For as long as people have made wine, war has shaped it. Armies have marched on it, plundered it and trampled it; rulers have taxed it to pay for their campaigns and rationed it to steady their troops; and, again and again, growers have returned to their ruined vineyards and begun again. Across some eight thousand years, the history of wine and the history of conflict are so tightly entwined that you cannot fully tell one without the other — and some of wine’s most extraordinary stories were written under fire. For the full story, see the great turning points in wine history.
Quick facts
- Wine has been rationed, plundered and taxed for war for millennia.
- Roman soldiers drank posca; French soldiers drank pinard.
- Champagne’s 1914 vintage was harvested under shellfire.
Wine and war, entwined
Wine has always been a prize of war. Valuable, portable and morale-boosting, it was among the first things conquering armies seized — and the vineyards that produced it, slow to replant, were among the first things they destroyed. Wherever wine was made, war was rarely far from the cellar door1. (See also: the Lusitania disaster.)
The armies that ran on wine: Roman posca
Ancient armies ran on wine — but not the good stuff. The Roman military rationed its soldiers posca, a drink of sour wine or wine-vinegar diluted with water. It was brilliantly practical: cheap, it stretched a little wine into a lot of liquid, and its acidity helped make dubious water safer to drink at a time when tainted water killed more soldiers than the enemy did2.
The ration was no small matter of logistics. Records suggest legionaries were issued wine and posca on alternating days, and keeping an army watered and steadied was a core military expense in an empire that spent the bulk of its budget on its soldiers. Wine, in effect, was strategic materiel3.
Pinard: the wine that fought the First World War
No war leaned on wine more openly than the First. A month after the fighting began, the French Army started issuing its soldiers a daily ration of rough red wine they called pinard — a low, harsh wine one soldier likened to petrol. The ration only grew: from a quarter-litre a day to half a litre, and by the war’s end to three-quarters of a litre for every man4.
Pinard became central to the identity of the French poilu, credited with sustaining morale and endurance through the horror of the trenches; a whole affectionate folklore grew up around it. There was a darker edge, too: the army also issued distilled spirits to men just before they went over the top, a deliberate policy of dulling fear for military ends5.
To the poilu in the mud of the trenches, his daily pinard was less a drink than a faithful friend.— on the French soldier’s wine6
The violent vintage: Champagne under fire, 1914
No story captures wine’s wartime ordeal like the Champagne harvest of 1914. As the front line tore across the region that autumn, the grapes still had to come in — so, with the men at the front, the harvest was gathered by women, children and the elderly, working to the sound of shellfire. It began on 21 September, days after French forces recovered Épernay and Reims, and before the last grapes were picked more than twenty children had been killed by shelling and sniper fire. Astonishingly, that blood-soaked 1914 became one of the greatest Champagne vintages of the century7.
The great houses simply went underground. Champagne’s deep chalk cellars, the crayères, were turned into shelters for whole communities — with schools, chapels and workshops below ground — and business carried on beneath the bombardment. At Ruinart, after the buildings above were destroyed and a shell burst a water main, André Ruinart is said to have run the firm from a raft floating in a flooded gallery eighty feet down8.
Occupation and plunder
Conquest has always meant plunder, and wine has always been among the spoils. The most systematic example came in the Second World War, when Nazi Germany occupied France and stripped its cellars — appointing “wine leaders” to requisition wine by the trainload, and driving growers to hide their finest bottles behind false, cobwebbed walls9.
Wine as morale, money — and myth
Beyond the ration and the plunder, wine has always carried the symbolism of war — nowhere more than with Champagne, the drink of victory. Napoleon, who kept Champagne close on campaign, is the source of the era’s most famous toast, though he almost certainly never said it10.
In victory you deserve Champagne; in defeat you need it.— attributed to Napoleon (almost certainly apocryphal)11
And behind the symbolism lay hard cash: for centuries rulers taxed wine heavily to fund their wars, so that the drink helped pay for the very conflicts that so often destroyed it.
Rebuilding after the guns
Yet wine regions are remarkably resilient. After the Napoleonic upheavals, after the shelling of Champagne and Bordeaux, after two world wars, growers cleared the wreckage, replanted their vines and rebuilt their trade — a vine takes years to bear, so every recovery was an act of patience and faith12.
| Conflict or era | Wine’s role |
|---|---|
| Roman legions | Posca — diluted wine-vinegar rationed to soldiers, and safer than water |
| Napoleonic Wars | Champagne as the drink of victory — and of consolation |
| First World War | Pinard, up to 0.75L a day, to sustain the poilu; Champagne harvested under fire |
| Second World War | French wine plundered under the Nazi occupation |
| After every war | Vineyards replanted and wine regions rebuilt |
The vine endures
That capacity to begin again — vintage after vintage, war after war — is one of the quiet themes of wine’s long history. Armies have done their worst to the vineyards of Europe for thousands of years, and yet the wine has always come back. In that stubborn return there is something almost hopeful: a reminder that, even amid the wreckage, people rebuild the things that bring them together.
Frequently asked questions
More from this day in wine history
See everything else that happened on November 11 — who was born, what was bottled, and which laws were signed.
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References
- World History Encyclopedia — Wine. www.worldhistory.org ↩
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — ancient Rome. www.britannica.com ↩
- Quartz — Posca: A 2,000-Year-Old Energy Drink from Ancient Rome. qz.com ↩
- 1914-1918-Online (International Encyclopedia of the First World War) — Food and Nutrition (France). encyclopedia.1914-1918-online.net ↩
- Points — World War I, Part 1: The French Army and Wine. www.pointshistory.org ↩
- London Review of Books — Julian Barnes: La Chasse au Pinard. www.lrb.co.uk ↩
- Union des Maisons de Champagne — Champagne in World War I. maisons-champagne.com ↩
- Wine-Searcher — 1914: Champagne’s Violent Vintage. www.wine-searcher.com ↩
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — World War II. www.britannica.com ↩
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Napoleon I. www.britannica.com ↩
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — Champagne (wine). www.britannica.com ↩
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — World War I. www.britannica.com ↩
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