VIENNA, Austria – Baron Elie Robert de Rothschild, who helped France’s renowned Rothschild winemaking and banking dynasty recover from the ravages of World War II, died Monday while vacationing at his Austrian hunting lodge. He was 90.
Rothschild had been on a hunting trip at his lodge near the alpine village of Scharnitz outside Innsbruck when he suffered a fatal heart attack, police in the province of Tyrol said in a statement.
He had spent the past several days hunting game with friends in the heavily forested area and had planned to return home to France, police said.
He was the second prominent Rothschild to die this year. In June, family patriarch Baron Guy de Rothschild died in Paris.
The family’s prestigious Chateau Lafite-Rothschild winery, for whom Elie de Rothschild began working in 1946 after serving as an Allied soldier during World War II, credits him with at least two of the best and most memorable postwar Bordeaux vintages: 1947 and 1949.
“After the difficult decades following the turn of the century, and the painful period of World War II, Baron Elie de Rothschild was entrusted with the recovery of the estate,” the domain says on its Web site, www.lafite.com.
“Vintages 1947 and 1949 were rays of hope amid the hard labors of renewal,” it says.
Rothschild supervised the effort to restore the domain’s vineyards and buildings and overhauled the way the holdings were administered.
During the war, Elie de Rothschild had been captured by the Germans. He wound up at Luebeck, one of the Nazis’ most infamous POW camps.
There, he was reunited with a brother, Alain, and although they were Jews, they were treated as captured officers and avoided execution.
Rothschild became a prominent taster at wine events in London, and went on to help found the Bordeaux Wine Guild in 1950. He passed management responsibilities to a nephew in the 1970s.
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