran out.
Jean pored over books and publications looking for ideas. Most of what he came up with was laughable. “Here is how to deal with your copper sulfate shortage,” said the Bulletin International du Vin. “Treat vines less often, reduce the dose, avoid waste by directing sprays with greater care, let women and children do the work to make up for the lack of male workers.”
In frustration, Jean paid a visit to his old chemistry teacher, explaining that he needed to find a way to make ten tons of copper sulfate every four months. “My teacher knew all kinds of formulas and was eager to try them out.” Before anything could be tried, however, they had to find copper. The Germans had confiscated all the metal they could get their hands on in Bordeaux, including a group of bronze statues commemorating the French Revolution which had stood at Place Quinconces. They were melted down and shipped to Germany.
Fortunately, Jean’s family had a good friend in the Belgian consul general in Bordeaux. When Jean explained what he needed, the consul agreed to help. Belgium was still getting copper from its colonies in Africa. In exchange for wine, the consul agreed to smuggle some copper into Bordeaux on trucks that hauled wine and wine bottles to and from Belgium.
Jean and his chemistry teacher were now ready. They set up their “very simple, primitive laboratory” at Château Coufran, where Jean’s family lived. The old farm building they used was far enough from the main house to be safe from the curious eyes of anyone passing through.
It was a bad choice.
In 1943, Coufran suddenly became part of the zone interdite, a no-go zone the Germans set up along the Bordeaux coast as a defense against an Allied invasion. They ordered the Miailhes out of their château and moved German soldiers in. From now on, the authorities said, you will need a special pass to come on the property, even to work your vineyards.
But with the lab already built and all his supplies at Coufran, Jean decided to forge ahead anyway, sneaking past the German lines at night, or hiding at the end of the day and not leaving when work stopped in the vineyard. Working at night helped hide the smoke from the lab, and the lab itself was still far enough away from the house to keep the smell of sulfur from German noses, as long as the wind was in the right direction.
For a few months, all went smoothly. Hunched over test tubes and other equipment, Jean mixed nitric and sulfuric acid and applied it to the copper he had accumulated. Soon he had made an impressive amount of copper sulfate. His father was thrilled.
But then, abruptly, the Belgian copper supply was cut off. The consul told Jean it had become too dangerous, that the Germans were becoming suspicious and the smuggling would have to stop.
Jean did not know what to do—until one day when he spotted an itinerant scrap metal dealer on the street. The dealer admitted he was getting metal “here and there” and would be happy to supply Jean with copper if Jean supplied him with wine. “It was our little cash-and-carry deal,” Jean later recalled. “I didn’t ask any questions and we didn’t exchange names.”
Their chief problem was getting the copper to the lab. The only way was by gazogene car, regular cars which, because of fuel shortages, had been converted to run on burning wood. “We would get into our cars and start for Coufran from Bordeaux. Every hill, even little ones, we would have to get out and push the car,” Jean said. “I don’t know how many times on each trip we would have to stop and get out the pick to break up the charcoal that was blocking the engine. Those gazogenes were awful. They were so slow and we were always nervous and worried about being stopped and searched by the Germans even though we had passes to work in the vineyards.”
Although he was aware of the risks, Jean found making copper sulfate under the noses of the Germans exciting, even exhilarating. “I really wanted to be involved in the war and that way I felt as though I was.”
But two things happened almost simultaneously that brought the reality of war to Jean’s doorstep. While working at the lab one night, he received news from a friend that his scrap metal dealer had been arrested. It turned out that the copper the dealer had been supplying to Jean had been stolen from a German warehouse.
Jean was terrified, unsure what would happen next. Would the scrap metal dealer talk? Would the Germans come for him next? He had been arrested once for being out after curfew and was released only because a friend of his father’s who was from a German family spoke up for him. “It was a moment of absolute panic,” Jean said. “I could not sleep for days I was so nervous.”
When weeks passed and nothing happened, he began to relax. But not for long. In the wee hours of the morning when he was still at the lab, Jean was startled by a burst of antiaircraft fire, followed by a deafening crash. After quickly shutting down his lab, he stepped outside. There, in the middle of the vineyard, was the burning wreckage of an American plane. Minutes later, the sound of barking dogs could be heard as German patrols came out of the château and began searching for the downed fliers.
Jean dashed back to his lab and began dismantling it as quickly as possible, hiding pieces in the hayloft and wherever else he could, even burying parts in the vineyard. Then he quietly slipped back to Bordeaux.
Jean Miailhe’s career as a chemist had come to an end.
God made man—
Frail as a bubble;
God made love—
Love made trouble,
God made the vine—
Was it a sin
That man made wine
To drown trouble in?
—Anonymous
Now, there was not enough wine to even do that, and everything the Vichy government did only made winegrowers’ troubles worse.
They increasingly saw Marshal Pétain’s collaborationist regime as meddlesome and manipulative, more anxious to appease Berlin’s thirst for wine than to meet the needs of its own people.
To stretch the dwindling wine supply, Vichy, under the guise of healthier living, launched an antialcoholism crusade. Certain days were designated “alcohol-free,” and bars and restaurants were forbidden to serve alcoholic drinks on those days. Advertising alcohol was prohibited and, for the first time ever, a minimum drinking age was established in France; it was set at fourteen. When people complained, Vichy, unconvincingly, sought to justify its moves by pointing out that one of the reasons France l
ost the war was that it had too many bars, one bar for every 80 persons compared with one for every 270 people in Germany.
Under pressure to meet Germany’s demand for more wine, Vichy was trapped and in a terrible bind. At the same time it was trying to persuade the French public to drink less, it was struggling to convince winegrowers to produce more. Growers were told they could now make wine from “undesirable” or “prohibited” grape varieties. They were also encouraged to water their wine. Those committed to quality were appalled.
Equally upsetting was a new government revenue-raising scheme. Desperate for money to pay occupation costs demanded by Germany, Vichy imposed a 20 percent tax on all wine that growers sold. Stores had to add another 20 percent when they sold that wine to the man-in-the-street. Not surprisingly, less and less wine was sold in shops because it was now too expensive for most people. Wine merchants lost money, and winegrowers did too.
As a result, the wine began flowing in a new direction, toward a flourishing black market where merchants and winegrowers could sell their wine “under the table.” French wine lovers jumped to take advantage, and so, too, did the Germans. Between July 1942 and February 1943 alone, the Germans, loaded with their overvalued marks, bought more than 10 million bottles of wine on the black market.
Vichy was furious about the black market activity and retaliated by taking complete control of everything related to wine production. From now on, warned officials, we will decide how, when and where wine is to be shipped and distributed. Individual citizens will be issued ration tickets while dealers and shippers will be granted purchase certificates specifying which wines they can buy. To plug any loopholes, officials also declared that growers would no longer be granted a perk they had enjoyed from time immemorial: the right to keep large amounts of wine for tax-free “family consumption.” That wine was usually sold to friends, giving producers a bit of extra income.
The French wine trade was in an uproar. The harder Vichy pushed, the harder winemakers and winegrowers pushed back. Black marketing actually increased. In response, the government unleashed its “Fraud Squad.” Inspectors arrested dozens of winegrowers suspected of conducting fraudulent wine operations. Many others were placed under investigation. One grower alone was charged with falsely labeling 50,000 bottles of wine.
Claude Carrage, a grower from the Mâconnais in southern Burgundy, watched with growing dismay as the crackdown intensified.
Carrage owned a small vineyard near Vinzelles, an area best known for dry white wines, including Pouilly-Fuissé. It was here among the dips and rises of the region’s chalky hills that the austere, intellectual monks of the Cluny monastery, in the twelfth century, first taught peasants how to plant vines and care for their vineyards.
In those days, the wines of the Mâconnais were unknown outside the region and nearly all of it was consumed locally. But about 1660, a bold and imaginative winegrower named Claude Brosse decided to change that. Loading a cart with two barrels of his finest wine, he set off from Mâcon bound for Paris, 250 miles away, on a route known as “the highway of the ready sword, where a fight was to be had for the asking, and death often attended the dropping of a lace handkerchief.”
Brosse made it to Paris safely, and his arrival, after a monthlong journey, caught the eye of France’s Sun King. Louis XIV was curious about a winegrower who would venture so far from home, and even more curious about his wine. When Brosse offered him a taste, the King willingly accepted. After a few sips, the King told Brosse the wine was very good, perhaps not as great as Chambertin, the grand seigneur of Burgundy, but nevertheless thoroughly enjoyable. “Do you think you can get more of it to Paris?” the King asked Brosse. When Brosse said he could, the monarch placed an order for his cellars. After that, the wines of the Mâconnais became extremely popular and much sought after.
It was a story Claude Carrage knew well. How ironic, he thought; Brosse got his wine all the way to Paris and here I am, four hundred years later, not even able to get my wines to market in Dijon, only seventy-five miles away. Instead of highwaymen, I have the Germans to worry about.
To protect his wine, Carrage hid his best vintages in a tiny hut in the middle of his vineyard. “No one could ever have imagined how much wine could be stored behind the tools and bundles of kindling in that little shed,” his nephew said. “I assure you it seemed much larger inside than outside!” The wine was contained in seven casks, “marvelous white wines, dry and cool,” the nephew remembered. “They were a pale yellow and tinged with green. He made me taste every single one of them. And each time, we toasted: ‘Here’s another one that Pétain won’t give to the Boches!’ ”
But Carrage’s bravado soon gave way to anger and despair. “He was beside himself,” recalled his niece Lucie Aubrac. “His Marshal Pétain, ‘victorious at Verdun,’ had betrayed him ignominiously.”
It happened when Vichy’s wine inspectors arrived to requisition Carrage’s stock of wine for industrial alcohol. “When they finished, they poured a glass of heating oil into every barrel to adulterate the wine and make it unfit for consumption. That way, they ensured its delivery.”
Carrage was in tears. “The wine, that’s really nothing,” he said. “But the casks! They’ve been here since my father’s day. The older the cask, the better the wine. They’re lost. That stinking oil leaves an odor that never goes away. They’re good only for burning! And to think—all this just to send wine to be distilled for fuel for the Boches. They may have enough to go all the way into Russia but they won’t have any left to come back—they’ll all die. Ah—that Marshal’s a fine man! He deserves to be shot twelve times!”
For Vichy and the Germans, that incident and others like it had unintended consequences. “More than any rational argument, more than any patriotic explanation,” said Carrage’s niece, “those glasses of heating oil adulterating a fine Pouilly-Fuissé swung the winegrowers of the Mâcon hills to the Resistance.”
And not only those from Mâcon. Throughout France, on both sides of the Demarcation Line, Resistance groups sprouted like weeds in the vineyard.
So too did genuine hostility toward Pétain. Until then, public disapproval had been directed mainly against his government and the avidly pro-Nazi Prime Minister Pierre Laval. Now, scorn was being heaped on the old man himself. There were jokes about his womanizing. (“Sex and food are the only things that matter,” he had said.) His tendency to fall asleep during meetings was ridiculed as well. After his assignment to Spain, Pétain had been nicknamed “the conquistador.” Now there were snide references to “le con qui se dort” (the asshole who sleeps).
Angered by the jokes and alarmed by a more militant Resistance, the eighty-six-year-old Marshal took to the vineyards of the Midi to upbraid vignerons. He accused them of breaking the law and defying his policies, warning that a “cold wind” was blowing across France. His words had little effect.
People did pay attention, however, when German forces, in November 1942, crossed the Demarcation Line and occupied the entire country. Speaking on the radio, Pétain called on his countrymen to stick together. I am your guide, your true leader, he told them. Things will work out if you have faith in me.
But when people heard the next broadcast, what little faith they had began to wither and die. This time, it was Prime Minister Laval speaking. With the war going badly for Berlin—its aura of invincibility had been punctured, first in the skies in the Battle of Britain, then in the sands of North Africa and now in the mud and snow of Russia—Laval saw his opportunity and took it. He knew that German war industries were desperate for labor and that French people were anxious for prisoners of war to be returned. Over the radio, Laval announced he had made a deal: for every three workers who volunteered to go to Germany, one prisoner of war would be brought home.
Laval’s plan was a total failure. Hardly anyone volunteered. “I didn’t want to work for the Germans,” said one winegrower, expressing the feelings of most. “The last thing I wanted to do was go to work i
n Germany.”
Laval was stung, and Nazi leaders in Berlin were seething. Laval decided to play hardball. In early 1943, he announced the formation of forced labor battalions, a program called Service du Travail Obligatoire, or STO. Under the program, men between sixteen and sixty years of age would be ordered—not asked—to go to Germany. Anyone who resisted or tried to escape would be hunted down and punished severely. To back up his threat, Laval created a paramilitary police force called the Milice. Armed by the SS and styled after the Gestapo, it specialized in the capture and torture of resisters. Seeing their own countrymen dressed in khaki shirts, black berets and black ties inspired fear and hatred throughout the population.
Nearly 700,000 Frenchmen reported for STO when they were called up, among them a young man from Vosne-Romanée, Henri Jayer, who would become one of France’s greatest winemakers. “I had a wife and baby daughter. I was afraid of what would happen to my family if I did not report,” he explained. Jayer was sent to work in a submarine motor factory in Vienna. (He escaped after several months and spent the rest of the war hiding at a cousin’s home near Vosne-Romanée.)
Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France's Greatest Treasure Page 14