The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It (P.S.)

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

No wine in the world brings to mind so many immediate associations as champagne. The pop of a cork and the bright sparkle of bubbles mean celebration and glamour and, more often than not, the distinct possibility of romance. It is the wine of weddings and New Year’s kisses. It is beautiful and delicate, and above all, it is a wine associated with women.

The poet Lord Byron famously proclaimed that lobster salad and champagne were the only things a woman should ever be seen eating.

I kind of don’t blame him, lol.

Champagne is the only wine that leaves a woman more beautiful after drinking it.

History credits a seventeenth-century blind monk with the now famous name of Dom Pierre Pérignon with having discovered the secret of champagne’s bubbles in the cellars of his hillside abbey,

Dom Pérignon was certainly a talented winemaker and probably one of the great tasters of winemaking history, but he did not discover how to capture the bubbles in a bottle of champagne. In fact, when they occurred naturally, he tried to get rid of them.

By forty, Barbe-Nicole was one of the wealthiest and most celebrated entrepreneurs in all of Europe and one of the first businesswomen in history to lead an international commercial empire.

And because of the Widow Clicquot, historians still claim that “no business in the world [has] been as much influenced by the female sex as that of champagne.”

Everywhere in the Champagne the roses come tumbling out of the sides of the vineyards still. Unfortunately, it’s hard to make romance out of the reason for this glorious summer profusion. None of the celebrated French lover’s passion here, it seems.

These roses are nothing more than the winemaker’s canary in the mine shaft, an early signal of impending disease and blight in a vineyard. They are planted because roses get sick with everything and usually before anything else in the garden.

Winemakers in the seventeenth century had a less charitable phrase for it. They called a bubbly vintage the devil’s wine.

He is supposed to have quipped to one of his sandal-shod brothers, “Come quickly! I am drinking the stars!”

It was a privileged life, but it was still life in a gilded cage. And think how astonishing it is that we know anything about the lives of these young women at all. Barbe-Nicole and her sister had learned from the time they were small girls studying catechism in their convent school that the only women with public reputations were prostitutes or queens. Even the two most famous women of Barbe-Nicole’s day—Marie Antoinette and Joséphine Bonaparte—were famous only because of their choice of husbands. It is probably not a coincidence that the public still thought of them both as whores.

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.

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.

The finest champagnes are celebrated for their small, slow bubbles, which rise with mesmerizing grace to the surface of the glass and leave a light and airy foam. This is because the older a champagne is, the smaller the bubbles become. Because only vintage champagnes are aged extensively, we naturally associate small bubbles with the finest-quality wines.

By the summer of 1811,

1811 - a note on timing

Champagne rarely improves with additional cellaring, and there is cause to celebrate the expert advice: Drink it promptly.

She is unlikely to have explained to Napoléon the symbolism of the comet insignia branded on the end of each of her corks in that year’s vintage, a comet said by those who worked the vineyards and the fields to prophesy the end of his empire. In the weeks and months that were to come, Napoléon must have remembered those days with the Ponsardins and the champagne of the young Widow Clicquot as the last taste of victory itself, for within three weeks, his meteoric career would be at an end, and Napoléon would find himself stripped of power and sent into a forced exile.

She was not just the first woman to build a commercial champagne house founded on new mercantilist principles; she was one of only a handful of entrepreneurs to do it at all. She wasn’t amazing just as a businesswoman. She was amazing at business. When we look at the names of the famous champagnes on our grocery store shelves, the so-called grandes marques, it should come as no surprise that these are the names of Barbe-Nicole’s nineteenth-century competitors.

About making champagne not just something for the rich and famous but something for ordinary middle-class people ready to celebrate little luxuries as wonderful and as simple as the beginning of a weekend. Barbe-Nicole had the same vision.

The truth is, champagne is great with pizza and a bubble bath.

I ask Eileen Crane which glasses she prefers for drinking champagne, and with a laugh she tells me that her sister has a collection of dozens of unique and mismatched champagne glasses, some modern and some antiques, that she uses at parties. Each guest chooses whatever strikes his or her fancy, and that, she says, is the best method.

Americans were beginning to clamor for bubbly by the 1820s, and as Charles Heidsieck put it, “There is no country where you can make a fortune so easily just by sending a product that pleases people and sells well.”

“Here I have my grandchildren and great-grandchildren around me,” she wrote to her cousin that year. “It is a reminder to me that I am not young and will be thinking about packing up soon and saying good-bye, which I shall do as late as possible.” She was as good as her word on that score.

Anne remembered a solemn childhood, raised “by sad parents and aged grandparents,” without any playmates her own age and, increasingly, in a house full of tensions.

Above all, she had seen a lot of life and more than her fair share of early death—her husband, a brother, a father, even two of her great-grandchildren in the space of a few years. Yet she still pored over her account books, still came alive again when Édouard told her of his plans for the company and its future.

I am going to tell you a secret…. You more than anyone resemble me, you who have such audacity. It is a precious quality that has been very useful to me in the course of my long life…to dare things before others…. I am called today the Grand Lady of Champagne! Look around you, this château, these unfaltering hills, I can be bolder than you realize. The world is in perpetual motion, and we must invent the things of tomorrow. One must go before others, be determined and exacting, and let your intelligence direct your life. Act with audacity. Perhaps you too will be famous…!!

one of the definitions of the word widow is still champagne. Yet the short entry also tells a larger story than it intends. The entry reads, “the widow: champagne. From ‘Veuve Clicquot,’ the name of a firm of wine merchants.”

But if our books and biographies tell only the personal stories that are richly documented in the archives, it is a strange history that emerges. People with interesting lives and inspiring characters have not always been kings and queens and famous poets. They have not always burned the midnight candle recording their intimate thoughts for posterity. Sometimes they were just too busy or too tired. Perhaps nowhere is this more likely than in the history of women in business. Barbe-Nicole—as exceptional as she was as a person—was not really an exception; she was one of hundreds and perhaps thousands of middle-class female entrepreneurs who found in the commercial world an expression of their talents and dreams. She was far more talented and successful than almost any one of them, of course. In that sense she was unique, and her story is singularly inspiring. But she was not alone.