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July 26 - August 2, 2022
It was the story of a woman raised to be a wife and mother, left widowed before thirty with a small child, with no training and little experience of the world, who grasped firmly at the reins of her own destiny and, through sheer determination and talent, transformed a fledgling family wine trade into one of the great champagne houses of the world.
The poet Lord Byron famously proclaimed that lobster salad and champagne were the only things a woman should ever be seen eating.
Champagne is the only wine that leaves a woman more beautiful after drinking it.
According to legend, the shallow goblet-style champagne glasses known as coupes were modeled after this lady’s much admired breasts. In the twentieth century, it was the perfect wine with little black dresses, and it still evokes Jazz Age flappers and the elegance of old Humphrey Bogart films.
Even more shocking, champagne wasn’t discovered by the French. It was the British who first learned the secret of making wine sparkle and first launched the commercial trade in champagne wine with bubbles.
Don't tell the French
The legend of Dom Pérignon was manufactured only in the late nineteenth century—and eventually registered by the estates of Moët and Chandon as a trademark.
champagne might have faded into obscurity, suffering the same fate as its unfortunate counterpart sekt—another sparkling wine now all but forgotten except among connoisseurs.
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.
She was a mass of contradictions, but her genius as a businesswoman was in refusing to see her options as black and white. Her success was not in bucking the system, but neither did she slavishly follow convention. As the daughter of a local politician with a cunning instinct for survival even in the midst of an ugly revolution, she had a talent for seeing the opportunities that existed in moments of cultural and economic instability, in the space between where the old structures and old ways of doing business (and those who stubbornly stuck to them) disappeared and innovative new approaches
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they spent their days learning the graceful arts expected of the wealthy daughters of the social elite: embroidery, music, dance steps, and their prayers.
The Revolution was at its heart a class war, and aristocrats and clerics were abused and stripped of their estates.
Children were not typically forced into marriages that they despised, but the first duty of a young girl especially was obedience and submission to her father: Love was something that blossomed within marriage and not a prelude to it. At its heart, this was a match arranged by their respective fathers, calculated to extend the complex web of social and entrepreneurial ties that connected the prominent merchant families of Reims.
The title of grand cru (“grand growth”) is reserved for the highly select localities (currently only seventeen in the Champagne region) where the very finest grapes are grown, those rating a perfect 100 on a percentage scale. The second category, premier cru (“first growth”), refers to the next forty-three best wine-growing regions in an area and is given only to those rating from 90 to 99 percent excellent.
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.
Today, champagne is ranked from driest to sweetest in categories that progress from brut nature (naturally strong), extra brut (extra strong), and brut (strong) on the dry end and then—despite the hopelessly misleading names—on into the categories of sec (dry), extra sec (extra dry), demi sec (half dry), and doux (gentle) on the sweeter end. Essentially, brut is dry and sec is sweet.
Strict regulations assure that real champagne can use only three grape varietals—the black pinot meunier and pinot noir grapes and the white chardonnay grape.
In time, winemakers and wine lovers would discover that it was possible to make wine sparkle on purpose by adding dissolved sugar, brandy, and yeast before bottling. New sugar and yeast would kick-start the fermentation process again. This mixture is known in champagne production as the liqueur de tirage,
In fact, the idea that Dom Pérignon invented champagne was always just imaginative marketing. It was a brilliant but misleading sales pitch.
So when a small group of people learned about this new sparkling wine, he started spreading the news with an infectious enthusiasm. Soon sparkling wine became the status symbol of in-the-know London high society. While Dom Pérignon was laboring in the cellars of his chilly abbey at Hautvillers to get rid of the bubbles in his wines, British scientists were working hard to understand how to produce them.
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,
The dirty little secret of the wine industry today is that 5 percent of the wine sold to customers is “corked”—ruined by the presence of a chemical known as TCA and its musty aromas. TCA stands for 2,4,6-trichloroanisole. The long scientific name suggests something far more complicated than the reality: TCA is the unfortunate result of fungus munching on corkwood. The cork will not smell, but a whiff of badly corked wine is unmistakable.
Is This still holds true?
Today, the staunch preference is for the tall, slender champagne flute, and if you care about your champagne having the smallest possible bubbles—and many connoisseurs do—the flute is the glass to use. Owing to basic mechanics, the bubbles are smaller and prettier in narrow glasses.
Making matters a hundred times worse was something that should have been cause for celebration. The harvest of 1811 was marvelous. As one nineteenth-century tourist in the French wine country observed, “There had never been…a grape so ripe, so sugary, and one harvested under such favorable circumstances of weather.”
As far away as America, “the great comet was attracting all eyes,” and one man who saw it later recalled “how many superstitious terrors it gave rise to.” Throughout the Champagne, the rural people whispered that it was a portent of great change and of the fall of empire. In homage to a perfect harvest, winemakers abandoned their own trademarks and branded their corks with stars, the mark of the Vin de la Comète.
As Louis put it that year, “The Good Lord is a joker: eat and you will die, do not eat and you will die, and so patience and perseverance.”
When the Russians arrived at last, it still surprised her, but even more surprising was that they were gentlemen. The leaders of the Prussian and Cossack armies gave their troops free rein to loot and pillage. The Russians were more restrained, and they were determined to keep administrative control of Reims. There was an ugly bureaucratic tussle when the Russian prince leading the armies, Serge Alexandrovich Wolkonsky, insisted that there would be no looting and no retributive requisitions.
More ironically still, although Barbe-Nicole would not have known it, the arrival of the Russians would also prove a brilliant marketing opportunity for winemakers throughout the Champagne. Although she had already made a name for herself in imperial Russia, had already captured a significant market share in the days before the economic collapse of the war and the closing of the borders, that recognition had surely faded in the years that had followed. These new men would never forget her sparkling wines.
According to the story, “Madame Clicquot…in order to have her land protected, gave Napoléon’s officers Champagne and glasses. Being on their horses, they couldn’t hold the glass while opening the bottle.” So they lopped off the necks of the bottles with their swords, and sabrage was born.
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.”
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.
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.
The collapse of the California wine industry in the 1970s and 1980s had the same effect as the Champagne crisis of the 1780s and 1790s:
What Collapse?
Barbe-Nicole today is credited with three achievements: “internationalizing the Champagne market,” “establishing brand identification,” and developing the process known in French as remuage sur pupitre—literally “moving by desk.”
Without her discovery of remuage—an efficient system for clearing champagne of the yeasty debris trapped in the bottle after secondary fermentation—champagne could never have become the world’s most famous wine.
“The adventure of Madame Clicquot,” wrote Jean-Rémy, “is infamous.” It was an infamous adventure for a woman, perhaps. And, as Jean-Rémy’s biographer puts it, these letters are “sufficiently eloquent to show the rivalry that existed between Jean-Rémy Moët and the Widow Clicquot…. A climate of imitation that flirted with espionage reigned between the two houses.”
One thing still has not changed in the world of business: More solid companies are destroyed by overreaching expansion than almost anything else. And Barbe-Nicole was not just building her business, she was starting two new ones in the space of a summer.
enterprise. In an increasingly industrial age, champagne was (and remains) a manufacturing contradiction—a handcrafted luxury wine, supplied to the world in mass-market quantities.
Today, this label—the “color of the egg yolks of the famous corn-fed hens of Bresse” and a company trademark—is immediately recognizable to wine lovers everywhere as the mark of the Widow Clicquot.
