Renee Ryan's Blog - Posts Tagged "wwii-fiction"

I'm often asked where I get my ideas. The short answer is, everywhere, nowhere, can I get back to you on that? Seriously, it's a hard question to answer. Usually it starts with some previously unknown fact.

For THE WIDOWS OF CHAMPAGNE it was a historical tidbit I came across during my research. Turns out one of the world's most famous Champagnes, Veuve Clicquot, was begun by a young widow who lost her husband to war. She pressed on (no pun intended) without him and reached massive International success. Veuve is French for widow, by the way. Other legendary houses - Bollinger, Laurent-Perrier and Pommery - also got their starts from widows.

Good morning! May 1945, just outside the city of Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. French soldiers stared at the massive steel door beneath Adolf Hitler’s private fortress and engineering marvel, Eagle’s Nest. What they thought was a simple barrier between Allied troops and the treasures Hitler had stolen throughout the war had become an albatross. The troops tried various solutions to tear it down. The door wouldn't budge. Sledgehammers proved no more effective than lockpicks.

They finally resorted to explosives.

The blast shook the entire mountain. When the smoke and dust cleared, the door had barely moved. But the slit was large enough for a young French soldier to squeeze through.

Inside the massive cave, the army sergeant found well over half a million bottles of the finest French wines ever made, some from the previous century, along with rare ports and cognacs. What makes this moment in history all the more incredible—Hitler didn’t even like wine. He'd stolen, and then locked away, France’s greatest treasures out of spite and greed.

My book, The Widows of Champagne, covers this small piece of WWII history. https://amzn.to/3lUTjPk

May 1945, just outside the city of Berchtesgaden in the Bavarian Alps. French soldiers stared at the massive steel door beneath Adolf Hitler’s private fortress and engineering marvel, Eagle’s Nest. What they thought was a simple barrier between Allied troops and the treasures Hitler had stolen throughout the war had become an albatross. The troops tried various solutions to tear it down. The door wouldn't budge. Sledgehammers proved no more effective than lock picks.

They finally resorted to explosives.

The blast shook the entire mountain. When the smoke and dust cleared, the door had barely moved. But the slit was large enough for a young French soldier to squeeze through.

Inside the massive cave, the army sergeant found well over half a million bottles of the finest French wines ever made, some from the previous century, along with rare ports and cognacs. What makes this moment in history all the more incredible—Hitler didn’t even like wine. He'd stolen, and then locked away, France’s greatest treasures out of spite and greed.

The women in my book THE WIDOWS OF CHAMPAGNE fight to keep their most valuable champagne from the Nazi looters. For more informations, click here: https://amzn.to/3lUTjPk

I'm deep in research mode for my next WWII story and want to share what I've uncovered about an annual music festival in Salzburg, Austria. One of my three heroines is an Austrian opera singer who chooses to remain in her beloved homeland after Hitler annexes her country. She's based on a real woman who used her fame and notoriety to rescue dozens of Jews from persecution and death. (More on her in another post). Today, let's talk about how she was able to move around so freely during Nazi occupation.

Enter Adolf Hitler's love of opera and his annual trip to Salzburg for the Salzburg Music Festival. If you've seen the Sound of Music, then you know all about this popular summer event. The Salzburg Music Festival is where the von Trapp family performed their disappearing act from the Felsenreitschule Theatre in 1938. The theatre still stands and is still the home of some amazing music year round, as well as during the annual festival.

Sadly, 1938 was the same year Hitler annexed Austria and, as the movie accurately depicts, when the Festival became an official propaganda tool for the Nazis.

THE WIDOWS OF CHAMPAGNE is set in Champagne, France during WWII. The history of champagne can be traced to a Benedictine monk, born Pierre Pérignon. You probably know him as Dom Pérignon. In 1668, after taking his pledge of celibacy, he transferred to the Abbey of Hautvillers near the town of Épernay in the Champagne region of France. He served as cellar master for the Abbey until his death in 1715.

Dom Périgonon was known for his skill at blending different wine vintages to bring out the best of their flavors. His technique still used today.

He is famous for the iconic champagne slogan that has been associated with champagne ever since. The story goes that when Dom Pérignon first created his delicious bubbly champagne, he called out to his fellow monks, “Come quickly, I am tasting the stars!”

The distinct pop of a champagne cork is another invention of Dom Pérignon. Originally, champagne bottles had been closed with wood, which did not always fit. The use of cork ensured that the tiny bubbles in the champagne would be preserved.

He also made changes to the shape of champagne bottles, choosing thicker glass to prevent costly and dangerous explosions caused by a build-up of gases within the bottle. These gases are what create the bubbles.

Let’s raise a glass in honor of my favorite Benedictine monk, Dom Pérignon. Cheers!

THE WIDOWS OF CHAMPAGNE https://amzn.to/3lUTjPk is set in Champagne, France during WWII. The history of champagne can be traced to a Benedictine monk, born Pierre Pérignon. You probably know him as Dom Pérignon. In 1668, after taking his pledge of celibacy, he transferred to the Abbey of Hautvillers near the town of Épernay in the Champagne region of France. He served as cellar master for the Abbey until his death in 1715.

Dom Périgonon was known for his skill at blending different wine vintages to bring out the best of their flavors. His technique still used today.

He is famous for the iconic champagne slogan that has been associated with champagne ever since. The story goes that when Dom Pérignon first created his delicious bubbly champagne, he called out to his fellow monks, “Come quickly, I am tasting the stars!”

The distinct pop of a champagne cork is another invention of Dom Pérignon. Originally, champagne bottles had been closed with wood, which did not always fit. The use of cork ensured that the tiny bubbles in the champagne would be preserved.

He also made changes to the shape of champagne bottles, choosing thicker glass to prevent costly and dangerous explosions caused by a build-up of gases within the bottle. These gases are what create the bubbles.

Let’s raise a glass in honor of my favorite Benedictine monk, Dom Pérignon. Cheers!

On Memorial Day, I wrote a post honoring some of the amazing women who changed the course of WWII. Women like Nancy Wake, named the “White Mouse." She spent the war smuggling soldiers and downed pilots out of France. When captured, and interrogated for days, she never gave up a single secret.

Or Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the Russian sniper so adept at her craft that the Germans addressed her personally over the loudspeaker in an attempt to lure her to their side with the promise of becoming an officer within their ranks.

Or Jacqueline Cochran, the pilot. Virginia Hall, the American spy. Ruby Bradley, the surgical nurse. Susan Travers, the fearless soldier for the Free French.
And, of course, one of my favorites, the brilliant Hedy Lemarr. This Hollywood actress coined “the most beautiful woman in Europe," developed a way to manipulate radio frequencies that prevented the enemy from jamming our torpedoes. Her cutting edge technology led to the development of modern day Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

Thank you to these ladies, and all the unsung heroes like you, whose names may have been kept from the pages of our history books but without whom we would not have won the war against tyranny.

While researching The Widows of Champagne (https://amzn.to/3lUTjPk I discovered that champagne making is a complicated business that requires two fermentations. After the initial “blending” of several base wines, the first fermentation occurs. The full champagne bottles are then brought to the chalk cellars, or rather caves that were cut deep into the limestone centuries ago, and placed on a riddling rack, known as a pupitre, with the necks angled downward.

Each bottle is then rotated daily, by 1/8th of a turn in each direction so that the lees collect in the neck of the bottle. As the angle of tile increases, the forces of gravity draw the sediment into the neck. Eventually that sediment will be removed and only a clear wine is left. This process is known as “riddling” or “remuage” and can last anywhere from 2 weeks to 3 months.

Remuage is still done manually in some Champagne Houses. A good ‘remueur’ (bottle turner) can handle roughly 40,000 bottles a day.

After France surrendered to Germany in June 1940, the Nazis moved quickly, cutting the country in half, with Northern France, the occupied zone, and Southern France, the free zone. The Champagne region was deep within the occupied zone and placed under the charge of a special corps of officers, or what the French called the weinführers, many of whom had direct connections with the wine trade prior to the war.

Originally, the Champenois thought this was a positive turn of events. In fact, one of the producers in Champagne was even quoted as saying after the war, “If you were going to shoved around, it was better to be shoved around by a winemaker than a beer-drinking Nazi lout.”

Unfortunately, this proved untrue. Under strict orders from Berlin, the Champenois were expected to supply nearly 400,000 bottles of champagne a week and at a fraction of its worth. Adding insult to injury, they were only allowed to sell their product to the German army or German-owned businesses. Once again, at a ridiculously low price.

And so began a large resistance movement that included switching labels, filling bottles with water, hiding the most valuable blends behind fake walls, and other dangerous acts of sabotage. My upcoming release, The Widows of Champagne, opens with one of these fearless acts. Interested in seeing how I portrayed these heroic acts. The book is up for preorder now.
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My upcoming WWII Historical novel The Widows of Champagne (https://amzn.to/3lUTjPk and https://bit.ly/3x1xl2e) is set, obviously, in the champagne region of northern France.

For centuries, countless bloody battles were waged in the area. Champagne’s secret weapon lay beneath the villages and vineyards. Dating all the way back to the Roman Empire, caves, also called crayères, were cut into the chalky limestone for transportation and storage.
After the Romans were thrown out, the hundreds of miles of these caves were used to store food. It wasn’t until 1769 that local vintner Nicolas Ruinart renovated the cavities and tunnels beneath his property to store his champagne. By 1915, nearly all the caves beneath Champagne were retrofitted with level floors. Staircases and elevators were added next.

Sadly, Champagne’s vineyards were heavily bombed during both battles of the Marne, but its cellars remained largely unscathed. Thousands of citizens took refuge in the crayères during the war, alongside the French military, who pinned up canvas curtains to make walls. They created makeshift desks with planks of wood over stacked Champagne bottles. Religious services were regularly conducted beneath ground, and even school was taught. Then the war ended, and the region had 21 years to recover before hostilities started up all over again in 1940.

And so begins the story of The Widows of Champagne...