Gertrude

It had been a pleasant evening. We were still at the dinner table – me, Petie and our good friend Gertrude. With dinner essentially over and the hour growing late, I began clearing.

"Stop, let go!" Gertrude snapped, grabbing the wine bottle I'd just picked up. It was a 1905 Château Latour, a legendary wine from the year Gertrude was born. We'd served it to celebrate Gertrude's 80th birthday. "No way am I going to let you pour this down the drain," she said. I didn't argue, even though the only things left were a few drops in the bottom of the bottle and a lot of sediment.  

I bought the wine years earlier at an auction in Paris and wasn't sure what to expect when I opened it that evening. Would it still be drinkable? I knew that when young, Latour can be hard and unyielding and take ages before it comes around, but still . . . after 80 years, would there be anything left? I checked The Great Vintage Wine Book by Michael Broadbent for clues. Broadbent, who was one of the world's greatest wine tasters and had reviewed many wines from that period, wrote that the weather in Bordeaux that year was "generally quite good . . . but rain throughout the two weeks of picking produced an abundant crop of light wines with some elegance." He gave decent reviews to Châteaux Lafite, Margaux and Mouton-Rothschild but there was no mention of Latour, presumably because he hadn't tasted it.

It was up to us to render the verdict.

Gertrude went first. After savoring the bouquet and taking a small sip, her only reaction was a faint "Oh," as if she was lost for words, but the smile on her face and the look in her eyes said it all. She was in seventh heaven, and the wine truly was heavenly. Though slightly faded in color, it was still very much alive . . . gentle and fragrant with a "nose" that conjured images of violets and roses. In short, the 1905 Château Latour was everything we hoped. For Gertrude, it was a trip back in time.

She was from Chicago where her father had run a successful advertising agency; one of his clients was Thomas Edison. In 1930, she fell in love with a young Frenchman named Marcel de Gallaix who had come to the U.S. to study law at Columbia University. After marrying, they moved to Paris where Marcel opened a law practice.

It was a nice life until 1940 when forces of the Third Reich swept into France and occupied the country. We wrote about those times – and Gertrude – in Wine & War. We told how, because she was an American, she was required to register at least twice a day with the Commissariat de Police. Though married to a Frenchman, the Germans considered her an enemy alien and insisted on knowing her whereabouts at all times.

One of the biggest problems was food, she said, for the Germans under orders from Field Marshal Hermann Goering had stripped the country of its bounty: wheat from Ile de France, cheese and vegetables from the Loire Valley, fruit from the orchards of Normandy, Charolais beef from Burgundy. The Germans did well; the French did without. Gertrude told us how she'd get up before five each morning and rush to the market only to find it bare. Whatever had been brought in from the country had already been picked over and was gone. "We were obsessed with food," she said, "it was all we could think of."

In a chapter called "The Growling Stomach," Gertrude described how she threw out her geraniums and began growing vegetables on her balcony. "Some of my neighbors raised chickens and rabbits on theirs. One even had a goat tethered to the railing so she would have milk for the baby."

There was hardly any wine either, she said. "Can you believe it? Food was one thing, but a wine shortage? In France? That was something I never thought I would see, but that's what the Germans made off with as well."

Fortunately, the Gallaix cellar still had a few bottles thanks to Marcel's job as a lawyer. Most of his work during the war was representing winemakers in Burgundy who were having problems with German authorities. In return, because they had very little money, they paid him with bottles of wine – unlabeled so the Germans couldn't tell whether the wine was special or simply vin ordinaire. The labels would be mailed to Marcel after he returned home.

*   *   *

It was almost midnight when Gertrude said it was time for her to leave, return home to the apartment she and Marcel had shared for so many years. We escorted her to a taxi. As she climbed in, she was still clutching that bottle of 1905 Latour, holding onto the past and remembering . . .