{"id":26178,"date":"2014-06-06T06:45:49","date_gmt":"2014-06-06T10:45:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=26178"},"modified":"2019-11-23T16:51:20","modified_gmt":"2019-11-23T21:51:20","slug":"fizzy-dishwater-instead-of-champagne-for-the-wine-fuhrer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/06\/06\/fizzy-dishwater-instead-of-champagne-for-the-wine-fuhrer\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;Fizzy dishwater&#8221; instead of Champagne for the &#8220;wine Fuhrer&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.decanter.com\/news\/wine-news\/586923\/champagne-houses-served-nazis-fizzy-dishwater\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Chris Mercer<\/a> on the various ways the French Champagne producers tried to keep their best wine from being diverted to the use of the Nazis:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>By the time the French city of Reims was liberated in August 1944, many Champagne houses and growers had spent four years playing a game of high stakes cat-and-mouse with the local Nazi &#8216;wine fuhrer&#8217;, Otto Klaebisch.<\/p>\n<p>As Julian Hitner writes in a feature published in the July issue of <em>Decanter<\/em> magazine, it was Klaebisch&#8217;s job to keep the Nazi empire topped up with France&#8217;s finest Champagnes. At its peak, Klaebisch was demanding 400,000 bottles per week.<\/p>\n<p>In response, many Champenois resorted to subterfuge to try to protect their most precious vintages and cuvees.<\/p>\n<p>As noted in the book <em>Wine &#038; War<\/em> by Don &#038; Petrie Kladstrup, some built fake walls in their cellar to hide their best stocks, while others intentionally mislabelled bottles.<\/p>\n<p>On more than one occasion, Klaebisch suspected he was being duped. &#8216;How dare you send us fizzy dishwater?&#8217; he asked 20-year-old Francois Taittinger.<\/p>\n<p>&#8216;Who cares? It&#8217;s not as if it&#8217;s going to be drunk by anyone who knows anything about Champagne,&#8217; replied the young Taittinger, who was subsequently thrown in prison for several days.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>H\/T to Brendan for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chris Mercer on the various ways the French Champagne producers tried to keep their best wine from being diverted to the use of the Nazis: By the time the French city of Reims was liberated in August 1944, many Champagne houses and growers had spent four years playing a game of high stakes cat-and-mouse with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[62,1117,1118,7,131,230],"tags":[305],"class_list":["post-26178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-france","category-germany","category-history","category-wine","category-ww2","tag-champagne"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-6Oe","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26178"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":53032,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26178\/revisions\/53032"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}