© Bildarchiv des Rhein-Hunsrück-Kreises; Kulturhaus Oberwesel - Stadtmuseum

Harvest in the war years was challenging due to lack of manpower

It wasn't just the vineyards of Champagne that suffered during World War I – hunger and hardship also haunted Germany's wine regions.

A century ago today, the terrible tragedy of World War I began, consuming Europe and drawing resources, men and morale from most of the region.

Although the war’s most famous battles were localized in northern France and Belgium, its long-reaching tendrils of influence made their way into all aspects of European life. Wine – forever an essential part of most European cultures – was not above this.

A recent article on Wine Searcher talked about Champagne, where actual battles were fought and lost in the vineyards. On the other side, while Germany’s wine regions saw little action, they were touched in different ways.

The German wine industry – which, due to phylloxera and other vineyard pests, was not in a good way in the early 20th Century – both suffered and profited throughout the war years.

It became clear shortly after the outbreak of war that the German government had not anticipated a long war. Food became scarce, and the blockade of Europe by the Allied Powers, which began in 1914, meant that the usual imports from France and Britain were severely depleted. While this impeded the production of other forms of alcohol like spirits and beer due to raw materials being need for food, the wine industry plodded along.

Lack of Resources

The main challenges that were faced in German vineyards were a lack of both workers and fertilizer. Food shortages saw a channelling of resources into staple crops like potatoes and wheat. Unfortunately wine was not considered an essential for survival, and fertilizer became a key issue.

Recommended by wine-growing almanacs of the time, wine producers had to turn back to using manure, as recently-introduced chemical fertilizers became scarce. Manure was more difficult to distribute in the vineyards than the chemical fertilizers used at the time and, as the war progressed, manure also became increasingly difficult to obtain as animals were slaughtered for food.

Manpower was another resource that, for obvious reasons, was limited during the war. Grapegrowers and pickers alike had been shipped off to other parts of Europe to fight. Horses, another essential winemaking tool of the early 20th Century, were also sacrificed to the war effort, and so producers – those who were left behind – were forced to do the heavy lifting themselves.

There was still help, albeit from corners that had never previously been associated with the main German vineyards in the southwest.

Russian war prisoners – many of them farmers themselves – were put to work amongst the vines. One essential vineyard task during the war vintages was to wage the labor-intensive war against the vine moth, involving spraying each individual vine by hand with arsenic or nicotine. Smaller numbers of French prisoners of war were also put to work in vineyards.

© Kulturhaus Oberwesel - Stadtmuseum; AFP

In the steep vineyards of Oberwesel above the Rhine, labor was hard at the best of times; British propaganda warned against buying German foodsuffs

The War Vintages

As a result of this lack of resources, the war vintages were compromised. The amount of land under vine dropped dramatically, falling from 102,000 hectares (247,000 acres) in 1914 to just 91,000ha in 1916.

Quality was compromised alongside quantity, and despite some potentially excellent vintages, the war wines were average at best.

It could almost be suggested that the war years in Germany conformed to that old French adage that the first vintage of a war is terrible, while the last is excellent. The bad 1914 vintage lived up to this, while 1917 arguably provided the good war-end vintage, as it marked a reversal in wine-growers’ fortunes.

1915 was a perfect example of a war-affected vintage. The weather conditions were textbook, with a cold spring delaying budburst and a sunny, dry summer that gave the grapes a long ripening period. Must weight and acidity was perfectly balanced, and the wines had good aging capabilities. What was lacking was people: to tend to the vineyard, pick the grapes and of course make the wine. The result was a largely forgotten-about wine: not fantastic but not terrible. Certainly it wasn’t a wine that would excite collectors for years to come.

The following year saw the amount of land harvested dwindle even further, as there was no manpower to maintain the vines in the wine regions. 1916 was an average vintage by any standard – a cold, wet summer and an early frost was never going to beat the previous year’s stellar conditions. The added challenges of war reduced the quality of the 1916 wines even further. This was arguably a low point for German winegrowers, particularly as the vintage was followed by one of the worst periods of the war: the so-called Turnip Winter, where the usual wartime staple of potatoes ran short and people had to subsist on turnips – a food usually reserved for livestock.

Despite the quality of the vintage, 1916 was important to the German wine industry in other ways. Professor Georg Scheu, working at the Rheinhessen State Institute of Winemaking (the Landesanstalt für Rebenzuchtung), managed to successfully cross Riesling with what he thought to be Silvaner. The result was a grape variety called Scheurebe, although DNA testing has since revealed that Scheurebe and Silvaner are unrelated.

While not the most glamorous of varieties, it is certainly one that has not been insignificant in Germany’s wine industry in the last hundred years. Today it makes up about 2 percent of Germany’s national vineyard – covering more German hillsides than the all-conquering Chardonnay. Scheurebe will never rival Riesling as Germany’s key grape variety, but its development speaks volumes about the importance placed on viticultural research even during the war.

The excellent 1917 vintage brought about a change in fortune for producers in the Mosel and along the Rhine. At this point, high taxes imposed on foreign wines had led to a shortage of wines to drink in the cities, and well-to-do city-dwellers were looking for something – anything – to slake their thirst. To add to this, the war had been going for long enough at this point that vintners had grown accustomed to the hand that had been dealt to them, and had found effective ways to manage their vineyards.

These factors, coupled with what was actually a very good vintage in the traditional sense, boosted the German industry considerably. The discrepancy between supply and demand during this time meant that wines were commanding high prices. Some producers were able to repay debts and even save some money leading to winegrowers developing a reputation as Kriegsgewinnler, or war profiteers. Land under vine began to increase again from the 1917 vintage onwards in order to keep up with this heightened demand.

© VDP - Die Prädikatsweingüter

The annual wine trade auctions run by the VDNV, now VDP, continued through the war years

After the War

Armistice was signed on November 11, 1918. The war was effectively over, but the Treaty of Versailles was still to come, imposing some serious changes to Germany’s wine output. The most significant of these was the loss of the territory of Alsace-Lorraine to France: a wine region that is famous for having been shuttled back and forward between the two countries several times. It would once again fall to Germany in 1940.

While this was devastating for Germany on the whole, it was a positive step for Alsace’s own wine history; under German rule, the region was used mainly to produce cheap wine for blending, with the now-revered hillside sites largely overlooked.

The war also changed the way international customers looked at German wines.

Prior to 1914, English wine drinkers consumed huge amounts of Hock, then the term for generic German white wines (later this would become a legal wine classification). After the outbreak of war, due to anti-German sentiment, trade with England effectively halted overnight, particularly in London’s pubs and restaurants. This situation continued until after World War II, when Blue Nun began to take off in earnest in both England and the U.S., providing one of the 20th Century’s most recognized (and ridiculed) wines. Some say that the reputation of Germany’s fine wines wasn’t recovered until far later.

Certain things remained the same throughout the war. The Verband Deutscher Naturweinversteigerer (VDNV, now transformed into the VDP) was established in 1910 to bring together the disconnected regional wine associations.

This association aimed to improve the general quality of German wines, which at the time were commonly sweetened with sugar and often diluted with water. Their main function was to facilitate a series of auctions where estates could sell their "natural" (unsweetened and unblended) wines in barrel to brokers and merchants. The VDNV consolidated auctions from all the regional associations, eliminating competition and scheduling conflicts. These auctions continued largely interrupted throughout the war.

The effect of the war on the German wine industry is not often looked at by historians, as France’s own wine regions were so profoundly changed during World War I. But there is no denying that the four war years had a considerable impact on Germany’s wines, and the people who made and drank them.

Wine Searcher would like to thank the library of Geisenheim University in Germany for its invaluable assistance with this article.