The occupation began almost immediately after France fell in June 1940. German Weinführer Otto Klaebisch arrived in Épernay with specific orders: control champagne production, requisition the best bottles for the Reich, and prevent any wine from reaching Allied hands. What he didn't anticipate was how the region's thousand-year-old chalk tunnels would become the backbone of French resistance. When Count Robert-Jean de Vogüé of Moët & Chandon refused to hand over his cellar keys, he was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. But the keys had already been passed to cellar masters who knew every tunnel by heart.
Every glass carries this history. Find the bottle that carries your moment.
Find your Champagne moment →The crayères became communication centers and safe houses. Resistance fighters used the interconnected tunnels to move between houses undetected. Radio operators broadcast from Veuve Clicquot's deepest cellars while coded messages were hidden in shipping manifests for neutral countries.
The chalk tunnels, dug by Romans and expanded for centuries, created a perfect underground city. German patrols couldn't monitor every entrance, and the constant 50°F temperature meant radio equipment functioned reliably.
Houses like Krug and Bollinger buried their best vintages deeper in the chalk, replacing visible stocks with lesser bottles. Meanwhile, champagne became underground currency — traded for safe passage, information, and supplies from sympathetic locals.
A bottle of Dom Pérignon could buy forged papers or a week's worth of food. The Germans knew champagne's value but couldn't distinguish between a 1928 vintage and a rushed wartime blend in the dim cellar light.
Master blenders like Jacques Bollinger secretly documented their techniques and grape sources, hiding records in sealed bottles buried in remote corners of the cellars. Some caves held not just wine but entire libraries of viticultural knowledge.
When the war ended, Champagne could resume production immediately because the techniques, blend formulas, and supplier relationships had been preserved underground. Other wine regions took years to recover their pre-war quality.
Picture being forty feet underground in absolute darkness, feeling your way along chalk walls worn smooth by centuries of hands, while above you German boots echo on cobblestones. The only light comes from candles that must be extinguished the moment footsteps approach. Your breath fogs in the constant chill, and the silence is broken only by the distant sound of bottles being carefully moved, one by one, deeper into the maze.
German control of the region had a name and an office. Otto Klaebisch was appointed Weinführer for Champagne — the official through whom all German purchasing passed. He was not a soldier by trade but a wine man, from a family in the business, and he had known the Champenois commercially before the war. That was the point of him: the occupation wanted the wine to keep flowing, and a man who understood cellars was more useful than a man who understood only requisition orders.
The demands were enormous and continuous. Champagne was shipped to officers' messes, to embassies, to the Eastern Front. Figures from the period are cited at up to two million bottles a month at the peak, and while such numbers should be read as estimates rather than audited accounts, the order of magnitude is not disputed. The great houses — Moët & Chandon, Mumm, Piper-Heidsieck among them — filled these orders for four years.
Mumm's case was distinct: the house had German origins and had already been seized once, as enemy property, during the First World War. In 1940 it was placed under German administration again. Ownership, nationality and loyalty did not line up neatly in Champagne, and the occupation exploited exactly that.
It is tempting to sort the houses into collaborators and resisters. The record does not divide that cleanly, and the region's own historians have been careful not to pretend otherwise.
Filling German orders was not optional in any meaningful sense. A house that refused outright lost its stock, its cellars and often its people; refusal was available as a gesture, not as a policy. What varied was everything around the compliance — what was declared, what was hidden behind hastily built walls, which vintages went into the crates, whose papers were altered, who was sheltered underground and who was not. A house could ship to Berlin on Tuesday and hide a radio operator on Wednesday, and several did.
The most consequential figure was Robert-Jean de Vogüé of Moët & Chandon, who led the Champenois side of the negotiations with Klaebisch and used the position to slow, misdirect and shortchange German demands. He was also active in the resistance. In 1943 the Gestapo arrested him, and he was sentenced to death; the sentence was commuted to deportation and he survived the camps to return after the liberation.
One institution came directly out of these years. The Comité Interprofessionnel du Vin de Champagne — the body that still governs the appellation — was constituted in 1941, in part so that growers and houses would face the occupier with a single voice rather than be picked off separately. The organisation that today defends the boundaries settled after the riots of 1911 was formed under German occupation, for that reason.
There is an irony in the region's twentieth century that is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up. The First World War had been fought across these vineyards: the front ran through Champagne for four years, Reims was shelled into ruin, and the vines were cratered and abandoned. The reparations imposed on Germany at Versailles contributed to the rebuilding of exactly that landscape.
Twenty years later, German requisition emptied the cellars it had helped restore — and twenty-five years after that, the same houses were pouring at the tables of the countries that had defeated Germany twice. The region did not choose any of this. It simply happened to sit on the road between Paris and the Rhine, which is the single fact that explains most of Champagne's history since 1870.
The occupation was also not the first time the houses had lost a market to someone else's legislation. The American trade had already been closed by thirteen years of Prohibition, reopening in 1933 only to be interrupted again by the war six years later. Two decades, two of the region's largest export markets, neither loss of its own making.
Who was the Weinführer?
Otto Klaebisch, the German official placed in charge of Champagne's output for the occupation. Similar appointments covered Bordeaux and Burgundy. He came from the wine trade rather than the army, which was deliberate: the object was to keep production running, not merely to seize what existed.
Did champagne houses collaborate with the Nazis?
They supplied Germany for four years, because refusal meant losing the house. Beyond that the picture is genuinely mixed, and reducing it to collaboration or resistance flattens what happened. The same firms that filled German orders also concealed stock behind false cellar walls, falsified records and sheltered resistance members underground. Individual conduct varied more than corporate conduct did.
What happened to Robert-Jean de Vogüé?
The Moët & Chandon director who negotiated with Klaebisch on the region's behalf was arrested by the Gestapo in 1943 for resistance activity and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to deportation. He survived and returned after the war, and went on to lead the house.
How much champagne did Germany take?
Contemporary estimates run to roughly two million bottles a month at the peak of the requisitions, and something on the order of tens of millions across the occupation. These are estimates from a period with every incentive to keep inaccurate books — on both sides — and should be read as scale rather than accountancy.
How did champagne survive the war at all?
Chalk. The crayères run for tens of kilometres beneath Reims and Épernay, and a cellar that large can be walled off in sections. Bricked-up galleries held the reserve wines, the older vintages and, at times, people. The Germans took what was declared to them, and a great deal was not declared.
Is the CIVC really a product of the occupation?
It was constituted in 1941, during it. The reasoning was that growers and houses negotiating separately with the occupier would be divided and beaten down one by one, while a single body could hold a line. The organisation outlived the circumstance and now administers the appellation.
When you taste older champagne today — particularly bottles from houses like Pol Roger or Bollinger — you're drinking wine that survived one of history's darkest periods. Some bottles in current releases contain reserve wines that spent the war years hidden in those chalk tunnels. The minerality you taste isn't just from the terroir; it carries the weight of survival, resistance, and the determination of people who risked everything to preserve their craft.