The Widow Clicquot (8 page)

As with cask wines, the process of clearing champagne could range from the time-consuming to the downright tedious. After the bottles had rested on their sides for a year in the cellars, developing their sparkle, someone had to find a way to get rid of the debris trapped inside. The easiest way was to rely on gravity. The process was known as
transvasage
, but we can think of it as racking wines in the bottle. The cellar workers could just pour the wine from one bottle to another, leaving the debris behind. It worked in theory, but the sparkle of the wine wasn’t exactly improved by all this pouring.

The other way to dispel the debris was called
dégorgement
. Nineteenth-century wine manuals make disgorging sound pretty arduous. The cellar worker had to invert the bottle and pop the cork off just long enough to let a bit of the wine and all of the debris come shooting out—but not a moment longer. The trick was in having a good eye to track the sediment and an excellent thumb, capable of stopping up the bottle fast, before all the wine poured onto the floor in an expensive puddle. Working bottle by bottle, disgorging champagne was a time-consuming and expensive process. Even with modern advances in winemaking, it is part of the reason champagne continues to command luxury prices.

Still, it would be foolhardy to wish for too easy a solution to this sediment—or to wish for too much cheap champagne. Ironically, experts today recognize that this irritating debris is actually crucial to the birth of great sparkling wine. During the year or more that the bottles are resting in the cellars, the fermentation is creating more than just alcohol and bubbles. The yeast cells also break down in the chemical process called “autolysis.” Autolysis begins when wine is left in contact with the enzymes naturally produced during the decomposition process—in other words, when a wine is aged while containing the dead yeast cells. Winemakers elegantly call it “aging on the lees” or, in French,
sur lies
. The important thing to know is that the result is a happy one, giving fine champagne its characteristic rich, nutty flavors.

Now that the Clicquots
were bottling their own wines, there was also the chance to experiment with blending the wines, creating a “marriage” of flavors. Making great wine—and making great champagne in particular—depended on skillful blending. Dom Pérignon may not have invented champagne, but he was a pioneer in the art of blending. World-class champagne today is often a carefully selected mixture of as many as forty different growths, or
crus,
with grapes from different varieties and grown in different parts of the region.

Barbe-Nicole already knew that blending depended on
terroir
. She had watched enough harvests and tasted enough of the juice to know that each grape was the product of the soil that had produced it. In winemaking, experts talk of the indefinable essence of
terroir
, the gift that the land gives to the grape and that creates the potential range of tastes and aromas it can express. Just as the minerals of the Dead Sea are thought to have inexplicable healing qualities for the sick and the infirm, so the soil of a great vineyard—from the composition of its clay and chalk to the wild plants that prosper in it—is spoken of reverently and in ways that can make it seem magical.

In the twenty-first century, scientists have undertaken chemical analysis of the vineyards of the Champagne and have confirmed their special properties. The chalky and acidic soil of the region develops the aroma of the fruit, and its northern location prevents the grapes from developing too many natural sugars. The moist springs and dry summers slowly deprive the grapes of water, allowing them to ripen gradually, without being overshadowed by foliage. The chalk in the soil lets the ground retain water in the winter and release it slowly in the dry summer periods.

Just as serving champagne at the right temperature—around 45°F or 7°C, best achieved by chilling the bottle in a mixture of ice and water for half an hour—will open up the flavors of the wine, so the right conditions in the vineyard will bring out the most striking qualities in the grape. It is because these conditions are so subtle and complex, depending on a combination of the right amount of rain and sun, at the right moments, in the right soil, that vintage years are rare. Vintage years are exceptional harvests, years when the winemaker does not need to rely on fine reserve wines, saved from a previous harvest, to round out the blending.

Perhaps above all, Barbe-Nicole and François soon learned that bottling wine—and especially the sparkling pink champagne that proved so popular—was a risky business. Breakage rates could be ruinous. In a hot summer, eighteenth-century vintners sometimes lost as much as 90 percent of their champagne stocks when the pressurized contents of the sparkling wine exploded. Unlucky vintners could awaken to discover their storerooms, filled with the wine on which they had staked their future, flooded with wine and broken glass.

Local growers like the Cattier family in Chigny-la-Montagne must have still remembered the legend of Allart de Maisonneuve’s staggering losses in the sweltering summer of 1747, when his cellars were so toxic with the fumes of spilled wine that no one could enter them for months. Now, vintners again were faced with cellars throughout the Champagne awash in pools of ruined wine. The heat wave that began in 1802 would grip France for three consecutive summers. What could be saved from the wreckage was turned into
vin de casse
—breakage wine—but it had to be sold at rock-bottom prices and had little appeal.

They soon realized that the quality of the bottles was part of the problem. French glassmaking was often a shoddy business, and ordering bottles could be maddening. Staring down at misshapen and flawed glasswork, Barbe-Nicole and François must sometimes have despaired. If they put champagne in these bottles, there would be little left to sell come autumn. Yet glass bottles were absolutely essential to the manufacture of champagne.

The shapes of the bottles created more obstacles. It wouldn’t be until 1811 that someone would invent a machine for molding commercial glassware. Until then, wine bottles were blown by hand. The result was bottles with inconsistent shapes and sizes. Customers might not have cared, but François had reason to worry when he saw them. In a cellar, bottles had to be stacked on top of one another, and uneven bottles did not stack steadily. Collapsed rows of ruined champagne were distressingly common, even when the cellar workers tried to stabilize the rows with wooden slats. When the bottles came with different-size openings, corking them became a tedious and time-consuming business as well. Sometimes, if the lip at the mouth of the bottle was wrong, it was impossible to tie the cork in place securely with string. Making a profit was difficult enough after a decade of war, but they were learning that winemaking had its own dangers.

These were simply the risks that came as a matter of course with the business of bottling wines. Barbe-Nicole and François still needed to learn whether he could blend wines good enough to justify the premium prices they would have to charge. Thanks to his father’s first forays into the wine trade in the 1770s, François had been trained as a boy in tasting wines and evaluating their potential. But it would turn out that Barbe-Nicole was the one with the gift for blending wines.

Perhaps she was what wine experts today sometimes call a “supertaster”—someone gifted with a higher proportion of taste buds on her tongue than the rest of us. Women are more likely to be supertasters than men. Even more than this, however, it was her nose that mattered. While we can experience only five tastes—sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and the elusive “other” taste known as
umami
—we can recognize over a thousand smells.

All wine has a distinct bouquet, which chemists tell us is the result of a dizzying array of volatile compounds. These compounds are volatile because they react—with one another and with the air—and their aromas are largely responsible for the experience of taste we have when we drink a glass of wine. Lactones can be nutty, while phenols can be spicy. Sulfur gives a cool summer’s glass of
sauvignon blanc
in the backyard its grassy notes. In his book
Molecular Gastronomy
, gourmet and scientist Hervé This explains in fascinating detail how this experience is intensified when white wines are aged “on the lees”—aged resting in the dead yeast cells, which have the highest sulfur concentrations. And as Eileen Crane, one of California’s master winemakers and president of Napa’s Domaine Carneros, explained to me one warm autumn afternoon, with champagne these aromas are doubly important. The popping bubbles in a glass of champagne are an unrivaled aroma delivery system, bringing a thousand scents and associations to our minds, all of them elegant and gleeful, before our first sip.

Barbe-Nicole probably knew none of this. Given the state of science in the beginning of the nineteenth century, she could have no conception of how sulfur molecules reacted with the enzymes in our saliva to create the experience of a great wine. But she did have the gift of blending great wines. While the science is amazing, there is nothing in winemaking that substitutes for the instincts of a connoisseur.

Perhaps the science of winemaking and the mysteries of craft were on Barbe-Nicole’s mind the following year as she stood in the cavernous reception rooms of the Hôtel Ponsardin. She was proud, but she was also anxious. Already, row upon row of their sparkling wines were waiting in the cellars, slowly concentrating their small, delicate bubbles. But the tenuous peace, they now knew, had not lasted. The deal brokered with the British at Amiens was unraveling. It had been just the briefest reprieve—a mere fourteen months. She watched as her father worked the room, dreaming again his old aristocratic dreams. Clémentine and Thérèse swayed elegantly in their rustling dresses. At the center of the crowd stood a wiry man with sharp eyes. Napoléon had come to study the local wine industry—and he was staying for a few days as the guest of the Ponsardin family.

Perhaps on this visit, when he was feted at Reims with opulence and ceremony, Napoléon first tasted the Clicquot champagne, although it was not yet memorable. The young couple was working hard to make the winery a success, but theirs did not have the appeal of the more celebrated cellars at Moët. There would have been no reason yet for a great statesman to seek it out, but there would be. Before the decade was out, the Clicquot champagne and the soon-to-be-widowed young woman who was left to produce it would take Europe by storm.

B
y 1804, François had changed the direction of the family wine business emphatically. Sales in France were now a mere 7 percent of their sales, down from nearly 25 percent only a few years before. With the renewed hostilities with Great Britain, orders came largely from Prussia and Austria or not at all. And, at the beginning, things looked promising. At the end of 1803, when their first house wines were available to customers, total orders were up modestly, and Louis Bohne had managed to find buyers among the dukes and princes of these eastern empires.

Once again riding a wave of enthusiasm, François was planning to expand the market even farther to the east. Early that summer, the ruddy and good-natured Louis visited François and Barbe-Nicole in Reims, and all the talk was about Russia. Louis was going to open the market for them, and he was already preparing to set off on his third voyage for the company. The trip would last well over a year and would take him to the frontiers of the Russian Empire, in search of new clients for their wines.

Barbe-Nicole listened to it all from the sidelines, perhaps with their five-year-old daughter, Clémentine, growing drowsy at her knee on those summer evenings. She and François were learning the winemaking business together, and she wished for the success of these new prospects, which seemed just on the horizon, with a passion equal to his own. When at last Louis set off in July for Russia, he went with her good wishes and all her hopes as well. Within weeks, they would have his first letters and soon, they hoped, news of astonishing sales.

The news, when it arrived, was crushing. For François, it must have been a terrible disappointment and an embarrassment as well. He already had the bungled London adventure to live down. Now it was clear that Russia would be a disaster, too. Writing from Saint Petersburg in the first days of October, Louis discovered that they had misjudged the market: “The excess of luxury [here] means that the broker, after all the costs are deducted, gains nothing and in a bad year is lost.” From Moscow, the news was worse. “The commerce in this place is excessively rotten and bad faith is the order of the day,” Louis wrote, adding bitterly, “Foreign companies are seen as nanny goats ready for milking.” Even if they got orders, he doubted they would ever get paid.

By the winter of 1805, François was undoubtedly depressed. The Russian numbers were miserable, accounting for just a small percentage of their sales. With Louis in Russia, moreover, they had lost ground in Germany. Then there was the war, which once again seemed endless and futile. The conflict with Great Britain, which had resumed in the summer of 1803, was pulling in more combatants, and some days it was difficult to know which foreign markets would stay open and which would close. The climate for international trade got worse with every passing week, with word of new battles and new blockades.

That winter was the sorry prelude to the period that historians talk about as the war of the Third Coalition—when Russia, Austria, and Sweden eventually joined Great Britain in a loose alliance against France. Napoléon wasn’t doing anything to turn down the political heat. In December, he had crowned himself emperor—not in the cathedral of Reims, like the kings of France since time immemorial, but in Paris. Now he was amassing troops for a planned invasion of England, perhaps in the spring. At the moment, nothing was certain, but an intensification of the war already seemed inevitable in the coming months, and there was no reason to expect a sudden improvement in their affairs. Barbe-Nicole was powerless, left to spend quiet afternoons in her sitting room, bent over some piece of fine needlework or glancing distractedly at a new novel sent from Paris, worrying about the future and what it might bring.

When the spring orders arrived in Reims, they should have raised François’s spirits. They were far better than expected. During those few months, they would ship over seventy-five thousand bottles of wine—more than their entire sales in 1804. Russia, not yet drawn into the simmering conflict, would account for an astonishing third of their sales. It had been a year of excruciating ups and downs, when they had begun to doubt in themselves and in the wisdom of François’s dreams of an international marketplace for their wines. Now, they should have been celebrating this small victory. It was a sign that they were doing something right. But François remained discouraged and dejected.

When the summer arrived, it was wet. They had seen enough summers to know that it was already too late to hope for anything from the harvest. It would be another failure. François, thwarted at every turn, could only watch the vineyards with despair, calculating over and over what this would mean in losses for the company, in new obstacles that he must have doubted his own ability to overcome. He had tried to reinvent the company he had inherited from his father, and he had been given all the advantages—sufficient capital, excellent training, an enviable list of international clients, contacts ready to do business with him, even a brief but important period of peace in which to build the company.

What was the result of it all? He had disappointed. His father surely warned him against staking the future on the distant and unsettled Russian market. Already by now, Napoléon and the czar, Alexander I, were at loggerheads, and by September it was open hostility. The future of international commerce was dark. Perhaps giving up the textile business had been a mistake. Perhaps bottling wines had been too great a risk. For those looking at the wet, muddy fields and at the useless grapes rotting on the vines, the worries were everywhere.

Then, sometime in early October, when the low vineyards sloping away from the mountain of Reims were again silent in the early hours of dawn, in the gloomy aftermath of that harvest, François—if the family version of events is true—must have found himself exhausted and consumed by a kind of frantic anxiety. As he sank quickly and deeply into a darker depression, the family began to worry in earnest.

The public story was that François had contracted an infectious fever. Like so many in Europe, they had lived with fears of the epidemic since the beginning of Napoléon’s wars, knowing that the disease was kept alive in the crowded and unhealthy conditions at the camps. In the nineteenth century, it was an easy death to imagine—far too easy and familiar. For two weeks, François suffered with what his doctors called simply putrid or malignant fever. Later generations would know the disease as typhoid. Only when the vomiting and chills began in the second week would Barbe-Nicole have understood the terrible truth about his illness. The resolute look of the doctor, when he came, must have told her what she already suspected. As François struggled to breathe, the ringing in his ears would have grown louder, and soon he was coughing blood, tormented by headaches. The telltale black spots soon covered his body, turning even his tongue to a black crust of infection, and everywhere, he ached. Barbe-Nicole could only watch his private agony.

For days, she suffered with him, surely sick with worry for the health of her little girl. She must have nursed the secret hope that he would be one of the lucky ones—one of the survivors. These hopes would soon be dashed. On October 23, after days of terrible torments, she could only feel relief to hear that François was dead. Three days later, numb with grief and horror, the Widow Clicquot buried her husband, after a funeral mass in the soaring Gothic cathedral of Notre-Dame de Reims. At twenty-seven, Barbe-Nicole would now need to begin imagining a future alone.

This, at least, is
the usual story of François’s death. If he was a victim of malignant fever, the doctor who treated him during his illness necessarily understood little about the actual nature of the infection. Typhoid remained a fearsome illness throughout much of the nineteenth century, and there was nothing reliable to be done for the patient unfortunate enough to contract it. If the doctor who tended to the Clicquot family during this sudden illness had been trained locally, at the medical university in Reims, he must have been struck by a cruel irony, however. The antiseptic properties of champagne were the subject of heated controversy among doctors and scientists in the region. Sparkling wine was thought to prevent—perhaps even to cure—the very illness that had struck down François Clicquot before the age of thirty.

In an eighteenth-century pamphlet entitled
Question Agitated in the School of the Faculty of Medicine at Reims…on the Use of Sparkling Champagne Against Putrid Fevers and Other Maladies of the Same Nature
(1778), Jean-Claude Navier cut to the heart of the controversy. Champagne was thought to possess particular curative powers. “It contains,” Dr. Navier wrote, “…a particular principle, which the Chemists call Gas or air fixed, a principle that characterizes it essentially, a principle recognized today as the most powerful antiseptic that there is in nature.”

Because Dr. Navier was a champagne insider, we might be forgiven for wondering if this was just another of the local marketing efforts, like the one that invented the legend of Dom Pérignon sixty years later. After all, Dr. Navier’s brother-in-law was none other than Jean-Rémy Moët, a competitor in the wine business. But the unlikely assertions that champagne could cure fever were apparently widespread.

The idea was not even simply a passing medical fashion, not just one of those unaccountable and gruesome things doctors did at the dawn of the nineteenth century. For more than two hundred years, it had been conventional wisdom that the fermentation of wine was comparable to infections in the blood, leading to harebrained (but quite appealing) experiments with wine cures. Doctors still believed it as late as 1870, when Charles Tovey wrote, in a book called
Champagne: Its History, Properties, and Manufactures
: “Champagne, if pure, is one of the safest wines that can be drunk. In typhoid fevers, in weakness, in debility, when there is a deficiency of the vital powers, there is nothing which can take its place; it enables the system to resist the attacks of intermittent and malignant fever.”

To think that a bottle of his own sparkling wine might have saved François! Or perhaps the doctor who attended him tried this champagne cure but found his illness too far progressed to be cured, even by bubbly of the best kind. Certainly, champagne would have been a more welcome treatment than the other nineteenth-century remedies for infectious fever—bloodletting and enemas—and one hopes that François’s final moments were soothed with a healthy medicinal dose of the Clicquot sparkling rosé that he and Barbe-Nicole had found such pleasure in crafting.

Barbe-Nicole knew that Philippe was broken by the death of his son. The intensity of her own grief was nothing compared with the depression that gripped her father-in-law. He could speak of little besides his despair, even in the most routine business correspondence. “Nothing,” he wrote in one of his letters, “can ever assuage the deep sorrow I feel. My loss is brought back to me every moment. Old age and increasing infirmity…have made me determined to retire and rest and have necessitated an interval between life and death.” Past caring, Philippe settled down to wait and die.

Perhaps Barbe-Nicole considered doing the same when she heard the horrifying rumors circulating in Reims in the weeks after her husband’s death. There is another story of how François died. People whispered that he had committed suicide. The scene is almost too terrible to imagine: François lying white and motionless in cool, bloody bathwater, perhaps, after the famous 1794 image of the slain revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat that hangs today in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Reims. There is the scream of the servant finding François or perhaps just the dull shock of his father, Philippe, after seeing the knife that had dropped from his son’s hand, the slow dawning of understanding, the terrible conviction of what it meant for his eternal soul—and, above all, the desperate hope of finding a doctor who would keep their secret, so François could be buried in sacred Catholic ground.

There is no direct evidence that the gossip was true. It may have been nothing more than vicious rumor or a confused sense of his other symptoms. The first sign of typhoid would have been a sense of hopelessness, after all. The very name
typhoid
comes from the Greek word for “smoke” and was chosen because mental confusion, irrational anxiety, and unspecified despair are the disease’s earliest and most persistent signs. As eighteenth-century readers of William Buchan’s
The Domestic Medicine
(1797) were told: “The malignant fever is generally preceded by a remarkable weakness…. This is sometimes so great that the patient can scarcely walk, or even sit upright, without being in danger of fainting away. His mind too is greatly dejected; he sighs, and is full of dreadful apprehensions.”

But the story might equally have been true. There is no doubt that François was down that autumn. The business had been struggling. There had also been hints all along that François was prone to bouts of depression and mania that had less obvious causes. People described him sometimes as a man of irrepressible energies and enthusiasm. He loved big plans and big ideas, and he lived with an almost frantic exuberance. The other side of François seems to have been darker.

If Barbe-Nicole ever spoke of it, the letters have not survived. Some of Philippe’s early correspondence with his son, however, hints that François’s tendency toward “gloom” worried his father. In one letter, written on Christmas Day 1793, Philippe urged his son, “Do not abandon yourself to a sort of melancholy gloom that can harm you and retard the development of your faculties and prolong the weakness of your temperament. Your happiness, your existence is all that makes mine precious.” We hear the resonance of a father worried about his son’s mental health.

Whatever the truth—and one hopes it was fever that took François—Barbe-Nicole is sure to have resented the rumored cause of his suicide: business failure. Local reports circulated that in those first years of running the family business, François was busy driving the company into the ground. He had developed a new—and, it was said, fundamentally flawed—business strategy. He had committed himself to a risky commercial approach to selling wines and was failing. As one nineteenth-century historian tells the story, “While big with this magnificent project, death came and cut short the career of…[François] Clicquot, the former husband of the Widow Clicquot Ponsardin. Common rumor at Rheims tells a different story of the exit of this notable personage, saying that he cut his throat in despair of the success of the ‘entirely different commercial system’ with which his biographer credits him.”