Tag: Books by Rebecca Rosenberg
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: The Million-Dollar Gamble
In the mid-1960s, the Champagne world had a rhythm it didn’t like to break. Most houses released their vintages as quickly as the market would swallow them, rushing to turn their harvest into profit. But Lily Bollinger was never one to follow the rhythm of others—she preferred to conduct the orchestra. In 1967, inside a hired Bentley stalled in the “snarled traffic” of a London on the brink of a cultural revolution, Lily checked her gold Bulova watch—a cherished gift from her late husband, Jacques. She was late for a high-stakes interview at the Savoy Hotel that would define her legacy: the official launch of the Bollinger R.D.
To understand why R.D. was such a shock to the industry, you have to understand both the science and the soul of the grape. Most vintage Champagnes are separated from their “lees”—the yeast sediment—after just a few years. It is a standard, efficient practice. Lily’s radical idea, however, was to leave the wine in contact with that yeast for much longer—sometimes fifteen years or more. She wanted to let the wine sleep in the cool, limestone silence of her caves in Aÿ, allowing the sediment to slowly transform the liquid into something ethereal and complex.
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.
