Wine and war combine in this remarkable untold story of France's courageous, clever vintners, who protected and rescued the country's most treasured commodity from German plunder during the Second World War.

In 1940 France fell to the Nazis, and the German army almost immediately began a campaign of pillaging one of the assets the French hold most dear: their wine. Like others in the French Resistance, wine makers mobilised to oppose their occupiers, but the tale of their heroism has remained largely unknown - until now. Wine and War tells the alternately thrilling and harrowing story of the French wine producers who undertook ingenious and often daring measures to save their finest and most precious crops and bottles as the Germans closed in on them.

Five prominent wine-making families from France's key wine-producing regions of Burgundy, Alsace, the Loire Valley,Bordeaux, and Champagne, allowed Don and Petie Kladstrup to tell their stories in a way that vividly illustrates how men and women risked their lives for a cause that meant saving the heart and soul of France as much as protecting its economy. It was a miraculous partnership involving everyone from the owners of Paris's famed Tour d'Argent restaurant, who hurriedly built a wall to conceal their finest bottles, and the vignerons who strung cobwebs over less-desirable bottles to make them appear vintage, to the winegrowers who sabotaged Nazi wine-transporting trains, and French soldiers who triumphantly seized Hitler's enormous cache of stolen wines at the conclusion of the war. They even received help from an unexpected quarter, the German weinfuhrers, the very men the Nazis sent to requisition wine.

Introduction

1. To Love the Vines

2. Nomads

3. The Weinftihrers

4. Hiding, Fibbing and Fobbing Off

5. The Growling Stomach

6. Wolves at the Door

7. The Fete

8. Saving the Treasure

9. Eagle's Nest

10. The Collaborator

11. I Came Home Not Young Anymore

Epilogue

Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index