3 Negotiating Lessons from Burgundy, The Nazis & The 3 Walls, With Roland Frasier

Roland Frasier is a phenomenal negotiator. Not only was he a business lawyer for 12 years, but Roland has also founded, scaled, or sold 24 different 7 to 9 figure businesses ranging from consumer products to industrial machine manufacturing companies with adjusted sales ranging from $3 million to $337 million. You don’t manage that kind of success without knowing a thing or two about negotiating. So listen in today for some excellent principles to help guide you through a tough negotiation. 

If you enjoy this podcast, be sure to subscribe on ApplePodcasts, write a review, and share this episode with your business-minded friends. If you find yourself needing to do some negotiating right now, you may also find this episode, and this episode (both with Roland) useful.

Back in World War 2, in the 1940s, the Nazis occupied France, and parts of Burgundy were under their control. Orders were given to appropriate large quantities of lower quality French Burgundy for the troops, and higher quality wines were to be purchased and sent to Germany for the officers and higher-ups.

To save as much of their better wine that had not already been designated “Grand Cru,” several of the local producers gathered and established a new designation, “Premiere Cru,” to permit that wine to avoid appropriation.

The plan worked, and that saved quite a bit of wine. But, the best wine of the region was also at risk, and even if the wine was being purchased for the officers, the French didn’t want all of it to leave their region to be lost forever.

Several of the winemakers built false walls in their large, sprawling cellars beneath the city of Beaune in the heart of Burgundy to hide their most precious wines. Among those was Bouchard Pere et Fils (which Roland recently had the pleasure of visiting). Bouchard has an immense underground cellar that covers several blocks beneath the city above, and this cellar stores millions of bottles dating back to the mid-1800s. They chose one of their off the beaten path cellar rooms that held about 35,000 bottles as the primary storage spot for their best wines and then built a false wall behind which to hide their liquid treasure.

However, false walls were not uncommon, and the Nazis knew that they were likely to exist in cellars, so they were not shy about breaking through walls at the end of cellar corridors to check and see if anything was hidden behind them. So, when they arrived at Bouchard’s cellars, the Nazi soldiers did indeed knock down and break through the false wall Bouchard had built.

However, rather than finding the most precious wines, they found a cache of lesser wines instead and, delighted that they had foiled the winemaker’s attempt to hide these bottles, took them all away.

What they did not know, however, was that Bouchard had built not one false wall between its prized 35,000 bottles and the main cellar, but three, and cleverly stashed a large quantity of lesser wine bottles behind each false wall so that the Nazi’s would believe they had found the best wines and not go any further. Fortunately, the soldiers were not well-versed in French Burgundy terroir and therefore were unable to discern the quality level of the wines they found hidden behind the first wall.

The plan worked, and thankfully, the most prized bottles survived throughout the war, hidden safely away behind two additional false walls.

There are several lessons in business and negotiation that we can take from what Bouchard did.

Whenever you have an absolute that you cannot give on and do not want your negotiating opponent to discover, take the time to construct several “false walls” that you can allow them to “breakthrough.”

This will allow you to give them the pleasure of getting something in return as you concede the issues that you are perfectly comfortable conceding, which will, in turn, be more likely to allow you to protect your most precious negotiating points.

Listen for Roland’s examples!

The French resistance could have opted to take a stand in the cellars and fight it out with the Nazis, but that would have risked the destruction of the cellars and the wine within, as well as the loss of hundreds of French lives.

When fac...