WINE AND WARFARE PART 9: LE SALUT AU PINARD

(TDB) - Pinard et singe – sustaining France’s armies in the First World War.

If any army in the world was going to follow the Roman example and have a wine ration effectively enshrined in law it would be the French. Wine has been a staple of French soldiers for hundreds of years and the First World War was no exception.

The “singe” in the title by the way means “monkey” and refers to what the soldiers called their tinned meat ration as assorted simians were rumoured to be the animal used in its production.

At the beginning of the First World War the daily allowance of wine per man was a quarter of a litre a day, by 1915 it was half a litre and by 1916, almost three quarters of a litre with the opportunity to buy more.

The army was supplying its troops with 12 million hectolitres a year by 1916 – French vineyard owners from the Languedoc donated 20m litres for army use at the outbreak of the war and France’s North African colonies provided a great deal of wine by the end.

This act of generosity on the part of the Languedoc was not without a less benevolent edge however. Just before the war the Languedoc-Roussillon was facing an enormous surplus of wine thanks to continuing abundant harvests from 1905 onwards, the war was the perfect excuse to drain the wine lake.

The wine was, however, pretty rough – French soldiers did not march to the front knapsacks bulging with bottles of Pauillac or Gevrey showered on them by an adoring public.

The troops called their wine ration by many names including; bleu, bluchet, brutal, gingin, ginglard, ginglet, jaja, picton and rouquin but the most common and most famous is “pinard”.

The etymology behind this slang is unclear. There is evidence that the name was being used by some but not all garrisons around France for its wine ration in the 1880s and that it had gained more common currency by the early 1900s.