Books I'm Reading: Wine & War

Just finished Wine & War (Broadway Books, 2002) by Don and Petie Kladstrup. After an uneven introduction, I was worried this might be a struggle to get through, but it turned out to be well enough written and it tells a story worth reading, if you have any interest in French wine. You'd think enough had been said about WWII, the Nazis, and their looting, but the book cuts a narrow yet new path through the thicket of familiar events and succeeds in creating novel perspectives. Specifically, this is a look at how the Nazis viewed France's greatest wines and vineyards and the greed and excesses France's riches of wine inspired during the German occupation of France.

On a personal note, it was especially interesting to read about Château Palmer and Château Pichon Lalande, my wife and I having been shown these chateaux in detail on visits in 1995, the latter by May-Eliane Miailhe Lencquesaing, herself, who appears repeatedly in the book. I enjoyed tasting the 1994 wine from the barrel—seemingly hopelessly astringent at the time (I wonder how it's developed?). At Palmer, they had recently made the rather bold (for Bordeaux) move of installing stainless steel tanks to replace the traditional wooden ones. They had been fabricated in the shape of the originals, however. Peter Sichel, who showed us around very graciously, explained that they'd decided the shape of the tanks was more important to the wine than what they were made of. I'd have looked at the places differently if I had known then what I know now about them--about how Pichon Lalande was taken over and used to house German soldiers that treated the place rather badly, about how the owners and the people that worked there coped, about the Jews secreted away at Palmer for months to keep them safe. Makes me want to go again.   

Finishing a good book is always a let-down, but there is one good thing about it: I get to think about what to read next.