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

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

and while on the road, he did make—albeit by pure chance—the single most important discovery for the future of his family’s wine business. This discovery was named Louis Bohne.

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.

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.