Wine and War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France's Greatest Treasure

Got wine?
If you do or don't, you'll love Wine and War. This book is a treasure and very good reading.

Historical accounts, and memoirs of WWII abound ... but this is the first book I've encountered that focused on the events and circumstances regarding the effects of the war on France's premiere vineyards, winemaking families, and fate of vast cellars of wines (millions of bottles) that lay ripe for plunder.

Before now, I'd seen some direct and indirect references to the massive looting of wine documented in various books and movies on the period ... such as the scene in Steven Ambrose's Band of Brothers in which Easy company uncovers a massive cache of looted vintage luxury champagne in Hitler's Berchtesgaden/Eagle's Nest complex - only to discover that most of it tasted inexplicably like swill. This book not only explains WHY, it also explains who stole them and how those bottles came to be there in the first place.

It's a great book - told as a series of interconnected accounts based on interviews conducted by the authors with winemakers and veterans of the underground resistance who lived (and suffered) though it all.

The storytelling is gripping, fast paced, and, at times, takes on some of the amusing qualities of "Hogan's Heroes", as we see desperate (but oh so clever) winemakers and resistance fighters repeatedly put one over on the occupying forces bent on milking them dry and outright looting them blind. We see massive caves of wines, walled up and hidden from the invaders, we see poor vintages re-labeled as great ones and sold/given to oneologically clueless officers tasked with shipping stolen wines back to Germany ... and we see what happened to those who got caught doing so.

Fiction, even at it's best, sometimes can't hold a candle to some of the crazy (and terrible) things that have already happened in real life.

Highly recommended. The mark of a good book is that it totally immerses you, and won't let go ... and it makes you look for ways to find the time to get back into it, when real life tears you away.

I have given away 12 copies of this book to friends who also love wine. After years of reading wine books "Wine and War" is an absolute delight. The reading is fascinating and fun. It is almost like fiction which makes it all the more interesting. We travel in France. On my next trip into wine country I'm going to check out some of the stories, if I can. This is a must read for any Francophile Wine lover.

There are certainly a number of interesting story lines in this book but it is written in a breezy lightweight style and follows no discernable pattern or outline. Really this is a collection of short stories around a vague central theme of the efforts of "most" Frenchmen to protect their famous wine collections from the Germans. While certainly the stories from Alsace, Burgundy, Champagne and Bordeaux are decidedly different, there are many connected themes, such as the conflict between passive resistance and active collaboration, that remain unexplored. Further, the actual brutality at the doorsteps of many of these people is glossed over in favor of repeated stories about doctored wines with grand cru labels. This could have been a much better, richer book.

This is a wonderful casual read. I could hardly put it down and was sad to come to the end of such remarkable tales. The authors have made an interesting collection of anecdotes into a fine story full of charm, humor, drama, danger and a dash of treason that reads like a good novel. When I finished I felt as though I had been on vacation and was saying goodbye to old friends too soon.