Rebecca Rosenberg’s Champagne Widows Novels are based on real-life widows who grappled with the loss of their husbands while continuing the tradition of champagne making. The third novel – License to Thrill – is about Lily Bollinger and that family’s famous Bollinger champagne. Who doesn’t love a sip of champagne? The women Rebecca writes about are truly extraordinary!
Rebecca is guest posting today as her latest novel launches. Welcome, Rachel.
~~~
As historical fiction writers, we often fall in love with a woman’s “extraordinary” resume. We find a figure like Lily Bollinger—the woman who steered a world-famous Champagne house through the Nazi Occupation—and we are dazzled. Our first instinct is to paint her in gold leaf and treat her like a monument.
But monuments don’t breathe. And they certainly don’t sell books.
To get our readers’ hearts racing and our own pens moving, we need to lean into that “grit and glitz” energy. Writing a legend isn’t about looking up at a pedestal—it’s about getting into the mud with her. We must use our craft to make the ordinary feel extraordinary, but we must use our hearts to make the extraordinary feel ordinary. We do that by recognizing Lily’s traits in ourselves, our mothers, and our friends.
The Farmer on the Bicycle
In my personal discovery of Lily, I realized that to make her real, I had to look past the “Madame” and find the farmer. We write, and we describe. We take the tools of her trade and treat them as sacred.
In License to Thrill, I couldn’t just give Lily a bicycle as a prop. It had to be her vehicle of daily defiance—the rusted frame she pedaled through the muddy ruts of the vineyards, her skirt fluttering as she inspected the vines like a general surveying her troops. I leaned into the sensory grit: the scent of fire-laced French oak, the metallic ping of a riddler’s hand in the caves, and the subterranean chill of the limestone. When we focus on these textures, the “legendary” House of Bollinger becomes a workplace. We recognize that grit; it’s the same determination we see in every woman who wakes up to protect what she’s built.
Finding the Human Friction
To make a legend believable, you have to find where she struggled with the same things we do. Lily walked a tightrope between two worlds. One day she was the “farmer of Aÿ” on her bike; the next, she was navigating the high-octane world of James Bond or making friends with Hollywood royalty.
As I sculpted her story, I looked for the friction that made her human:
- The Weight of Law: Lily carried a secret love that remained unfulfilled for decades. By law, a married woman’s possessions belonged to her husband. She could not marry for love without surrendering the Bollinger legacy. We recognize that sacrifice—the impossible choices women make between their hearts and their duty.
- The Clash of Egos: Even her success was a battle. She spent two years fighting with her egotistical biographer, Cyril Ray. Trying to explain the technicalities of wine to him was like teaching a cat to waltz! Any writer who has wrestled with a difficult personality knows that frustration.
The Shared Heart
Lily wasn’t a superhero; she was a woman doing the best she could in a world that was in shambles. She lost her husband in the middle of WWII, hid her wine from the “Wine Führer,” and gathered her nieces and nephews to keep the legacy afloat because she had no children of her own.
Even her most “extraordinary” feats—like sailing the Queen Elizabeth to forge an American market—were born of necessity. She spent two months wining and dining New York society because the legacy handed to her was fragile, and she refused to let it break. We understand that pressure; the weight of being the one everyone else relies on to keep the lights on and the family together.
The Bond Connection
One of the most delightful parts of Lily’s later life was her relationship with the world of 007. To the world, it looked like a brilliant marketing stroke. To Lily, it was personal. She was a woman who understood adventure and the high stakes of survival. When she was wining and dining movie stars, she wasn’t just a CEO; she was a woman who had lived through the real-life espionage of occupied France. She recognized in Bond the same audacity she had to summon to keep her winery from being plundered. By connecting her “extraordinary” business success to her “ordinary” love of a good story and a sharp wit, she becomes someone we’d want to share a bottle with.
How We Do It
We use description to make the reader feel the weight of a Nazi rifle or the sparkle of a vintage flute. But we use recognition to reach the heart. We look for the universal threads: the clenched fist of grief, the cold certainty of purpose, and the drive to stay relevant in a changing world.
“Extraordinary” isn’t a distant peak. It is what happens when an ordinary woman—like you, your mother, or your best friend—refuses to give up when the world becomes impossible. I wrote License to Thrill to understand how a woman moves from a muddy field to a James Bond gala with her soul intact. The secret wasn’t in the bubbles; it was in the woman who made them.
Many thanks, Rebecca for sharing some of the techniques you use to make this remarkable woman ‘fizz and sparkle’ just like the champagne she was famous for.
License to Thrill by Rebecca Rosenberg
The Nazis wanted her champagne. The critics wanted her erased. Lily Bollinger refused to surrender.
1940: In occupied France, the Bollinger cellars are a battlefield. Newly widowed Lily must host the Nazi Weinführer while Resistance fighters hide in the chalk tunnels directly beneath her feet. To protect her legacy, Lily becomes a master of deception—outwitting the Reich by day and defying them by night, bound by a dangerous secret and a mysterious lover known as the Commodore.
1970: Lily reigns as the undisputed “Dame of Champagne,” but the new decade brings new enemies. From triumphant tours of America to high-stakes court battles in London, she has conquered the world—yet her own house is under siege. As feuding nephews tear at the empire from within and a venomous critic dismisses her as a relic, Lily makes her move.
In her most audacious gamble, Lily forges an unbreakable bond between Bollinger and the world’s most sophisticated spy: James Bond.
As her seventy-fifth birthday looms, Lily executes one final maneuver to secure her empire. But when her rarest vintage is uncorked, a long-buried truth resurfaces—proving her greatest achievement wasn’t just the wine she saved, but the secrets she kept.
Two eras. One legacy. A woman who proves the finest vintages are impossible to crush.
Other posts featuring Rebecca Rosenberg:
FOR MORE ON READING & WRITING HISTORICAL FICTION FOLLOW A WRITER OF HISTORY. There’s a SUBSCRIBE function on the right hand side of the page.
M.K. Tod writes historical fiction. Her latest novel THAT WAS THEN is a contemporary thriller. Mary’s other novels, THE ADMIRAL’S WIFE, PARIS IN RUINS, TIME AND REGRET, LIES TOLD IN SILENCE and UNRAVELLED are available from Amazon, Nook, Kobo, Google Play and iTunes. She can be contacted on Facebook or on her website www.mktod.com.
