The Widow Clicquot (27 page)

In France, a handful of women run wine estates
: Matasar, p. 2.

Today, in all of Europe, there is not a single woman who does both
: Interview, October 2007, Eileen Crane, President, Champagne Domaine Carneros, Napa, California.

An “industry in retreat” opened doors for new entrepreneurs
: Ibid.

Built in the 1750s on the site of the ancient estate of the monks of Saint-Pierre aux Monts de Châlons
: Promotional materials, Champagne Taittinger, available at www.taittinger.com.

“Any big glass is good for champagne”
: Hugh Johnston,
Wine
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), p. 71.

miniature versions of the V-shaped stemware
: Ibid., p. 63.

Barbe-Nicole today is credited with three achievements
: Matasar, p. 27.

her name was celebrated in some of the greatest nineteenth-century works
: Detail from Natalie MacLean, “The Merry Widows of Mousse,”
International Sommelier Guild,
3:63AJ (December 2003): 1–2, 1.

On the literary representations of the Widow Clicquot, see in particular Anton Chekhov’s “Champagne, A Wayfarer’s Story” and Alexander Pushkin’s
Eugene Onegin
, where he famously writes: “Of Veuve Clicquot or of Moët / the bless’d wine /…/ Its magic stream / no dearth of foolishness engendered / but also what a lot of jokes, and verse, / and arguments, and merry dreams!!” (st. xlv, ll. 1–14);
Eugene Onegin
, trans. Vladmir Nabokov (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 196. The champagne of the Widow Clicquot also appears in various works of twentieth-century literature, including, memorably, Ernest Hemingway’s
The Sun Also Rises
(ch. 7).

“It is cruel,” Louis wrote, “to have to refuse orders”
: Bernard de Vogüé,
Conquête pacifique de la Russie
, p. 18.

By winter, grain was impossible to come by in the markets
: Fiévet,
Madame Veuve Clicquot
: “In 1816 after the war, there were no cereals at the public markets…. Many of the peasants turned in their misery to vagrancy and robbery,” pp. 41–42.

“The old way, which involved knocking the bottles upside down to settle the sediment, used drugs and clarifiers”
: Tomes, p. 150.

“
You only have fifty thousand bottles ready
”: Fiévet,
Madame Veuve Clicquot
, p. 65.

“Great advance,” they whispered
: Quotations in this paragraph from Fiévet,
Madame Veuve Clicquot
, p. 66. A point reiterated by Kolleen M. Guy, “Drowning Her Sorrows: Widowhood and Entrepreneurship in the Champagne Industry,”
Business and Economic History
26, no. 2 (Winter 1997): 505–512: “In the early nineteenth century, it was believed that this kind of manipulation of the wine would not serve to speed up the process of removing the sediment and that it would only trouble the already volatile wines. Clicquot’s early experiments were met with ridicule and sarcasm by male contemporaries,” p. 508. See also Tomes, who records details of Barbe-Nicole “slipping quietly into the cellar day after day, while all the workmen were at dinner,” p. 154.

preliminary cellar experiments with siphons, “rigid tubes fitted with a tap”
: Jullien, p. 139.

What she and Antoine Müller discovered changed the way champagne is finished to this day
: Fiévet,
Madame Veuve Clicquot
: “The spirit and tenacity of a woman triumphed over these stubborn cellar workers, stuck in their routine. All the Champagne today has adopted the method of Madame Veuve Clicquot,” p. 68.
Henry Vizetelly, in his
History of Champagne, with Notes on the Other Sparkling Wines of France
(New York: Scribner & Welford, 1882), gives Müller credit for suggesting the idea to Barbe-Nicole: “Already in 1806…the bottles were placed on tables, like to-day, with their heads downward; each bottle being taken out of its hole, raised, in the air, and shaken with the hand, so as to cause the cream of tartar and the deposit it contained to fall upon the cork…. This lasted till 1818, when a man named Müller…suggested to her that the bottles should be left in the table whilst being shaken, and that the holes should be cut obliquely…. The trial was made, and every day, with a view of keeping this new process a secret, Müller and Madame Clicquot shut themselves up in the cellars, and shook the bottles unperceived,” pp. 161–162, n. 1.
Accounts of this sort led Matasar to observe: “There is disagreement regarding the degree of the Veuve Clicquot’s personal involvement in developing this process. Her detractors, including her winemaking contemporaries who dismissed her experimentation on the basis of her gender, give all the credit to Müller. Some, however, view her as the sole inventive genius. She surely instigated the research, encouraged and participated in developing the process, and can lay claim to it as the firm’s owner,” pp. 27–28.
Vizetelly suggests 1818 as the date when
remuage
was invented, although some recent sources propose 1816, including Crestin-Billet and Etienne.

wine aficionado Henry Vizetelly describes
remuage: Quotations here and in the following paragraph from Vizetelly, pp. 160–161.

“from which tragic instrument
”: Tomes, p. 159.

a move by the large commercial producers to mechanized rotation in crates known as
giropalettes: Interview, Champagne Cattier, January 19, 2007; see also Bruce Zoecklein, “A Review of
Méthode Champenoise
Production,” Virginia State University/Virginia Tech, Cooperative Extension Publication, Publication Number 463-017, December 2002, available at www.ext.vt.edu/pubs/viticulture/463-017/463-017.html.

expert cellar worker, it is said, can turn as many as fifty thousand bottles in a day
: Vizetelly, p. 161.

“We must wrack our brains to obtain as good a result”
: Quoted in Desbois-Thibault, p. 47.

“The adventure of Madame Clicquot,” wrote Jean-Rémy, “is infamous”
: Ibid., p. 50.

“sufficiently eloquent to show the rivalry that existed”
: Ibid., p. 49.

The climate of espionage aside, Jean-Rémy would not discover her secret
: There is some disagreement regarding how long Barbe-Nicole was able to keep
remuage
a company secret. Roderick Phillips claims it was a matter of only a few years and that the technique was widely used in the region by the 1820s; see Phillips, p. 243. However, all the evidence suggests that Jean-Rémy Moët—despite his enthusiasm for technological innovation in the champagne industry—didn’t begin using the technique until 1832, surely a curious situation if
remuage
was already widely used throughout the Champagne. On Moët’s use of
remuage
, see Desbois-Thibault, p. 49.

“It is only within the last fifty years that the trade in champagne has become important
”: Tomes, p. 74.

Barbe-Nicole was scraping by on sales of under 20,000
: Etienne, p. 277. In 1812, Moët sold approximately thirty-five thousand bottles; see Desbois-Thibault, p. 36.

exporting upward of 175,000 bottles a year
: Desbois-Thibault, p. 36; Crestin-Billet, p. 88.

CHAPTER TWELVE: THE WINE ARISTOCRATS

Two eligible bachelors were vying for the attentions of her daughter
: Chimay, pp. 31–33.

Marie’s husband, Florent Simon
: Florent Simon Andrieux (1761–1835) and Marie
née
Lasnier (1768–1842). The visits of Barbe-Nicole, Édouard, and her family to the Andrieux salon were recorded by Marie’s grandson Arthur Barbat de Bignicourt (1824–1888) in his
Un salon à Reims en 1832
(Reims: n.p., 1879).
In 1820, the two families became even more closely connected when the stepson of Barbe-Nicole’s sister, Clémentine Barrachin, a young man named Augustin (1797–1883), married one of the Andrieux daughters, Elisabeth (1799–1846). Augustin was the child of Jean-Nicolas Barrachin’s first wife, Charlotte Augustine,
née
Raux.
Florent Simon was mayor of Reims from 1828 to 1835, after the retirement of Nicolas Ponsardin from that office. Throughout the early nineteenth century, champagne dealers were well represented in city politics, with other notables including Barbe-Nicole’s distant relation Irénee Ruinart de Brimont (Champagne Ruinart, 1820–1827) and, later, Édouard Werlé (Champagne Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, 1852–1868). Details available at www.reims.unblog.fr/tag/generale.

“Don’t cry, Mentine,” her mother had told her only recently
: Gmeline, p. 20; Chimay, p. 31.

she had proposed the generous dowry of 100,000 francs
: Chimay, pp. 31–33.

“like cabbages in the market”
: Crestin-Billet, p. 24.

“All this marriage talk,” she wrote to Mademoiselle Gard
: Chimay, p. 31.

King Louis XVIII had reconfirmed his title
: Fiévet,
Madame Veuve Clicquot
, p. 47.

Barbe-Nicole “was infatuated”
: Chimay, p. 42.

“easy living for the time being, and opulence in the future”
: Ibid., p. 35.

“assisting at the balls of Marie Antoinette”
: Tomes, p. 95; Fiévet,
Madame Veuve Clicquot
, p. 115.

“a mandate of arrest to direct the taking of ‘Citizen Such-a-one’”
: Anonymous,
A Residence in France During the Years 1792, 1793, 1794, and 1795
, n.p.

her sister, the Countess de Marmande
: Various details on Louis de Chevigné’s family and childhood from Gmeline, pp. 21–25.

“obtaining noble titles was a shrewd marketing strategy”
: Kolleen Guy, “‘Oiling the Wheels of Social Life’: Myths and Marketing in Champagne during the Belle Epoque,”
French Historical Studies
22, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 211–239, 218.

“a mother with an only daughter”
: Chimay, p. 35.

“the less she will be able to refuse”
: Chimay, p. 35.

Clémentine, perhaps tired of this parade of suitors, for once insisted
: Éric Poindron, “Promenade et
Conte rémois
, en guise d’introduction, ou, tentative de nouvelle essai à la manière modeste des
Contes
de Louis de C[hevigné],” available at http://blog.france3.fr/cabinet-de-curiosites/tb.php?id=59083.

“I won’t make myself destitute”
: Chimay, pp. 32, 38.

plus free accommodation with her in the family home
: On conventional family arrangements in nineteenth-century France, see David I. Kertzer and Marzio Barbagli,
Family Life in Early Modern Times, 1500–1789
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); and Frederic Le Play,
La reforme sociale
(1872), reprinted in Catherine Bodard Silver, ed.,
On Family, Work and Social Change
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982).

“awaiting the rest of the inheritance—which shouldn’t take long”
: Chimay, p. 35.

the wedding was planned in Reims on the tenth of September
: A facsimile of the wedding invitation is reproduced in Diane de Maynard,
La descendance de Madame Clicquot-Ponsardin, preface de la Vicomtesse de Luppé
(Mayenne: Joseph Floch, 1975).

“Arrange as you like with Monsieur de Chevigné about the trousseau”
: Chimay, p. 36.

“Clémentine is no longer shy with her husband, she
tutoies
him”
: Gmeline, p. 23; Chimay, p. 37.

locker-room references from his friend Richard Castel
: Chimay, pp. 40–41.

“The Comte de Chevigné, who had not yet written his [erotic] fables
”: Barbat de Bignicourt,
Un salon à Reims en 1832
(1879), quoted in Eugène Dupont,
La vie rémoise
, ed. Jean-Yves Sureau, available at www.lavieremoise.free.fr.

In London, the Duchess of Devonshire
: See Amanda Forman,
Georgiana: Duchess of Devonshire
(New York: Random House, 1999).

the lowly sandwich was a sign of the times
: According to a contemporary travel account, the sandwich was invented at the gambling table by John Montagu, the fourth Earl of Sandwich (1718–1792); see Pierre Jean Grosley,
A Tour to London, or, New Observations on England and Its Inhabitants
(London: Lockyer Davis, 1772).

“a protest against bourgeois and capitalist modernity”
: E. J. Carter, “Breaking the Bank: Gambling Casinos, Finance Capitalism, and German Unification,”
Central European History
39 (2006): 185–213, 186.

Philippe Clicquot…died in the final months of 1819
: His death is recorded on October 23, 1819; see Lallemand,
Le Baron Ponsardin
.