The Widow Clicquot

T
his is the story of French champagne, but it didn’t start amid the splendor of a countryside château. Its origins were a more modest little luxury: the aisles of a well-stocked wine shop. It was a remarkably simple way to have begun an obsession with the history of one of the world’s great wines—and one of the world’s great women. As much as we associate champagne with celebration and the good life, I should also tell you that, for me, it was a passion that began without fanfare in a small town in the American Midwest, where I was trying to weather what turned out to be the last months of a less than glamorous job.

It was in the midst of this daily living—and those occasional splurges that any sensible woman uses to temper it—that I discovered the Widow Clicquot. Although the writer in me wishes to tell you that my love affair with the Widow began in the spring, with the loosening of the earth and the promise of new life, that is not true. Winter had the Midwestern plains firmly in its Anglo-Saxon grasp, and I found myself gazing wistfully at a row of bubbly, dreaming of distant appellations and the sun-soaked vineyards of France.

I already knew the champagne. I don’t mean that. My girlfriends and I drank it with a degree of enthusiastic regularity that might not be wise to detail. It was the story of Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin that I discovered that afternoon, printed on a small card tucked into the box of the 1996 vintage Grande Dame that I had decided I certainly deserved.

The elegant little biography was less than thirty-five words, but it was a story that even in its outlines captured my attention that winter. It was the story of a woman raised to be a wife and mother, left widowed before thirty with a small child, with no training and little experience of the world, who grasped firmly at the reins of her own destiny and, through sheer determination and talent, transformed a fledgling family wine trade into one of the great champagne houses of the world. Here, I thought, is a woman who refuses to compromise.

In the years that followed, her story stayed with me, even after we had left the Midwest and settled in my then husband’s home state of California in the hills of Sonoma County, where the winters are green-misted and indescribably soft. Something about this woman who took such immense risks to pursue her passion still resonated deeply, and I began odd little researches, hunting down nineteenth-century references to the Widow Clicquot in the local wine library in Healdsburg, practicing my rusty French reading old travel narratives written at the height of the Napoleonic empire. And, of course, never one to stint on rigorous research, I made sure that we tasted all the sparkling wine we could find, locally at first, and later in France, where I spent a windy January in a sprawling old farmhouse surrounded by nothing but muddy vineyards.

The trouble always was how to find the woman herself, this young widow with the unwieldy name of Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin, the Veuve—or Widow—Clicquot. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Barbe-Nicole was settling into her adulthood and all the compromises that come with it, the lives of entrepreneurs and commercial innovators rarely made the history books. This was especially true if that entrepreneur or innovator happened to be a woman. The archives are filled with the letters and diaries of statesmen and princes, but few librarians thought to collect the personal records of businesspeople, even businesspeople who did exceptional things. It is still true today. Most of us will never see our love letters preserved in the world’s great libraries. For a young woman in the nineteenth century it was particularly true, unless she was a queen or a duchess or the sister, wife, or mother of some great man.

Barbe-Nicole was none of those things. She was simply a formidable and independent woman, making her own name in the humdrum, dog-eat-dog world of business. When I finally made my way in the early months of 2007 to the Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin company archives in Reims, confident of discovering her private secrets, I found that the walls were lined with shelf after shelf of careful account books, all evidence of Barbe-Nicole’s singular resolve. But there were few clues as to the woman behind the trademark yellow label.

So, instead, I dragged willing friends around the countryside of the Champagne that winter, looking for some trace of the life Barbe-Nicole must have known. Something that would explain not just
how
a young, sheltered woman broke free from the life other people had charted for her, but
why
. We bumped down rutted dirt roads in the rain, looking for the Widow’s vineyards in the fields above the village of Bouzy. In a fit of collective charm one afternoon, we persuaded the reluctant winemaker at Château de Boursault, once her favorite country home, to give us just ten minutes in the private grounds she had loved. I sat for hours in the cool silence of the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Reims, thinking that Barbe-Nicole knew these same walls well. Throughout it all, I found myself staring at buildings and street corners, stealing glimpses through windows like some thief, looking in vain for a woman and the finely woven texture of her life.

Sometimes I wondered if finding her private life—rescuing her from the silence that engulfed her story—would be possible. Before my quest was over, I would meet with women winemakers and company presidents in sunlit Napa offices, searching for the modern incarnation of the Widow Clicquot, hoping to find in their experiences of a woman’s life in wine some way to untangle the past. Later, there was France. In small towns throughout the Champagne, La Veuve—and in France there is only one—lives in the shadowy half-life of oral folk legend. Frustrated with the dusty books and the archives, some days I simply asked the locals in bars and bistros to remember, knowing that remembering and inventing are close cousins, especially at the distance of two hundred years. We passed the wine from table to table in open bottles, and the chef came out from the kitchen to relax with a cigarette and to listen. In those moments, her presence was with us.

I like to think that the life of the Widow Clicquot has been slowly ripening in quiet darkness like some rare and wonderful vintage. Some of that darkness has been my life and my imagination. Some of it has been the darkness of history and the role of entrepreneurial men and, especially, women in it. But now—at last—is the time to enjoy it. As we all know, over time, wine becomes something different and more precious. The hard tannins mellow into smoothness; the flavors mature and ripen. In the nineteenth century, much of the Widow’s story wasn’t worth saving. Today, its mere outlines are breathtaking. It is a tale that will change the way we think about the history of champagne and the role of one woman in it.

We all know the wine that Barbe-Nicole helped to make famous. No wine in the world brings to mind so many immediate associations as champagne. The pop of a cork and the bright sparkle of bubbles mean celebration and glamour and, more often than not, the distinct possibility of romance. It is the wine of weddings and New Year’s kisses. It is beautiful and delicate, and above all, it is a wine associated with women.

It has ever been thus. The poet Lord Byron famously proclaimed that lobster salad and champagne were the only things a woman should ever be seen eating. Byron was an unrepentant chauvinist, but it is still a delicious idea. In the first decades of the eighteenth century, not long after champagne was discovered, the voluptuous and powerful Madame de Pompadour, mistress to the king of France, put it best: Champagne is the only wine that leaves a woman more beautiful after drinking it. According to legend, the shallow goblet-style champagne glasses known as
coupes
were modeled after this lady’s much admired breasts. In the twentieth century, it was the perfect wine with little black dresses, and it still evokes Jazz Age flappers and the elegance of old Humphrey Bogart films.

But one look at the business of champagne tells a very different tale. In the boardrooms and wine cellars, champagne is a man’s world. Today, there are only a handful of women in senior positions in the French wine industry, and only one of the elite and internationally renowned champagne houses known as the
grandes marques
is run by a woman—the house of Champagne Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, headed since 2001 by Madame Cécile Bonnefond.

The familiar stories about the origins of champagne tell us that men have always controlled the business of wine. Indeed, champagne enthusiasts quickly learn that it was a man who discovered it. History credits a seventeenth-century blind monk with the now famous name of Dom Pierre Pérignon with having discovered the secret of champagne’s bubbles in the cellars of his hillside abbey, perched at the edge of the village of Hautvillers. According to legend, he is the jolly mad scientist of champagne, relentlessly pursuing a way to transmute ordinary local wines into a sparkling liquid gold.

If Dom Pérignon discovered how to produce champagne, other talented and prosperous men learned how to market it to the world. Men such as Jean-Rémy Moët, who used his personal connections with Napoléon, fostered during wine country weekends at Moët’s luxurious estates in Épernay, to build one of the first commercial champagne empires. Picture postcards of this celebrity friendship, with images of Moët and Napoléon touring the wine cellars in good spirits, were popular souvenirs as early as the nineteenth century. Even more famous was Charles-Henri Heidsieck, who rode two thousand miles on horseback to Russia as a marketing gimmick. His son Charles Camille was later immortalized in popular song as “Champagne Charlie,” and before long, Champagne Charlie was slang for “any dissipated man or noted drinker of
fizz
.”

With men like these in the business, no wonder champagne is one of the world’s most familiar products. This one small region of northeastern France, with less than 85,000 acres of vines—the only place where true champagne is made—has been blessed with more than its fair share of entrepreneurial talent. The trouble is that the story of how these men slowly built a global champagne empire is only half-true. Dom Pérignon was certainly a talented winemaker and probably one of the great tasters of winemaking history, but he did not discover how to capture the bubbles in a bottle of champagne. In fact, when they occurred naturally, he tried to get rid of them. His goal was not developing a new product, but meeting the needs of the market he and his clerical brothers already controlled: a trade in good-quality still wines.

Even more shocking, champagne wasn’t discovered by the French. It was the British who first learned the secret of making wine sparkle and first launched the commercial trade in champagne wine with bubbles. The legend of Dom Pérignon was manufactured only in the late nineteenth century—and eventually registered by the estates of Moët and Chandon as a trademark. And while Champagne Charlie came onto the scene with genuine gusto, champagne was already big business by the time he was celebrated in cabaret tunes, and he was not quite the young upstart he pretended to be.

Champagne was not always big business, however. In the second part of the eighteenth century, champagne was in a slump, destined to become a regional curiosity. Local winemakers were struggling to drum up even modest sales, and champagne might have faded into obscurity, suffering the same fate as its unfortunate counterpart
sekt
—another sparkling wine now all but forgotten except among connoisseurs.

All that changed in the first decades of the nineteenth century, thanks to the determination and resourcefulness of less than a dozen important brokers and winemakers, who saw a bigger potential for the sparkling wines grown in the sloping vineyards running south from the cathedral city of Reims. Within the space of a single generation, champagne went from skidding toward the commercial sidelines to a powerful economic engine. From 1790 to 1830, sales increased almost 1,000 percent, from a few hundred thousand bottles a year to over five million. By the dawn of the twentieth century, even before the Jazz Age made champagne the symbol of an era, the world was already buying twenty million bottles of bubbly a year.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, champagne was still a small-time enterprise, and these decades would prove to be a defining moment for the champagne industry. At the crossroads of its cultural history, one entrepreneur deserves much of the credit for establishing this sparkling wine as the most famous luxury product in the world market: the Widow Clicquot.

Widowed at the age of twenty-seven, with no formal business training and no firsthand experience, Barbe-Nicole transformed a well-funded but struggling and small-time family wine brokerage into arguably the most important champagne house of the nineteenth century in just over a decade. It is thanks to her technical innovations in the cellars that today we can find modestly priced bottles of champagne on store shelves around the world. Had she not discovered the process known as
remuage
, champagne would have remained the drink only of the very rich or the very lucky. I would not have been able to drown my sorrows that Wisconsin winter—and I would never have begun this quixotic search for the lost details of another woman’s life.

By forty, Barbe-Nicole was one of the wealthiest and most celebrated entrepreneurs in all of Europe and one of the first businesswomen in history to lead an international commercial empire. Recognizing an industry in crisis, she was unafraid of entering into a new business and new markets when the entire social structure of old France—the ancien régime—was crumbling and Europe was in a collective panic. More experienced entrepreneurs resolved to wait out the crisis—or to find another line of business entirely. But the story of the Widow Clicquot has its roots in sheer audacity. Risking her financial independence for a future in champagne, she changed the history of French winemaking. In the process, she also helped to make the product she sold a byword for luxury, celebration, and the good life.