The Widow Clicquot (14 page)

First, however, he would see Jean-Rémy. It must have annoyed Barbe-Nicole to no end. When Napoléon left the Ponsardin family home, he headed directly to Épernay, where he visited one last time with his old friend. Despite the champagne that they undoubtedly shared, it was a somber and serious occasion. Napoléon was too experienced in war not to understand the odds he faced.

The story goes that Jean-Rémy found his friend intently studying a map. Looking up to find Jean-Rémy, Napoléon quietly unpinned his own Legion of Honor, the small but ornate five-starred cross that signified noble rank in imperial France. Napoléon then pinned it on his friend’s coat, saying only: “If fate intervenes and dashes my hopes, I want at least to be able to reward you for your loyal service and steadfast courage, but above all for the excellent reputation you have achieved, both here and abroad, for the wines of France.” Napoléon was a wine lover to the end. And he was loyal to Jean-Rémy, as always.

Napoléon abdicated the throne
of France in early April, and the Russians were briefly in Reims again, celebrating the end of the war in boisterous spirits. Barbe-Nicole had reason to celebrate as well. Russian officers toasting the end of the long campaign toasted with her champagne. Everywhere in the city, “Russian officers…lifted the champagne glass to their lips. It was said even that many of them preferred the popping of the bottle of Rheims to the cannon of the Emperor.” After long years of war, the British were no less exuberant. Lord Byron wrote to his friend Thomas Moore in the second week of April, “We clareted and champagned till two.” Already, champagne was on its way to becoming another word for mass-culture celebration.

Barbe-Nicole was simply glad that the war would soon be over and she would soon be free to gratify the Russian love of fine French wines. “At last the time has come,” she said, “when, after the sufferings our town has known, we may breathe freely and hope for a general and permanent peace, and consequently for commercial activity which has stagnated for too long. Thank God I have been spared. My properties and cellars are intact, and I am ready to resume business with all the activity that recent changes will allow.”

That the Napoleonic Wars should have ended in the Champagne region is mere happenstance, but it was a pivotal moment in the history of this wine, a moment that forged its cultural identity. Champagne wine was already enjoyed as the drink of festivity. It had been since the earliest days of its history. But a hundred little obstacles had impeded its broad commercial appeal. For centuries, it had been the wine only of the wealthiest and most discerning of connoisseurs, and the total production in France at its prewar height had never been more than four hundred thousand bottles. Within decades of Napoléon’s defeat, it would multiply more than tenfold, to over five million.

However much Barbe-Nicole despised Napoléon, his support for the industry and nearly fifteen years of reforms, which had changed everything from the laws of Europe to the condition of roads throughout the empire, made a different future—and her own fame—possible. It was the events that took place that spring in the Champagne, the occasion for half a million soldiers and minor British lords to celebrate the end of an empire with sparkling wine, that transformed champagne into an international cultural phenomenon, rich with universal symbolism and meaning.

Still, when the Russian czar Alexander ordered provisions for a banquet meant to fete three hundred thousand troops at Camp Vertus, the champagne came from the cellars of Jean-Rémy. That even the czar favored her competitor must have been irritating. Perhaps this preference was what focused her energies on getting back to business immediately and recapturing her own share of the Russian market that she and Louis—and François before them—had worked so hard to open.

It would take time to work out the political settlements, but when the end of the war finally came, as she now knew it would, it would be a new beginning for her champagne enterprise. She seized the initiative. By the end of April, even before the peace was yet certain, she had opened her cellars and had returned to work, checking the long rows of casks to see how the vintage had fared, making adjustments and taking notes, and beginning the arduous process of disgorging some of the wines.

If the occupation of Reims had not been a boon, it had not been a disaster, either. “Thanks are due to Heaven,” she wrote. “I do not have any losses to regret, and I am too fair to grumble about expenses from which no one will be saved.” She sent her workmen back to the vineyards in earnest, all with an eye toward the future, when the trade bans on France would finally be lifted and she could begin shipping her wines again.

Barbe-Nicole was not one to wait passively on fortune, however. She had begun almost instantly planning a daring enterprise, the execution of which would prove to be the greatest gamble of her career. She was at the crossroads of her life, and she knew it. The moment the Bourbon kings of France were restored to the throne, and working in absolute secrecy, with only her trusted salesman, Louis, and their Russian distributor, Monsieur Boissonet, as her conspirators, Barbe-Nicole decided to run the blockades one final time, in advance of the formal restoration of international trade.

As she had discovered that spring, the Russians adored her sweeter, fortified champagnes, and if only she could get her wines there before any of her competitors, there was a nation waiting for its first legal taste of French champagne. It was risky and dangerous, and if she failed, this would be the end.

The stakes could not have been higher. It was a large shipment, and she was sending it without permission or security. She was breaking the law and breaking all the rules of common sense. The plan was to deliver several thousand bottles of champagne by chartered ship, first to the open port of Königsberg (present-day Kalingrad, Russia) and then, the instant the trade ban was lifted, immediately onward the short distance to Russia. If the cargo was discovered traveling without a license, it would be confiscated and destroyed—and much of that amazing vintage of 1811 would be lost forever.

Worse, if her local competitors were to learn of her venture, or if they happened to be plotting one of their own simultaneously, the result would be immediate ruin. Nothing would be more infuriating than Jean-Rémy getting the upper hand in Russia once again. As Barbe-Nicole knew, success depended not just on getting her wines to Russia but on getting them there first, weeks before other shipments could arrive, when hers would be the only French champagne available in the ports and markets.

The moment Napoléon abdicated, she began writing letters, trying to charter a ship in secret. In mid-April came the encouraging news from Louis that Monsieur Rondeaux, a shipping merchant in Rouen, could help her. There was a ship ready to load her wines and take them to Russia, if she could get them to Rouen quickly. In the event Russia was still inaccessible, they had devised elaborate contingency plans. The wines could surely be sold at Königsberg or sent on to other ports along the English Channel if needed. She had learned the lessons from Amsterdam well: Never again would she let wines go to waste in warehouses.

Louis would travel with the shipment. Her first plan had been to send six thousand bottles of wine. Then, at the last minute there were maddening delays. Although the foreign troops had left Reims and the wines could travel safely, there were few local men able to help with the cellar work after the long war. “You know,” she told Louis, “our wines must be properly cared for and rebottled before being shipped and since I have not enough capable workmen to complete this indispensable operation, I must delay deliveries.” Finally, when it came time to load the wines onto the wagon destined for Paris and then on to Rouen, the final count was 10,550 bottles of her finest champagne. The news had just arrived that the blockades on the Baltic ports had been lifted, although bottled French wines were still banned in Russia.

Still, she was sure that the Russians would welcome her wines. Soon, other brokers would also be sending shipments. But it might take them several weeks to arrange a ship, and she had a head start. It was a race for Russia. Jean-Rémy was already writing to Count Tolstoy, the grand marshal of the imperial palace in Saint Petersburg, requesting permission to send the czar thirty thousand bottles of sparkling champagne, and within weeks he would send several thousand bottles to Russia for the open market, simply on the chance they would pass customs unimpeded.

On May 20, Louis and the wines left Reims for Paris, on the way to Rouen and the seacoast. The anxiety was at fever pitch. There was no way of knowing if other competitors had come up with the same idea. Perhaps they were already too late. Perhaps the wines would be lost long before they ever reached Russia, victims of uncertain times and a long sea voyage, undertaken far too late in the warm spring season to make any winemaker confident.

Louis would be traveling for weeks with the wines, in harsh conditions, and in Paris he stopped to purchase provisions for the trip, staples like dried ham and biscuits, tea, and apples. He would also need to arrange for his own bed and personal comforts on the ship. Barbe-Nicole was sympathetic. Among the cases of wine, she had also slyly included a present for Louis—some things to feed his “gullet,” she told him. It was a hamper filled with small luxuries: one and a half dozen bottles of excellent red wine from nearby Cumières, half a dozen bottles of cognac to warm the chilly evenings, and a small, leather-bound copy of Miguel de Cervantes’s
Don Quixote,
the famous Spanish tale of an adventurous knight determined to fight even the most foolhardy battles. Given the risks they were taking and the recklessness of their own adventure, it was a witty present, just Barbe-Nicole’s sort of dry humor.

Finally, at eleven o’clock on the night of June 10, Louis and the shipment set sail on the
Zes Gebroeders,
under the command of Captain Cornelius. The crispness of the night air belied what Louis found belowdecks. The ship was infested with lice and vermin, and he was so anxious for the fate of the fragile and pressurized cases of wine rocking in the hold that he determined to sleep on rough nights with the cargo. It could hardly be worse. As Louis knew only too well, the bottles were prone to breakage, and they could shatter with a remarkable force, destroying an entire case at a time.

For the sleepless Louis, it was a long trip. For Barbe-Nicole back home in Reims, the nights and days were even longer. On July 3, nearly a month later, the
Zes Gebroeders
finally crept into the harbor of Königsberg, a Baltic seaport then in Prussian territory. It had been a rough and increasingly warm crossing, and it might already all be over for them. The wines might have burst. Or the changes in the temperature might have caused the wines to go cloudy and ropey. After years of war and terribly depressed sales, there was no margin of error for the company any longer.

The morning when the wines were unloaded dawned stiflingly hot, and Louis opened the first case with a heavy heart. Amazingly, the first bottles that he drew from the packing baskets were absolutely crystalline, and there had been no breakages. It was the same for the second case and the third. Their condition was perfect, “as strong as the wines of Hungary, as yellow as gold, and as sweet as nectar,” he wrote. Best of all, “Our ship is the first, in many years, to travel to the North, and from the port of Rouen, filled with the wine of the Champagne.”

Their secret ruse had succeeded. None of Barbe-Nicole’s competitors had guessed her plan, and the champagne made by the Widow Clicquot created a frenzied competition among purchasers within days of its arrival. Before Louis could have the shipment forwarded to the imperial city of Saint Petersburg—even before the cases were fully unloaded from the
Zes Gebroeders
—clients besieged him at his hotel, begging to be allowed to purchase just a few bottles. On the docks, wine merchants nearly came to blows as the stock apportioned to Königsberg dwindled. With the cunning business acumen that Barbe-Nicole so admired in him, Louis wrote playfully that he was now deliberately playing hard to get and asking prices that she never would have believed possible—an astonishing 5.5 francs a bottle—the equivalent of more than $100 and equal to what she paid her vineyard laborers for an entire week of their backbreaking work.

Learning of their triumph
in the dim light of her office, Barbe-Nicole might have brushed a lock of hair back from her cheek and let herself enjoy a slow, broad smile of satisfaction. In that moment, she must have thought about François and about the long summer days when they rode through the fields of the Champagne to inspect the small vineyards at Bouzy or when they simply stopped to look out over the hills in silence. Making this wine had been his dream, and here in front of her was the proof that her faith in that dream had not been wasted. Even Barbe-Nicole could not have dreamed what else was still to come. On this first evening of her success, when she was only just beginning to understand that she was on the verge of something big, something wonderful, she might have indulged her fancy for a moment. Then she put pen to paper, already planning the immediate departure of another shipment of her glorious champagne.

S
uccess brought with it new challenges and new opportunities—all of them risky and exhilarating. Like her father, Barbe-Nicole was not a passive idealist, and she was never more levelheaded than in moments of crisis. In an age of social unrest and economic uncertainty, Nicolas Ponsardin was a survivor. His daughter would be that and more.

The first shipment was a stunning victory, her first major coup in almost six years of running the company. It was making her a local celebrity. As word of her daring and foresight reached her competitors in Reims, there were whispers of astonishment and—what a pleasant change—even whispers of professional jealousy. Soon Louis wrote, tongue in cheek, with his fantasies of driving the competitors mad with envy. “I am bored of seeing them leave us in peace taking the money,” he wrote. “When the time is right…celebrity is the natural result, it is this that I am after for you; better to be envied than pitied; while they backbite, we will fill our pockets, and when we have skimmed the cream of the pot, we will laugh in the corner to watch them grimace in their dens and wring their hands…. You [can rest] secure…in the exclusive confidence of Russia [and] in your bank account.” Indeed, in a matter of weeks she had brought in the equivalent of over $1 million in sales.

Now, Louis could report that they had sold their entire stock of the first 10,550 bottles of the Widow Clicquot’s champagne. Some of it he had sold the moment he landed—just enough to recover the costs and make them a small profit, in case of disaster. The rest he had sent on to their distributor in Russia, Monsieur Boissonet, where the prices they commanded were even higher. In both markets, there was a buying frenzy. Barbe-Nicole wrote, breathlessly, “Great God! What a price! How novel! I am over the top with joy and satisfaction. What overwhelming happiness this change will pay out. The Heavens have showered me with blessings, after all the terrible moments I have passed. I owe you a thousand and thousand thanks.”

While this news of their financial success was fabulous, even more heartening were the rave reviews. Winemaking was her passion, and Barbe-Nicole knew that she had been a relentless and sometimes even meddlesome employer. She didn’t keep to her offices and leave her winemakers to craft the vintage. An unrepentant perfectionist, she had her hand in everything. Now, that vigilance had clearly paid dividends.

Louis reported from Königsberg that when people tasted Barbe-Nicole’s wines, the streets of the city buzzed. The Widow Clicquot’s 1811 vintage—the wine from the year of the comet—was extraordinary. “I am adored here,” Louis told her, “because my wines are adorable…what a spectacle.” Her champagnes were the toast when the king of Prussia celebrated his birthday, and Louis wrote to tell her that “two-thirds of the high society of Königsberg…are at your feet as a result of your nectar…. Of all the fine wines that have teased northern heads, none compare to Madame Clicquot’s 1811 cuvée. Delicious to taste, it is an assassin, and anyone who wants to make its acquaintance will become well attached to his chair, because after paying his respects to a bottle, he will go looking for crumbs under the tables.”

Louis wasn’t kidding when he said that people who drank her 1811 champagne were likely to find themselves under the table come dawn. Not only was it delicious, it was powerful. The rich, sugary grapes of that perfect harvest had created a strongly alcoholic wine, with an excellent
mousse
that made the corks come flying out with a pleasant and resounding pop. What those British scientists discovered at the end of the seventeenth century that made the production of champagne possible in the beginning was the simple fact that adding sugar increased
both
alcohol and fizz. During the harvest of 1811, nature needed no assistance, and the result was intoxicating.

In Saint Petersburg, the Widow Clicquot’s wine was an even greater sensation, if that were imaginable. It sold for higher prices than she ever could have dreamed. Those same aristocratic officers who had come to love her wine during the occupation of Reims were now prepared to buy her champagne at any price. Soon, Czar Alexander declared that he would drink nothing else. Everywhere one heard the name of the Widow Clicquot and praises of her divine champagne. Knowing that the Russian market was at their feet, Louis laughingly wrote a final letter from Königsberg to tell her that he was even now headed to the shops to buy wine for a farewell dinner. He had sold every last bottle, and he was on his way to Saint Petersburg, eager to take new advance orders. Before long, he wrote: “I have already in my portfolio [orders for] a new assault on your caves.” Barbe-Nicole was ready for them. She was ready—and then some.

What came after those first few moments of unimaginable pleasure, rereading Louis’s letter with news of her triumph, was a sickening sense of relief. The secret gamble she had taken was far, far bigger than anyone had known, and it was enough to keep even the most hardheaded businessman—or businesswoman—up at night in a panic. Now, it would make her success more stunning than her competitors could imagine.

Before she knew that her champagnes would command an astonishing 5.5 francs a bottle and could be sold from a hotel room—before she even knew that the wines had survived their perilous sea journey in the last days of a war that defined a generation—she had started making plans to send a second, larger shipment. More of that magical vintage of 1811, which those lucky enough to taste it agreed was nothing less than spectacular.

While Louis and the first shipment were still making their uncertain way to Königsberg in the tossing hull of the
Zes Gebroeders,
merchants in Reims had learned that the Russian czar had lifted the ban on bottled French wines. It had been a ban calculated to thwart Napoléon and his dreams of making champagne a distinctive French luxury. Now, Napoléon had been defeated, and all of Saint Petersburg was thirsting for a taste of champagne.

Word of the end of the ban had spread throughout the city’s commercial network with a feverish intensity. In the business offices and along the docks of the river, where local wines began the long, slow journey to Paris and the seacoast, all the talk was of the export trade—and of the astonishing prices champagne would bring as all of Europe celebrated the end of an agonizing war. Already cellar work was under way to prepare thousands of bottles for travel.

Barbe-Nicole quickly realized that she faced another agonizing decision. Within weeks, it would be impossible to charter a ship. Throughout France, merchants were rushing to get their products to the export market, and there would not be enough boats to satisfy them all. If Louis was successful and if her wines survived the voyage, there would soon be no way to get more cases to him—unless she acted immediately. The advantage of arriving first, she knew, would soon be lost. And it wasn’t a matter just of sales. It was a matter of market share. She did not want to sell just ten thousand bottles of wine. She wanted to conquer the entire market.

The risk of making plans to send the second shipment blind had meant that, should Louis fail in Königsberg, her financial ruin would be compounded terribly—perhaps hopelessly. She would have to make a bargain with a sea captain before she knew exactly how she would pay his bills. It took nerve and determination, but Barbe-Nicole saw that there was no real choice. She had not come this far to lose the first opportunity in years because her courage failed.

Thank goodness she had not flinched. When news reached her competitors that she had beat them all to the international market, when they began scrambling to find ships to carry their wines, she had—for the second glorious time—a head start. Already Monsieur Cléroult, captain of
La Bonne Intention,
was waiting for her in Rouen, ready to deliver another 12,780 bottles of that legendary vintage of 1811. The sea journey would still be treacherous for these delicate wines. This time, no one would sail with them.

Now, her greatest enemy was not a grueling wartime economic climate. It was the summer weather. Extreme temperatures—either hot or cold—would ruin her wines, and there were only two times during the year when a champagne dealer could reliably make shipments. Transporting bottles of champagne in the summer heat was a sure way to end up with shattered glass. Frozen wines fared no better. But during the spring and fall, weather permitting, the wines could be sent by barge, along the broad river that runs through the Champagne region. This second midsummer shipment was being sent much too late.

Even in season, there were perennial problems with the wines arriving in good shape. Barbe-Nicole did not have the advantages of contemporary winemaking technologies or modern transportation. Her bottled sparkling wines had to survive a bumpy and slow journey, packaged only in woven baskets and wooden crates, along the roads and docks of Europe, unprotected from delays, temperature variations, and robbery. Cask wines transported in barrels—barrels that were easy to tap and reseal on the road—were subject to the additional hazards of adulteration, when thirsty handlers siphoned off a bit of the product to ease the journey and replaced the missing volume with water. Or worse.

Amazingly, however, the second shipment also survived. It was victory following on victory. Writing to her cousin Jennie, who was still struggling with wartime shortages in Paris, Barbe-Nicole was reeling from how quickly everything had changed in Reims. “If my business continues as it has gone since the invasion of the allies in France, if my daughter is someday married,” she wrote in November, “I will be able to live, if not as one of the rich, at least in affluence, and then my house will always be a safe port, where you can retire, without depending on anyone. We wait together for what divine Providence has planned for us. So we go day by day and do not despair. You remember how last year at this time I was desolate!…I didn’t have any hope of doing anything [and] the advance of the Russians over the Rhine was the last straw. And now, out of all these misfortunes came the good business I have had, and I dare to hope for more. Maybe for the rest you also have a dose of good luck coming. We can’t always be unlucky, in my experience. And so, my dear friend: courage, patience, and resignation.”

In truth, her luck was not yet finished. Not even close. These two daring shipments were to make her one of the most famous women in Europe and her wine one of the most highly prized commodities of the nineteenth century. As Louis told her, it was a success born out of “your judicious manner of operating, your excellent wine, and the marvelous similarity of our ideas, which produced the most splendid unity and action and execution—we did it well, and I give a million thanks to the bounty of the divine Providence who saw fit to make me one of his instruments in your future well-being—and no trials in the world would stop me from doing it again, to justify the unlimited confidence you have placed in me, and which has produced such happy results. Certainly you merit all the glory possible after all your misfortunes, your perseverance, and your obvious talents.” As Louis recognized, it wasn’t the sales figures or the excellent quality of her wines alone that would finally turn her into a business legend. It was the astonishing ruse that got her champagnes to Russia first. The secret advance shipments were a breathtaking one-two knockout punch that turned the Widow Clicquot into a luxury brand name in one of the world’s largest—and most fashionable—markets.

Ironically, the celebrity that followed had little to do with Barbe-Nicole the private woman. Like the poet Lord Byron, whose witty travel adventure
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
became the runaway best seller of 1812, she could say in all truth that she awoke one morning to find herself famous. Unlike that rakish devil-may-care young lord, however, few people who repeated the name of the Widow Clicquot in the first years of her meteoric rise on the world stage knew the story of the woman behind the company. Perhaps this curious manifestation of the public anonymity that should have been her destiny—the same pragmatic kind of self-effacement signaled by her decision to wear the black widow’s weeds permanently—was part of the reason a woman-owned business was able to flourish in an increasingly conservative postwar Europe.

At the same time, it is also worth considering, even if only in passing, what it was about the first few decades of the nineteenth century that was so special. It was during these years that the champagne industry, like so many other industries in postrevolutionary Europe, went from being the craft of rural artisans to big business. The family-run wine brokerages of the late eighteenth century were on the brink of becoming large commercial companies—or they were on the brink of disappearing. A generation earlier, the actual winemaking had been in the hands of the rural growers, who raised the grapes, made the wines, and, especially with champagne, bottled them. François had been part of the small group of wine distributors who cautiously began to take this last stage of the winemaking process out of the hands of the farmers, and he had occasion to wonder sometimes if the new risks were worth the increased profits. What François had begun, Barbe-Nicole had embraced with a singular sense of mission, and it was because of this that she was poised to become an important figure in the evolution of champagne.

Champagne, after all, was not going to be an artisan family affair for long: The future was in a manufacturing model of doing business. A boom was coming in the champagne industry, and those who benefited from it were the entrepreneurs who were starting to take control of the production process. Barbe-Nicole, who had always found pleasure in watching the harvest and learning the cellar work, was at the vanguard of this movement. She not only bottled the vast proportion of her own wines but she committed herself to blending and aging them. Thinking like the daughter of a manufacturer, she hounded her suppliers mercilessly. In the company archives in Reims, there are pages and pages of scolding correspondence where she writes about the shape of the bottles she needed delivered or the quality of the corks she wanted cut. The manufacturers soon learned that she would come to complain in person if it was the only way to get what she required. Before long, she would also begin buying new vineyards, in order to supply more of her own grapes.