The Widow Clicquot (10 page)

If the champagne turned out cloudy, they knew they had failed. As long as the wines were still in the cellars, there were some options. One trick was to move the wines to a colder part of the cellar. Sometimes the suspended bacterial debris would settle out naturally. But if the wine turned muddy once it was already on the road, making its way to their clients, it was heartbreaking. A wine that came out of the cellars clear could instantly turn cloudy if the temperature shifted too dramatically. This was part of the problem in the Amsterdam disaster.

Even worse than knowing that so many bottles of fine wine were being ruined in Amsterdam was the bill. The storage costs and port fees were outrageous. Dozens of ships had been caught in the port closure, and warehouse and cellar owners could charge wartime prices. With every passing day, the financial losses were getting worse. Perhaps the wines were already a total loss, and now they were paying richly to store worthless product. If the wine had already started to go off, it would be hard to sell, even if the ports did miraculously open. So in August, they finally had to send one of their salesmen to do something with the wines—even if it was just liquidate them.

When Charles Hartmann arrived in Holland, he confirmed their worst fears. The wine was in terrible shape. “I prayed to the Good Lord,” he wrote to Barbe-Nicole and Alexandre, “to let me find our wines in such a way that I could send you good news, but my prayers were not at all answered. I opened the first case with trembling hands…I took out a bottle, trembling I removed the straw and tissue paper, but rather than the clear and brilliant wine that I had hoped for, I saw nothing but a deposit like a finger that I could not detach without shaking the bottle for a full minute.”

It took him weeks to go through the stock, bottle by bottle, salvaging what he could. Cloudy bottles he gave a hearty shake, hoping that this might cause some of the suspended sediment to precipitate again, clearing the wine to an extent and making it possible to sell. Overall, the news was wrenching. It was not until the end of September that Charles was able to place the handful of wines that could be saved from the shipment. Once again, they would have to risk port closures to move the product. The wines were shipped to the open port of Copenhagen, to be sent from there, on nimble coastal cruisers, to the Prussian market. “I pray to the Good Lord day and night to send some corsair to take them,” he wrote. At least then they would be done with this ill-fated shipment.

The total loss of Amsterdam was quickly followed by word that the entire market was on the verge of collapse. Louis Bohne had set off in April for Germany and Russia on another of his marathon sales tours. The German market, he now wrote, was hopeless: “This country has lacked even money for the worst vintage this past year and after fifteen years of war has given up on being able to procure our luxury drink…. The result is that it is necessary for all the world to head to the North…. All is war, war and war!” No one had the money—or the inclination—for champagne.

Finally, from Russia, a small bit of unexpected good news: Louis learned that Empress Elizabeth Alexeievna was pregnant. “What a blessing for us,” he wrote to Barbe-Nicole and Alexandre, “if this is a Prince that she is brought to bed of…a tide of champagne will be drunk in this immense country. Do not mention it, all our competitors would come at once.” In over a dozen years of marriage, the empress had given birth only once, to a daughter, and the baby had died as a very young child. The czar would celebrate the birth of a son and heir after all these years with lavish celebrations—celebrations that Louis hoped would include their stealthily exported champagne. By early autumn, he was heading for the Russian border, war or no war. It would turn out to be the most dangerous adventure of his career.

The life of the international salesman was treacherous even in the best of times. A commercial traveler took risks with his life on the road. Roads were generally in bad condition, deeply rutted and narrow. Carriages overturned frequently, in the modern equivalent of the deadly car crash. Ships were lost at sea. That year, another of Barbe-Nicole’s employees had nearly been shipwrecked off the coast of Norway; his letter, describing the terror onboard a sinking ship, made for sober reading in Reims.

During wartime, all these dangers were intensified, and Louis knew that he was risking his life going to Russia. The risk was not simply being caught in the crossfire between opposing armies. The problem with a Frenchman arriving in enemy territory in the middle of a war that the Russians were on the verge of losing and setting out to ply the aristocracy with his sparkling wine and cultured charms was that it looked downright suspicious. Before crossing into Russian territory, Louis wrote to Barbe-Nicole and Alexandre, warning them to censor their letters. Avoid “talking politics,” he pleaded, “this is dangerous in this country.”

Despite all their precautions, Louis soon found that he was suspected of being a French spy. By the spring of 1807, having endured a bitter winter in Saint Petersburg, there was something like panic in his letters to Reims. He was afraid that he would be arrested at any moment, and he knew that his posted letters were being scrutinized. When the chance came, he seized the opportunity to send a hand-delivered note to his employers with a friend returning to France. “In the name of God, don’t ever talk of politics,” he urged them, “if you don’t want to compromise my liberty or my life, deportation to the mines of Siberia is the chastisement for all indiscretions; all the letters are opened.”

Perhaps a blistering winter in the capital had given him too clear an idea of what Siberia promised. Leaving precipitously, however, would certainly arouse almost as much suspicion as staying, so Louis was forced to remain at least through spring, when the roads were open for easy traveling. When warmer days returned, they found a relieved Louis promptly on the road, heading west out of Russia.

Despite it all, Russia turned out to be another colossal failure. The empress had given birth to a daughter in the autumn, and this child, like her first, died quickly. Besides, the child was rumored to be the daughter not of the czar, but of Elizabeth’s handsome lover, and somehow the emperor wasn’t in the mood to throw any fabulous champagne celebrations. Louis had taken some good orders, but the cost of doing business so far from home was turning out to be fabulously expensive, and it was still not clear how they would manage to get their wines into the country. If they couldn’t deliver their wines, there would be no staying afloat.

Barbe-Nicole spent much of
the next year trying to find some way to get their wines to customers overseas. By the time news came in the summer of 1807 that a Franco-Russian peace treaty was on the horizon, they were faced with a sickening dilemma. When the trade restrictions with Russia were lifted, there would be a mad rush for the border, and the wine merchants able to get product there first would take all the easy sales. They already had requests for champagne pouring in from Russia, Austria, and the Prussian Empire. But no one was going to wait for their wines if their competitor Jean-Rémy Moët got there first. The only option was, once again, to send a shipment of wine to Amsterdam, where it would be ready to sail for Russia as soon as trade opened—and where it would sit waiting in the meantime.

There would be a while to wait. By autumn, it was all depressingly familiar to Barbe-Nicole. No peace treaty still. Wines once again stuck in a warehouse in Holland. The account books were enough to leave her with a pounding headache, and there could be only so many disasters before Veuve Clicquot Fourneaux was out of business. Slowly, the company letters reveal Alexandre fading into the background. Perhaps he already suspected that his initial investment could not be saved. Or perhaps tensions between the two partners were mounting, because despite the setbacks, Barbe-Nicole stubbornly insisted that they needed to focus on international markets. She was so determined that she even considered breaking the law for the first time.

She started to toy with the idea of sending her wines as contraband. Up to now, they had simply been sending their wines in private ships around closed ports, hoping to avoid detection and confiscation at sea. Sending the wines as contraband was something far more serious. It meant cutting a deal with a foreign ship captain—usually someone on the other side of the war. In the final months of 1807, it began to look like the only remaining option, unless she wanted wines sitting in uncertain storage in Amsterdam for a second time.

For a heavy fee, it was possible to have foreign sea captains—and British and American sea captains especially—transport cargo into closed ports by disguising the French origins of the products. Barbe-Nicole was considering it. But she hesitated, probably because she realized some of the unique risks of contraband champagne: In the event these ships were stopped for inspection, it would be difficult to disguise the French origins of this sparkling wine.

Part of what had saved champagne dealers thus far was the exclusivity of the product. At the royal courts of Europe, a lucky few had enjoyed it for more than a century, and the war had perversely whetted their appetite for this luxury wine. It was an impulse pretty near to looting the wine cellars as the
Titanic
went down. Champagne has always had the advantage of coming from one place only—the French are insistent on this point. Real champagne is made only in the Champagne region of France. Today, the region is limited to 323 classified villages, and everything from the dates of the harvest to the pruning of the vines is strictly controlled.

This determination to protect the integrity of champagne, both as a product and as a marketing monopoly, was just getting its start in the early nineteenth century, much like the industry itself. It wasn’t until 1844 that champagne makers—recognizing that a brand name was fast becoming a generic category—sued for the right to prevent other sparkling-wine makers from using the word. The legal battle is still not over. Hoping to avoid the branding destiny of products like Band-Aid and Q-tips, winemakers in the Champagne challenge all comers. Even the descriptive term
champenoise,
or “champagne style,” used to describe sparkling wines crafted in the traditional style, is contested property.

In the first decade of the nineteenth century, the winemakers of the Champagne weren’t yet worried about the misuse of their name. Champagne was not yet big business, and in the mind of the consumers—a select and mostly royal crowd—it naturally came only from this small part of the world. Even so, when it came to sending champagne through closed ports, the singularly French origins of the wine already meant that there could be no disguising its source. Barbe-Nicole would have hesitated to gamble on a ruse that had such an obvious and singular flaw.

The cruel irony was
that by 1808, the wines of the Widow Clicquot were in great demand in Russia. It just goes to show that name recognition in the marketplace sometimes doesn’t square with the actual sales figures. She owed much of this success to Louis Bohne. Political tensions had eased, and Louis was back in Russia again, hell-bent on capturing the market. In fact, for the next four years, France and Russia would maintain an uneasy and always fragile peace in the midst of the ongoing European conflict. Now, at the beginning of this peace, Louis knew that he had helped talk Barbe-Nicole into her international strategy, and his business judgment was on the line. Besides, Louis was working on commission. Although he wrote that “a large part of Europe [was] ruined by the famine, the exigencies of occupation,” and that “the misery of the times is contrary to the effects of luxury,” he had persevered doggedly.

Already, both the name of their company and the limited quantities of wine that they managed to get into the country had excellent reputations. Increasingly, it was Barbe-Nicole’s name alone that the customers recognized. Ironically, the faceless Widow Clicquot was becoming a brand in Russia before she could even make her own decisions as an entrepreneur. Unlike the popularity of so many famous brands named after women in the years to come, this success owed nothing to conventional stereotypes of personal beauty or charm. The Russians can have had no idea that behind these wines was a hardheaded and diminutive woman of just thirty. As Louis told her, already in the most fashionable homes “there are rare advantages that give us a rising name brand among our competitors and which we need not wait for a general peace to realize…. [The] favorable reputation attached abroad to the name of Clicquot…is invariable and can be considered as the unique foundation of your establishment.” “Your establishment.” Already, it seemed, everyone understood who was at the heart of this commercial partnership.

In the autumn of 1808, for a marvelous few months, there was a reprieve. During those heady weeks, Barbe-Nicole could imagine what business might be like without all the obstacles. The blockades were lifted, and they scrambled to ship their wines. Fifty thousand bottles arrived safely in Saint Petersburg, and orders for more were pouring in. For a moment, it seemed the worst was over.

But by the spring of 1809, Barbe-Nicole knew that it was really just the beginning of another long haul. Suddenly, everything turned more ugly than anyone could have imagined, as economies across the continent unraveled. Trade came to a virtual standstill, and in letter after letter word came back from her travelers with the same report: “Everywhere…business is absolutely dead.” In July, even Louis admitted defeat. There was no point in staying in Russia. Europe was on the verge of financial collapse, and the French were largely to blame. In the midst of it, Napoléon only turned the screws tighter. In Krakow, their sales agent was threatened with arrest and given “an order to leave the city and the states of Austria.” Suddenly, no one was in the mood for luxuries like champagne. No one wanted anything to do with the French, either.

Barbe-Nicole now understood that the ports would stay closed for months, maybe even years. There would be no more sly exports. No amount of cunning or energy could get her wines safely to her international clients now—even if there had been clients waiting for them. And there were not. The business was in trouble. There was no question about it. In 1809, she managed to sell only forty thousand bottles of wine, many of them to markets no farther than France. She turned to the domestic market in hopes of staying in business, but few people at home had the money to indulge in champagne or expensive fine wines. Fewer still had cause to celebrate.