The Widow Clicquot (11 page)

In the spring of 1810, the orders were once again a dismal trickle, and in July came the final blow. On the emperor’s orders, all export trade would require expensive government licenses, and banks throughout Europe began to fail at an alarming rate. There had been no word at all from Louis for months, and Barbe-Nicole was beginning to worry that something terrible had happened. Finally, a letter arrived. We can only imagine what went through Barbe-Nicole’s mind as she held the slender packet with its bright wax seal. Perhaps, she thought, Louis had once more saved them. Perhaps inside was news of stupendous orders or peace just on the horizon. Her hand hesitated a moment before she unfolded the sheets, and she read with devastating simplicity the only news he could send: “Business totally dead.”

Looking at the letter for a long while, she must have dreaded writing her reply. There was no easy way to reassure Louis, nothing she could say to buoy his spirits that he would believe. And there was one other thing that she would need to tell him. On July 10, the four-year contract that had kept Veuve Clicquot Fourneaux in business expired. It would not be renewed. Alexandre couldn’t see a future in this company, and he was taking the opportunity to walk away—with his half of the operating capital. The cycle of hope followed by crushing failure had taken its toll on all the partners at Veuve Clicquot Fourneaux. For the second time in her life, Barbe-Nicole found herself facing an uncertain future, and this time she really would be on her own.

F
or Barbe-Nicole—indeed, for the entire Ponsardin family and the wine industry in general—1810 was a year of great transitions. Barbe-Nicole had known that the contract with Alexandre would expire that summer, and the decision not to renew the partnership was no mystery. The continuing war with Great Britain and Napoléon’s Continental System were making export sales impossible, and profit margins were slender. She had known since spring that, soon, expensive licenses would be required for all shipments abroad.

Besides, Alexandre’s son Jérôme had now completed his commercial education, and Alexandre was understandably eager to set up his son in the trade. There was no reason to commit Jérôme to a long-term partnership in a failing family business with a young widow several years his senior—especially one who clearly wanted to run the family business herself.

Barbe-Nicole, it seems, had no intention of marrying again, although if she had, Jérôme Fourneaux might have been a convenient choice. Perhaps some small spark of romance or admiration had been ignited, for although Jérôme and his father had turned their energies to expanding their own family wine business—founded in 1734 by Alexandre’s grandfather under the name Forest-Fourneaux—the young man continued to help Barbe-Nicole with the finer points of winemaking in her first few years alone, despite the fact that she was now a competitor.

The family business to which Alexandre and Jérôme returned their attentions, now renamed simply Fourneaux and Son, never made either famous. If the direction of their company is any indication, they didn’t have the same competitive ambition that always characterized Barbe-Nicole as an entrepreneur. Still, both were talented winemakers, and the tradition of delightful champagne wines that they initiated continues to this day. In 1931, the company they had nurtured was bought out by a family of winemakers who would turn it into one of the world’s most prestigious estates. It is now known as Champagne Taittinger—thanks to Alexandre and Jérôme, the third oldest champagne house in existence.

That spring, when Barbe-Nicole’s days were filled with preparations for the necessary liquidation and with plans for her own future as a sole proprietor, there were also monumental changes for the Ponsardin family. Their star was on the rise. Her father, Nicolas, always a charming and politically savvy man, had been currying favor with Napoléon since the early years of the century, when Napoléon and Joséphine had stayed as guests at the Hôtel Ponsardin during the year of the first Clicquot family vintage.

Poor Joséphine—unable to produce an heir and a bit too free with her favors—had been since then unceremoniously dumped, but Nicolas’s reward for his hospitality and his zealous support of the new regime was to become the mayor of Reims, not by public election, as one might have expected of a former Jacobin revolutionary, but by the imperial decree of the emperor.

In the spring of 1810, even Barbe-Nicole was caught up in some of the excitement surrounding her father’s new position and Napoléon’s impending second marriage to the Austrian archduchess Marie Louise—niece to the ill-fated Marie Antoinette and, like her aunt before her, being sent to her future husband as so much checked baggage in a train of magnificent carriages from the east. Her destination was the Château de Compiègne, a grand royal palace some fifty miles northeast of Paris. The road passed very near to Reims. Barbe-Nicole certainly witnessed the arrival in the city of the pretty archduchess and her convoy. Living in the center of Reims, she would have found it hard to miss. But it was especially hard since her father, always a royalist at heart, had personally organized the extravagant celebrations to welcome her.

While more fashionable women like her sister were aflutter with talk of seeing the new empress and of the magnificence of her court, Barbe-Nicole had just one wish. She hoped that this new marriage to one of Napoléon’s most powerful sparring partners would buy them some peace. The “marriage of the Archduchess Louise is fixed for the 25 of March at Compiègne [and] she will pass our village,” she wrote to Louis Bohne. “If she can give us the peace it will be a great good for the people.”

Whatever her father’s personal feelings about Napoléon—and personal feelings don’t seem to have guided his political allegiances unduly—Barbe-Nicole by now hated the man. She had no patience with his wars any longer, and she and Louis referred to him in their letters simply as “the devil.” His open support for her competitor, Jean-Rémy Moët, undoubtedly played some small role in their antagonism.

Her feelings for the brazen emperor were probably not softened when she learned that Napoléon had been spreading his influence further in the vineyards of the Champagne. He awarded another competitor, Memmie Jacquesson, proprietor of Jacquesson and Sons in nearby Châlons-sur-Marne, with a gold medal intended to reflect the emperor’s personal appreciation of “the beauty and richness of their cellars.” Then, as an additional mark of his favor, Napoléon asked Jacquesson to supply the champagne for his wedding to Archduchess Marie Louise. It was discouraging. These were sales Barbe-Nicole hated to see go to a competitor—especially one who had been in business for just over a decade. In the luxury wine market, she was already learning that name recognition meant everything, and here was another newcomer nurturing a personal relationship with the most powerful man—and purchaser—in all of France.

The biggest change of all for Barbe-Nicole that year was the most obvious one: Against all the odds, she would soon be an independent woman running a well-funded international business. That fact alone makes her an exceptional woman in her era. A surprising number of women—widows especially—ran small companies in order to ensure their family’s economic survival, especially in traditionally feminine businesses like dressmaking or innkeeping. But in the entire century, only a handful of women in France owned businesses with the sort of capital that Barbe-Nicole commanded. She was already a pioneer, just by having taken these enormous chances.

On the last day of July, she opened her own new account ledger for the business that she would call, from that moment forward, Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin and Company. Her account book showed on the order of 60,000 bottles of wine in stocks, six dozen additional casks, 10,000 empty bottles, and nearly 125,000 corks. Her father-in-law, Philippe, still prepared to gamble on her ambition and talent, reinvested his 30,000 francs, maintaining a share in the company both were both determined to keep alive.

To hurry the liquidation and settlements, she began sending out announcements that summer to clients, asking for the prompt payment of outstanding accounts. She was anxious to settle the books. On some of these announcements, we see her elegant and carefully looped signature, reading simply: Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin. It is the same distinctive signature reprinted today on every bottle of the yellow label nonvintage champagne that bears her name.

In the cellar and
with the direction of the business, she had other new ideas and new plans as well, but they were initiatives she wanted to discuss with Louis Bohne when he returned from his travels. Louis was in love, and he had delayed beginning married life during his long years on the road for the Clicquot family. Now he was engaged to Miss Rheinwald, the daughter of a town councilman. There are no other details about this young woman who captured Louis’s heart. All we can guess about her is that, like Louis, she came from a German family. Louis planned to take several months off from work while the liquidation details were arranged. It would be an extended honeymoon, a chance to start a family for a man who had spent much of the past five years far from home.

Barbe-Nicole welcomed the opportunity to have Louis close at hand during the early months of her new solo leadership. The other salesmen would be back on the road immediately, bringing in new orders even as the final business of Veuve Clicquot Fourneaux and Company was resolved. Louis, however, would be able to advise, and she would be at leisure to talk through her plans with this reliable—and undeniably expert—employee, just as she had heard François do in that long summer before his death. A number of important decisions needed to be made that would shape the future of the business profoundly. If Barbe-Nicole had the advantage of seeing things with the fresh eyes of inexperience, she also had the sense to learn from those she trusted.

There was the question of her trademark, but that was simple enough, at least. During her partnership with Alexandre, they had burned the symbol of the anchor into the corks of the wines blended and bottled by the company. It was as close to a trademark as any champagne house had at the turn of the nineteenth century, when wine labels were still virtually unknown. Shipping cases and casks were often labeled with the company initials and with some information to identify the client and the type of wine to avoid things going astray on the crowded docks of wartime Europe, but the colorful marketing of bottles that we know today had not yet been invented.

At this time, once a bottle of wine was unpacked, only the cork and the color of the resin sealing wax around the collar of the bottle distinguished the wine of one house from another. The sealing wax collar, the so-called
goudron
, was often elaborate and pretty, but it was not particularly reliable as a way to distinguish the wines of one vintner from another. Moët colored his caps in brilliant greens flecked with gold or silver. But Philippe Clicquot used exactly the same color scheme. So did Barbe-Nicole after him. Marketing was in its infancy, and at a time when many brokers still purchased their bottled wines ready-made from a variety of local suppliers, few champagne houses or few of their clients thought of particular wines as the distinctive product of an individual company.

Apart from the colorful
goudron
, the only other way to identify a bottle of wine as coming from the cellars of the Widow Clicquot was the symbol branded on the cork. The family had first used the anchor as a company symbol just after her marriage, when Philippe and François started Clicquot-Muiron together, and she was determined to continue the tradition. Perhaps it reminded her of François’s presence in the company that they had dreamed of building together. Perhaps it was a nod to the export markets and the ocean trade that François had worked to open. From the beginning, it had always been used because it was the traditional symbol of hope. They had started using it when the future seemed promising, when they could look forward to a life together and to prosperous new directions. She would not give up on it now—and the symbol can still be found today on the labels of a bottle of the Widow’s famous bubbly.

Now at the helm of her own company, she had other, more thorny questions to tackle about work in the cellars and the direction of her business in a disastrous economy. With the intensification of the blockades and the unstable currency rates, it was a difficult time to export wine, and Barbe-Nicole could not afford a major financial setback. She was risking her own independence, and the company had been struggling for several years. She retrenched and diversified. Under her new direction, the company began selling more local red wines by the barrel on the domestic French market, rather than going to the unnecessary expense of bottling these wines for an international luxury market that in many cases she could not reach. The largest proportion of these wines was from the grapes raised on her own estates, sold to clients within a few hundred miles of Reims.

When she did export bottled wines, Barbe-Nicole also made a point of including an impressive selection of high-end vintages from other, more fashionable parts of France. The red wines from the Champagne, which had once rivaled the wines of Burgundy in their bouquet and delicacy, were no longer so highly reputed. The exceptions were wines from a handful of renowned villages in the Champagne, villages that most fortuitously included Bouzy, where it was now left to her to manage the Muiron vineyards that she and François had inherited. She could still remember spending the long hours of the early morning watching the crush in the coolness of the pressing room, and she knew that it was excellent land. Involvement in every aspect of the business was to be her hallmark, and the barrels from the Bouzy estate are likely to have been the first wines that Barbe-Nicole could boast of being crafted under her sole direction. By selling them directly to customers, she maximized her slender profits.

She also continued making champagne. The obstacles to international trade made an exclusive focus on sparkling wine impossible for a young broker still establishing her name, and she would have to be prepared for some proportion of her stocks to sit unsold in her cellars for months, perhaps even years. On those long summer nights before the harvest, when François and Louis had dreamed together of vast new markets in Great Britain or in Russia, Barbe-Nicole had been enchanted, and she still believed in their shared vision. Even as she turned to concrete sales in domestic markets, she kept her travelers seeking out new opportunities abroad and keeping up old contacts on the other side of closed borders.

Barbe-Nicole’s workday, in the cellars or at her desk, began at seven in the morning, and she rarely set aside her account books and letters until nine or ten in the evening. Running a family business required a staggering amount of work, and she prided herself on quickly and carefully answering the endless correspondence she received. This commitment came at a high personal cost. At some point during her first years of running the business with Alexandre, Barbe-Nicole sent her daughter, Clémentine, away to a convent boarding school in Paris. Since six or seven was the usual age for girls to be enrolled in convents, it is likely the loss of her daughter as a companion coincided with the founding of the joint company in 1806. She had already learned, like so many single mothers, the heartbreaking challenges of raising a child while running a business.

Sending Clémentine away to school in Paris had not been a coldhearted decision. Barbe-Nicole’s sister had been sent to school at the same age, and strange as it may seem to modern parents, who would no more send their young children away to a convent than leave them on the side of a busy street unattended, boarding school for young girls was normal. But that did not mean Barbe-Nicole didn’t miss her daughter. Her letters show that she was a devoted and pragmatic mother, determined to protect her daughter’s future and her happiness but also convinced that Mentine, as the girl was known in the family, had not inherited the same sharp intelligence of her mother or grandfather. Still, Barbe-Nicole knew that the nuns would look after Clémentine and that she would be taught to read and write. Clémentine surely learned, as her mother had done before her, the art of fine needlework and the Catholic catechism, and Barbe-Nicole could rely on her mother’s Paris cousins to keep an eye on the girl in the event of something unexpected. There was no doubt, however, about the life that Barbe-Nicole imagined for her daughter. It would not be a future in business. It would be the same life of quiet domesticity and affluent privilege that Barbe-Nicole had rejected.