Photo: Rudy Gelenter

As I climbed out of the Paris metro, emerging onto the sun-filled Place de Trocadero I was struck by irony. My route to Don & Petie Kladstrup’s Paris pied à terre would end on the Rue Louristan where during the occupation the gestapo routinely lined up resistants and fired away.

Usually found at their farmhouse in Normandy they have made the trip to tell me about their new book Wine and War . On this day their tiny sun drenched apartment is also occupied by an 18 year-old cat and his companion a sleek, yellow-eyed Burmese.

As I assumed the interviewer’s position on the sofa, Petie eased herself into an over-sized, cat-scratched, brown leather chair while Don leaned forward on a kitchen chair, gently touching Petie’s shoulder in an unconscious manner that revealed how much they remain connected.

TG: What was the inspiration for the book?

PK: I think that there is no question that there were two major people. One was Gaston Huet, whom Don spent a lot of time interviewing when the government was planning to bring the TGV through the vineyards.

DK: Huet decided to oppose it. I was working on television. I went down to the Loire Valley to interview him and got to know him. Our relationship has grown ever since. Bernard de Nonancourt was almost a last minute thing. A guy that we met accidentally after going to a function in Champagne, a producer said, You know whom you really ought to talk to is Bernard de Nonancourt. He opened Hitler’s cave. We managed to finally meet Bernard. He invited us to his place and regaled us with all kinds of stories. It was quite amazing.

TG: He opened up the cave and found hundreds of cases of 1928 Salon champagne, a wine he had seen stolen by the Germans five years before.

PK: It was Huet who first brought up wine to us in connection with war because after Don did various interviews with him, and we did an article for the “Wine Spectator”, he served us this incredible glass of ’47. And we said: this is wonderful! This must be the best wine you’ve ever drunk, and he said, oh no! There is this still wine that I can’t even remember the name of that I drank as a prisoner of war in Germany.

DK + PK: And there was a woman who we got to know who was married to a Frenchman, an American, her name is Gertrude Degarriuex. Gertrude was here throughout the war, which was an unusual situation for an American. She told us about her husband who was an attorney and when she discovered that we liked wine, and she had a lot of wine from the war years because her husband had exchanged legal services for wine at that time, she shared a few bottles with us.

DK: There were a whole lot of things that got us started on this book. Arriving in France, discovering the whole scene here, the cuisine and fine wine. We certainly drank wine in California, but it was also coming over here and having some wines that were wonderful. Pretty soon we were taking every vacation in the vineyards or in the different wine regions. Along the way we happened to taste some pretty old vintages. Wines that were produced during the war and amazingly they were all good. You know how bad old wine can be; these were all good, and it got us to wondering, how did they manage to produce such wonderful stuff under such difficult conditions. So there are a variety of things that propelled us and inspired us.

TG: Talk a little about the French character, how it overlays on the way they protected their wines over this five year occupation. The French were quite remarkable in how they deceived the Germans by giving them great looking bottles that contained inferior product. Is there something specific to the French character that made them protect their cultural heritage so effectively?

PK: I don’t know if it’s specific to the French character. I think that everyone tries to protect their own heritage but certainly they felt very strongly that it was so much a part of what France was about that they couldn’t give that up. It was very easy at the beginning to be an occupied country, it seems to us, until they realized how awful it would become, but even at that point, they were protective of their wine. Long before the first Germans had set foot in France, they’d begun to hide wine.

DK: There is no exaggerating the importance of wine to the economy and they were determined to protect it. But to most, wine was a lot more than that, it ranked up there with the flag, it’s their national heritage, it’s part of the French character. As one person said, it gives the French wit and gaiety and sets us apart from beer drinking louts.

PK: But I think that you give the French almost anything and within a week it becomes an art form. You give them graffiti and at the end of the year there’s a graffiti museum and the greatest graffiti artists are being called to do work.

DK: It is art. You hopped in a cab once, and the cab driver looked out the window and said: “look at that building, it’s so sad”. And he started talking about the tristesse, the sadness of the way it was constructed. Where else in the world can you hop into a cab and have some cabbie start talking to you that way?

TG: Talk about the carpet dust.

PK: Ah, the carpet dust. Years and years ago, we ran across a magazine article on the Chevalier Carpet Company. All those really famous carpets and antiques. They also run a cleaning business for these rare and antique carpets. At that point, the article was focused on the research being done at the Institute Pasteur from the dust they were taking out of these very old carpets, and many of these carpets hadn’t been cleaned since they were made- perhaps a hundred years ago. From this the Institute Pasteur was able to determine what elements were present in the atmosphere at certain times, and deal with allergies.

PK: In the article, they were quoted as saying something to the effect that it was not the first time that the Chevaliers has been called upon to perform heroic duty with their dust. They had a lot of dirty tales to tell, and that during the war they had supplied dust to restaurants in Paris to sprinkle on their awful bottles to make them look older, rare and fancy and present them to the Germans as a special thing.

DK: The tactic worked. We posed the question to Claude Terrail of La Tour d’Argent did you use any of this dust? No, no, no, we wouldn’t lower ourselves like that, but Claude did regale us with a terrific story of how he was a young fellow in the airforce in Lyon and he realized it would not be long before the Germans arrived in Paris and his father was traumatized. His father had spent years building up a beautiful cave with wines from the 19th century, so Claude rushed back. He got leave of just 6 hours, flew back with some of the staff, went into the cave and began sorting out the most precious bottles, slapping bricks and mortar into place and hiding the best. They completed the work just in time. Not long after that one of Goring’s special representatives came in and said, “I’ve heard about your wonderful wine cellar, especially those 1868’s”. He was informed that the all of the 1868’s had been drunk.

DK: Naturally he was skeptical and insisted on seeing for himself. He went into the cellar, looked around and after several hours he was satisfied that they weren’t there. But much to Terrail’s regret, they made off with 80 percent of the other bottles, thousands of other bottles. But that was about the most injurious incident that La Tour d’Argent suffered. The Germans turned it into one of their favorite watering holes and Terrail said, “we never tried to put anything over them. We tried to foist off our lesser bottles, our cheaper vintages on the Germans, but we didn’t play any tricks”.

PK: He was very clear about that. They believed that it wasn’t worth dying for. And his father, André Terrail was so traumatized by the Germans that he would not try to do anything that would result in any of his staff being badly treated.

DK: Terrail said of his German clientele, they were always gentlemen when they came in here, but outside on the street they were killers.

TG: One final question. How have you changed as a result of writing this book?

PK: I have a much bigger respect for the wine industry, and how interconnected it is, how important it is to Europe, not just to France but how much it holds the whole continent together. I developed a greater respect for all the people who learned to work together after such God-awful experiences.

Wine & War