Author: Rebecca Rosenberg
Rebecca is an award-winning author of historical novels that celebrate glorious women of the past. She is also a champagne geek and a lavender farmer in Sonoma, California.
Champagne Chronicles Blog: Havana Heat. Why Lily Bollinger Walked Away
By the late 1950s, the world was desperate for the glitz of Bollinger, and nowhere was that hunger more apparent than in Havana, Cuba. It was the playground of the elite, a city of rum, revolution, and relentless sun. But when Lily Bollinger stepped off the plane, she wasn’t looking for a vacation. She was looking for the truth about how her wine was being treated on the other side of the Atlantic. What she found in the humid shadows of the Havana docks was a direct assault on the integrity of her house.
Champagne Chronicles Blog: Bubbles and Iron — When Lily Bollinger Met the Women Who Saved San Francisco
In the autumn of 1947, Lily Bollinger was on an audacious mission to reclaim the American market. She had survived the dark years of the Occupation by hiding her best bottles behind false walls and outwitting Nazi officers in her own dining room. But when she reached the fog-swept hills of San Francisco, she found a new battle brewing—one that had nothing to do with wine and everything to do with the soul of a city.
Lily hadn’t come to California to be a political activist, but her “grit” was a magnetic force that instantly recognized a fellow soldier. At a high-society gala in the St. Francis Hotel, amidst the scent of gardenias and the clinking of fine crystal, she was introduced to Friedel Klussmann. The local press had dismissed Friedel as a sentimental nuisance, a woman standing in the way of modern progress because she refused to let the city’s mayor dismantle the iconic cable car system. The mayor called the cars obsolete and a burden, but as Lily looked out the window at the steep hills and the iron tracks, she saw a spirit of defiance that mirrored her own.
Champagne Chronicles Blog: Outshining the Shadow
The year was 1967, and London was a city vibrating with a chaotic, revolutionary energy that felt a world away from the quiet, limestone-scented champagne cellars of Aÿ. Inside the plush, leather-scented interior of a Bentley, the air was still, but outside, the “Swinging Sixties” had turned into a cacophony of dissent. Protesters filled the streets, their shouts muffled by the heavy glass of the car windows as traffic ground to a halt. For Lily Bollinger, the ticking of her watch was louder than the crowds. She was late for the most important interview of her life—a meeting with the world’s press that would decide if Bollinger Champagne remained a relic of the past or the icon of the future.
In the stillness of that trapped car, Lily found herself grappling with the weight of her own reputation. For decades, the public and the press had comfortably tucked her into a neat, safe category: “The Famous Widow of Champagne.” It was a title born of respect for her resilience during the war, but to Lily, it was beginning to feel like a shroud. She had spent years protecting the vineyards from the Nazis, sleeping in the cellars while bombs fell, and expanding the house into the “Cage of Lions” that was the American market. Yet, despite her conquests, she was still often viewed through the lens of the man she had lost rather than the vintages she had perfected.
Champagne Chronicles: The Pin That Won 007
By the late 1950s and early 1960s, Lily Bollinger had already conquered the American market and secured the coveted Royal Warrant. She was the undisputed “Grand Dame” of Aÿ, a woman who had steered her champagne house through the darkest days of the Nazi occupation with little more than a bicycle, a prayer, and a resolve made of tempered steel. But the world was changing. The era of stiff, post-war tradition was giving way to the high-octane, jet-set glamour of the 1960s. The bubbles were shifting, and Lily knew that to remain the “toast of London,” she had to find a way to stay three steps ahead of the curve.
Her nephew, Christian Bizot, came to her with a vision that sounded, in Lily’s own sharp-witted words, a bit “cockamamie.” He believed that the world’s most famous secret agent—the man every man wanted to be and every woman wanted to be with—should abandon his varied spirits and drink only one champagne: Bollinger. At the time, James Bond was a rising cinematic phenomenon, a symbol of modern masculinity and lethal sophistication. Christian saw the marketing potential, but Lily saw a strategic challenge that would define the future of her house.
