In Victory & Defeat

On champagne, hard times, and everything in between.

A champagne vineyard under a cloudless winter sky.

“I will stay no matter what happens, to reassure and to comfort those who wish to leave but cannot. And I will do all that is humanly possible to defend them.” — Maurice Pol-Roger, Mayor of Épernay, 1914

“We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering... But I take up my task with buoyancy and hope.” — Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 13 May 1940

There is a particular kind of courage that doesn’t come from moments of triumph, but in moments of desperation. When everything around you collapses and the only act of heroism possible is to stay, and to find a way to endure. This is what connected Maurice Pol-Roger and Winston Churchill across two wars and two generations. They never met. But their legacies are intertwined by a common resolve and a champagne that bears both of their names.

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It took me about thirty minutes to walk through the slushy Boston snow to Eastern Standard Kitchen and Drinks. It was a frigid February morning, and the city streets were a study in contrasts, attentively plowed pavement giving way to neglected stretches of bumpy, stamped-down snow.

“I’m here for the wine tasting,” I said to the host.

“That starts in an hour,” she replied.

“Are you sure? My invitation says 10:30.”

“Let’s go check. They’re setting up now.”

She led me through the back hallways at a pace my clunky boots struggled to match. We emerged into a bar and cocktail lounge where a lone bearded man in a tailored blazer was unpacking cases of wine.

“I’m here for the tasting,” I said again.

“We don’t start for another hour.”

“That’s not what it says on my—”

I glanced at the date on my phone. I pride myself on punctuality. In this case, I was a week early for the wrong tasting. I apologized.

“That’s okay,” said the man with a chuckle. “You’re welcome to stay. We’ll have a few no-shows.”

I looked at the bottles of Pol Roger Champagne lined up on the table and accepted without hesitation.

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Pol Roger (1831–1899). Image courtesy of the Photothèque Union des Maisons de Champagne.

In the year 1849, a young man of nineteen set out to make champagne.

He had no great fortune, no family name of particular distinction, and no guarantee of success. He had only his ambition, his palate, and the incomparable good sense to plant himself in the finest sparkling wine-producing region in the world. That young man was Pol Roger, and the house he built still bears his name.

In 1900, his sons Maurice and Georges, inheriting both his enterprise and his devotion, fused his first and last name into a single word, a small but permanent act of filial loyalty that has endured without interruption to this day. By then the house had earned its place among the great names of Épernay, its wines gracing the tables of Europe and receiving, in due course, the royal warrant of Her Majesty Queen Victoria herself. It was, one might say, the beginning of a most agreeable relationship between Pol Roger and the British.

But history is not always agreeable. And what those two sons inherited was not merely a cellar full of excellent champagne. They inherited a century that had not yet shown its teeth.

In September 1914 the Germans came to Épernay. Many officials of the town, with admirable efficiency, departed. Maurice did not. As mayor, he considered it his duty to remain, and remain he did, at considerable personal cost. The occupying forces held him accountable for the conduct of an entire city, and threatened him with execution on no fewer than several occasions for matters that were, in truth, quite beyond his power to prevent. He met these threats not with capitulation but with the only weapons available to him: his wits and his will. He even issued a temporary currency, backed by his own personal guarantee, so that the citizens of Épernay might continue to buy bread.

French troops marching through Champagne vineyards, 1914. Christian Schopphoven Collection.

And then came the harvest.

With the men of the region called away to face rather more lethal hazards, and with the shells falling in no particular regard for the schedule of the vine, Maurice and Georges and their fellow producers did what Frenchmen of a certain character have always done in adversity. They improvised. They hauled their equipment from one vineyard to the next. They pressed their grapes where they found them. They worked in the intervals between the bombardments, as though the harvest were a thing not even a world war had the authority to cancel. The vintage of 1914 was brought in. And as it turned out, history had one further surprise in store. It was, by most accounts, an excellent year.

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The room filled gradually with men and women, some in suits, others in more casual attire. Tables were set with glassware and plates of bread, cheese and charcuterie. Then a tall man with a neatly trimmed beard and a blue suit walked over and introduced himself. Laurent d’Harcourt has been president of Pol Roger since 2013, and his manner that morning said everything about the house he represents. Champagne culture can carry an air of glamorous inaccessibility, as though the bottle itself is judging you. Laurent was the opposite: unhurried and warm, with a patient, dignified curiosity that immediately put the room at ease.

He welcomed us and we took our seats. Bottles were poured. Laurent spoke without notes in the manner of someone who has spent years explaining something he deeply cares about to people he has just met.

Vineyards blanket hills near the village of Épernay.

Pol Roger sources from two equal halves, he explained, their own estate vineyards, which anchor and define the house style, and long term contracts with growers whose fruit they have relied upon for generations. At any given time up to ten million bottles are aging in its cellars, four to five years of inventory which will be exported to a hundred and twenty countries. Numbers that speak to considerable scale, yet the house remains independent, still owned and guided by descendants of the founding family for six generations.

Every bottle, he noted, is still riddled by hand. Fifty to sixty thousand per day, at considerably greater cost than the mechanical alternative. No oak is used in the winemaking, only stainless steel and concrete, allowing the fruit to speak without interference. The disgorgement date appears on the back label, an act of unhurried transparency. These are the details of a house that has decided, in each of its careful choices, what it wishes to be.

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The Germans returned to Champagne in 1940.

They came, as they had come before, with demands. The houses were ordered to produce, each month, large volumes of their finest vintages for shipment to Berlin. Among those requisitioned was Pol Roger’s 1928, a wine of such uncommon distinction that to open a bottle was to understand, without further argument, what champagne at its greatest could be. To have it taken by the truckload was not merely theft. It was pillage disguised as paperwork.

Pol Roger Champagne label intended for export to America, later stamped “Exportation Interdite” during the German occupation of Champagne. Image from Wine & War, Don & Petie Kladstrup.

The house resisted where it could. Under the guise of cellar repairs, cement was requested and cement was received, and the greater part of it was used to seal the finest remaining stocks behind freshly laid masonry. What the Nazis could not find, they could not take. It was not a grand gesture. It was a practical one. But in the circumstances, practicality was its own form of defiance.

And the defiance was not only structural. It was personal. Odette Pol-Roger, daughter-in-law of Maurice, became a courier for the French Resistance, making the grueling twelve hour journey by bicycle from Épernay to Paris on multiple occasions, carrying intelligence. The Resistance had also learned that the Nazis habitually dispatched large quantities of champagne ahead of planned military operations. By tracking those shipments, they transformed a supply chain into something rather more useful. The champagne cellars of Épernay, it turned out, were not merely repositories of pleasure. They were, in their quiet way, an instrument of battle.

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The first wine poured was the Blanc de Blancs 2016. It had all the lemon, lime and fresh apple charm of a fine champagne. It was precise and bright, yet underneath ran a current of creaminess that softened every edge. There was a particular tension between sweetness and tartness in the glass, and a suggestion of flaky pastry that lingered into a long, faintly ginger-like finish. It was a wine of opposing forces held in elegant balance, each element sharpening the other rather than competing with it.

Pol Roger Vintage Brut 2018

The Vintage Brut 2018 broadened the conversation. Where the Blanc de Blancs had been precise and linear, this was rounder, deeper and more generous. Crisp apple and pear with a touch of citrus, and beneath it all a faint smokiness that gave the wine a savory dimension. Made from sixty percent Pinot Noir and forty percent Chardonnay, drawn from vineyards across the Montagne de Reims, the Côte des Blancs and Cumières, across the river from Épernay in the Vallée de la Marne. Aged six years on the lees, it was an example of clarity and precision, but having more weight and warmth than the wine that preceded it.

Then came the rosés, poured back to back in a pairing that revealed as much about vintage character as it did about the house style. The 2019 was perfumed and lifted, all strawberry, raspberry and violets. Its liveliness was tempered by an unexpected crème brûlée creaminess that gave the wine a softness belying its energy. The 2018, by contrast, was more concentrated and opulent, the fruit riper and broader, the texture weightier on the palate. The long, warm summer of 2018 was present in every sip.

Throughout, Laurent led the tasting with the unhurried confidence of someone who has no need to oversell what is in the glass. When pressed for specifics about individual wines he was measured in his response, as though reducing them to their component parts would somehow miss the point. Imposing in stature but modest in nature, he kept returning the focus to the wine itself rather than the components of it. Champagne, in his mind, was something to be experienced as a whole.

“We are not saying our champagne is better,” he said. “We are saying our champagne is Pol Roger.”

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Winston Churchill had been drinking Pol Roger since at least 1908.

This was the year of his first recorded purchase, long before the war that would define his legacy and long before he ever met the family behind the bottle. It was, by most accounts, a devotion bordering on the absolute. He is reputed to have consumed some 42,000 bottles of champagne in his lifetime, roughly two bottles a day until his death in 1965 at the age of ninety. His preferred brand was Pol Roger. There was, in this, no great mystery.

“Champagne,” he once remarked, “imparts a feeling of exhilaration. The nerves are braced, the imagination is equally stirred, the wits become more nimble.”

This was not the language of indulgence. It was the language of a man who understood what champagne actually does, not merely to the palate, but to the will. And in the years between 1940 and 1945, the will was the last line of defense.

Winston Churchill inspecting the bombed ruins of Coventry Cathedral during the Blitz, 1940. Photo by William George Horton, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

While the cellars of Épernay were being emptied, Churchill was engaged in something not entirely dissimilar. He was holding the line. The bombs fell on London for fifty seven consecutive nights, and Churchill walked through the rubble in his overcoat and hat, cigar in hand, as though the city’s continued existence were a matter already settled. He understood, perhaps better than anyone, that endurance insisted upon in the darkest of hours is not denial. It is defiance. And through it all, he kept uncorking Pol Roger.

Napoleon is said to have remarked that in victory you deserve champagne, and in defeat you need it. For Churchill and for France, there was a great deal of need.

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The prestige cuvée of any great champagne house carries a particular weight. It is the wine that makes the clearest statement about its maker. For Pol Roger, that wine has carried Winston Churchill’s name since 1984, a tribute to the man who had remained faithful to their champagne through the hardest years of the twentieth century. The blend is never disclosed, though the wine speaks unmistakably of Pinot Noir. Exclusively sourced from Grand Cru villages that were important to the house during Churchill’s lifetime, it is, in the words of champagne writer Peter Liem, a robust, full-bodied champagne, in the style that Churchill preferred.

Pol Roger Cuvee Sir Winston Churchill 2015

The 2015 arrived with authority. Clean and precise, yet somehow exotic: jasmine, preserved lemon and vanilla cream with a long toasty finish that lingered well past the last sip. It entered the way Churchill might enter a room, bounding with unapologetic certainty.

The 2018 was even more forthcoming. Riper and more assured: Meyer lemon and nectarine, warm shortbread and honeycomb framing it all in a way that felt almost architectural. Where the 2015 drew you inward, the 2018 inspired visible smiles from around the room. Laurent introduced each without ceremony, letting the wines speak without editorial comment, as though anything added might only get in the way.

Then he introduced the Vinotheque wines.

These are what the house calls their library wines, a combination of “vin” and “bibliothèque.” The bottles are disgorged at the same time as the initial release of each cuvée, then returned to the cellars to age undisturbed for years before being released again. The concept is rooted in the belief that Pol Roger is a house that trusts in time, treating tradition not as a constraint but a complement.

“The best place to store our champagne,” Laurent noted, “is in the cellars of Pol Roger.”

For a house that had once used those same cellars to hide its finest stocks, it was a statement that carried more history than he perhaps intended.

Vinotheque Brut Vintage 2004

The Vinotheque Brut Vintage 2004 arrived as something unified and whole. Dried apricot and baked quince, toasted brioche and a wisp of candied ginger, soft and creamy with a finish that moved slowly between sweet and savory, agreeably never quite resolving itself.

Then came the Vinotheque Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill Brut 2002. For this bottle, the room seemed to hold a little more of its breath. It possessed flavors of passion fruit and preserved pineapple, baked apple and clove, smoke and cream and something faintly reminiscent of toasted honey. Pol Roger distilled to its essence, every element so thoroughly integrated that dissecting it felt beside the point.

Vinotheque Cuvee Sir Winston Churchill 2002

There is a certain kind of wine that resists analysis. Not because it is simple, but because it has achieved something beyond the sum of its components. These were those wines. Tasting them was less an exercise in recognition than an act of attention. They presented themselves not as a collection of flavors but as a single, unified thing. Which is, perhaps, what twenty years in the cellars of Épernay does to a bottle of champagne. It stops being an composition of parts. It becomes whole.

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It was November 1944, and Winston Churchill was in Paris for the first time since the liberation of the city.

At a lunch at the British Embassy he was seated next to Odette Pol-Roger, who by this point had become the animating spirit of the house, a woman of such wit and charm that one observer noted it sparkled as vividly as her champagne. The vintage poured that day was the 1928, the same bottles the Nazis had gone to such lengths to requisition, and which had survived behind their cellar wall to be opened at precisely this moment. Churchill was captivated, by the woman, by the wine, or most likely by both, to the point of naming one of his champion racehorses “Pol Roger”.

Sir Winston Churchill & Odette Pol-Roger

The friendship that followed lasted twenty years. He called the Épernay cellars “the world’s most drinkable address” and promised Odette he would one day visit and press the grapes with his own feet. He never did. But he sent her a signed copy of his war memoirs inscribed in the manner of a champagne label: “Cuvée de Réserve, mise en bouteille au Château de Chartwell.” Each year on his birthday, Odette sent him a case of the 1928. When that vintage ran out she moved to later years, always searching for something worthy of the occasion.

He died in January 1965. Odette attended his funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral. When she returned to Épernay she gave instructions that all bottles of Pol Roger shipped to England be bordered in black, in mourning for the man who had loved them most.

The cuvée that bears his name came a decade later. The exact composition has never been disclosed. That much was understood between the two families from the start. What is known is that it is made in the style Churchill himself preferred: robust, charming, and built to last. At the launch in 1984, his daughter Mary Soames spoke of her father's lifelong devotion to Pol Roger. She had seen him, she said, many times the better for it. Never the worse.

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With the tasting concluded we said our thank yous and goodbyes, especially to the gentleman in the tailored blazer who had been kind enough to invite me to stay. As I left the restaurant the February wind hit me hard, shocking me back into the cold reality of the street. A moment ago I had been tasting prestige champagne in the warm and welcoming confines of a cocktail lounge. Now I was navigating slushy puddles in clunky boots, head down against the chill.

It occurred to me, somewhere between the last glass and the first gust of wind, that champagne itself is composed of contrasts, both in its nature and its history. The sweetness of the dosage is added to counteract the wine’s piercing acidity. And behind its shining opulence lies the shadow of suffering and sacrifice. Perhaps part of what captivates us still is not in spite of this duality but because of it. Champagne is neither mere celebratory frivolity, the sole preserve of revelling dilettantes, nor the exclusive province of the endlessly discriminating connoisseur. It is both, and everything in between, and perhaps that is why it seizes the imagination and becomes, like some ancient myth, an object of timeless fascination.

Churchill embodied this duality as fully as anyone. He was far from perfect, especially by the standards we rightly apply today. But it is hard to argue that he was not perfect for the moment history handed him. His unabashed defiance, fueled in part by the buoyancy that Pol Roger provided through all the rubble and ruin, helped hold a civilization together at its most precarious hour.

And like the well-aged bottles that bear his name, whose disparate parts merge over time into one unique and irreducible whole, so too do we come to define ourselves. We are not diminished by our contrasts and contradictions, but made fully ourselves by them.

Author’s Note

Champagne Pol Roger was founded in 1849. It remains independently owned and operated by descendants of the founding family, now in its sixth generation. The house sources from its own estate vineyards and long term contracts with growers. All bottles are riddled by hand and disgorged with the date printed on the back label. Its prestige cuvée, the Cuvée Sir Winston Churchill, is produced only in exceptional vintages and always released later than any other wine in the portfolio. Since the first release with the 1975 vintage, there have been 22 vintages released. The 2018 being the most recent.

Pol Roger is imported in the United States by Frederick Wildman & Sons.

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Sources & Further Reading

Champagne — Don & Petie Kladstrup (2005) An indispensable history of the Champagne region, drawing on the stories of the families and houses that shaped it. Essential background for the wartime sections of this piece.

Wine & War: The French, the Nazis, and the Battle for France’s Greatest Treasure — Don & Petie Kladstrup (2001) A vivid account of the German occupation of France’s wine regions during the Second World War and the remarkable ways in which producers resisted. Required reading for anyone who wants to understand what was at stake in those cellars.

Christie’s World Encyclopedia of Champagne & Sparkling Wine — Tom Stevenson (1998) The definitive reference on champagne and sparkling wine, and an invaluable source for the Churchill and Pol Roger connection specifically.

Champagne: The Essential Guide to the Wines, Producers, and Terroir of the Iconic Region — Peter Liem (2017) The most authoritative modern guide to the region, its producers, and its wines. Indispensable for anyone who wants to go deeper than the glass.