The 20th Century

Two Wars and a Slump: Bordeaux from 1914 to 1945

How Bordeaux lived through 1914–1945: the pinard ration, the unsold 1930s, AOC rules born mid-crisis, the weinführer years and the frost of 1945.

Between 1914 and 1945 Bordeaux went through two world wars, a depression that lasted a decade, four years of German occupation, and the longest commercial slump in its modern history. It entered the period having just spent forty years and a great deal of money replanting after phylloxera, oïdium and mildew. The geographer Philippe Roudié, whose Vignobles et vignerons du Bordelais (1850–1980) is still the standard account, treats the three decades as a single ordeal running from the trenches to the Liberation. The same years produced much of the framework Bordeaux still works within. The appellation system was written in the middle of the slump. The trade's governing body came out of the war. And many of today's family estates were founded when the market was at its lowest, because vineyards could be bought that nobody else wanted.

The army ration, 1914–1918

During the First World War the French army became the largest buyer of wine there had ever been. According to the agriculture ministry's own account, wine entered the soldier's official ration in October 1914 at a quarter of a litre a day. The ration was doubled in January 1916 and raised to three quarters of a litre in January 1918. Supplying it was a state operation. The historian Alban Sumpf describes the army's supply services collecting, processing and transporting millions of hectolitres; donations and purchases at reduced prices did not cover the need, and requisitions made up the difference, taking as much as a third of some harvests. Pinard, the rough and anonymous red the soldiers drank, became a patriotic institution. It was celebrated in songs, and people credited it with holding the front together.

Very little of it was claret. The Gironde made its living selling named wines abroad, and the war hurt that business from the other direction. Mobilization took the men out of the vineyards, so women, old men and children did the pruning and spraying, while shipping and export markets were disrupted for four years. In September 1914 the French government left Paris for Bordeaux, which gave the city a brief national role. The vineyard itself survived the war intact but poorer, with fewer workers and its customers scattered.

Lost markets and two great vintages

Peace did not restore the pre-war markets. Revolutionary Russia, which had bought Bordeaux's sweet wines and classified growths as prestige goods, was gone. Prohibition shut the United States from 1920 to 1933. At the very end of the decade the vintages improved. Jane Anson's vintage-by-vintage survey describes 1928 as dark and tannic, built to age for decades, and 1929 as one of the vintages of the century, with picking from 18 September in close to ideal conditions.

Wall Street crashed on 24 October 1929, a few weeks after that harvest. Two highly regarded vintages, expensive to make, reached a market that was disappearing.

The 1930s

Three poor harvests followed. 1930 brought rain, coulure and widespread downy mildew, and a small crop of weak wine. 1931 was cold and wet, with 21 days of rain in August alone. 1932 was worse: picking began on 20 September and yielded roughly half a normal crop, of poor quality. With a world depression under way, the region was in open crisis, and vintage records from the time note that classified estates started to come up for sale. At Mouton, Baron Philippe de Rothschild launched Mouton Cadet in 1930 to sell wine that could not go into the grand vin.

Demand could not absorb the supply, because France already had more wine than it could sell. Algeria, then legally part of France, had raised its production to about 20 million hectolitres by 1935. The economists Giulia Meloni and Johan Swinnen show that by the mid-1930s it accounted for roughly two thirds of all wine exported anywhere in the world, and nearly all of it entered mainland France free of duty. French consumption per head peaked in 1934 at about 170 litres a year, higher than at any time before or since, and it still was not enough.

Land prices show the damage most clearly at the top of the hierarchy. In May 1935 Château Haut-Brion, a first growth in the 1855 classification, was sold to the American banker Clarence Dillon for 2,300,000 francs. Its owner was close to bankruptcy and the estate was in poor repair. Jean-Michel Cazes, recalling the Médoc his family bought into, described properties with low revenues and run-down buildings: "they were farms". Much of the peninsula was still for sale in the 1950s. The longer run of these prices is in our economics of Bordeaux in charts.

Low prices also changed who owned the land. A vineyard that no investor wanted was one a farming family could afford, and over the decade hundreds of properties passed from owners in financial trouble to smallholders and local families, many of whom farmed them for the rest of the century. A good number of today's family estates date from these years; Château de Brague, in the Fronsadais, was founded in 1937.

The AOC, 1935–1936

Bordeaux's quality framework dates from the worst slump the region had known. The décret-loi of 30 July 1935, promoted by the Gironde senator Joseph Capus as a measure for "the defence of the wine market", created the Comité National des Appellations d'Origine, which later became the INAO. It also created a new legal category, the appellation d'origine contrôlée, defined by a delimited area, permitted grape varieties, yields and a minimum ripeness. The first six AOCs were decreed on 15 May 1936. Bordeaux followed within months: Sauternes and Barsac were recognized on 11 September 1936, and Margaux, Pauillac and Saint-Émilion were among the decrees of 14 November 1936. Meloni and Swinnen interpret the system as, in part, a defence against Algerian competition. The decades of fraud and failed legislation that preceded it are covered in a separate article.

The weinführer years

After France fell in June 1940, the Reich set up a regional system for buying French wine. Don and Petie Kladstrup, in Wine and War, describe how each region was assigned a weinführer, a wine-trade plenipotentiary usually recruited from the German wine business. Otto Klaebisch went to Champagne. Bordeaux got Heinz Bömers, head of the Bremen firm Reidemeister & Ulrichs, whose family had owned Château Smith Haut Lafitte until France confiscated German property after the First World War. The historian Christophe Lucand, in Le vin et la guerre, calls what these men ran the most intense organized plunder the French vineyard had ever experienced: purchases on terms set by the occupier, with Vichy as intermediary, becoming much harsher from 1942.

In Bordeaux the occupier was also the only customer left, since trade with Britain and America had stopped. Bömers bought in very large volumes. Jane Anson notes that his purchases included lots equivalent to a million bottles of the unsold, mediocre wine of the 1930s, which ended up in German canteens. Growers hid their best bottles behind cellar walls built in a hurry and dirtied with dust and spiders to look old. The Kladstrups report that Bömers himself once filled an order from Göring's circle with ordinary wine under counterfeit Mouton labels.

Some merchants collaborated openly. Louis Eschenauer, the most powerful négociant in the city, did 957 million francs of business during the war by his own admission. Through his Société des Grands Vins Français he acquired Jewish-owned estates that had been seized, and he entertained the occupiers at the Chapon Fin. His trial opened on 9 November 1945; he was convicted of economic collaboration and sentenced to two years in prison and a fine of more than 60 million francs. By late 1944 about 43 Bordeaux merchants faced proceedings and had their assets sequestered. Most were amnestied in 1950–51. The trade committee created in January 1944 lasted: on 22 February 1945 it became the Conseil Interprofessionnel du Vin de Bordeaux.

Frost and the victory vintage, 1945

The war in Europe ended on 8 May 1945. A week earlier, on the night of 1 May, frost destroyed more than half of the Gironde's potential crop. The harvest came to about 1.5 million hectolitres, the smallest since 1915. A hot, dry summer concentrated the grapes that were left, and the small 1945 vintage turned out to be one of the best of the century. Mouton bottled it under a label reading Année de la Victoire. Most of the work had been done by the women, old men and children who had kept the vines going through the war.

The estates that made it were undercapitalized farms with worn-out equipment, short of both labour and money. The market stayed weak for another ten years, and the downturn that began in 1930 did not really end until the late 1950s. When the post-war expansion came, it was built on what had survived these thirty years: the AOC rules of 1935–36, the CIVB, and the families who had bought land when it was worth almost nothing.