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

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

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.

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.

Recognizing an industry in crisis, she was unafraid of entering into a new business and new markets when the entire social structure of old France—the ancien régime—was crumbling and Europe was in a collective panic. More experienced entrepreneurs resolved to wait out the crisis—or to find another line of business entirely.

she also helped to make the product she sold a byword for luxury, celebration, and the good life.

She opened these new horizons for women in business and forced those around her to reconsider the gender stereotypes of her day more or less despite herself.

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 took hold. Hers is the portrait of a woman with the courage to step into the breach, emotionally, physically, and financially.

Rare Veuve Clicquot vintages are still called “La Grande Dame” in tribute to her fame.

the Widow Pommery invented the dry brut champagne that wine drinkers still adore today.

But for nearly a century—the first century of its global transformation into the iconic symbol of luxury and celebration—the champagne business was a woman’s world.

“no business in the world [has] been as much influenced by the female sex as that of champagne.”

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. Our demi sec—one of the sweeter champagnes on the market—has up to twenty grams of sugar per bottle.

Champagne sold in France during their lifetime often had two hundred grams of residual sugar. The Russians liked it sweeter still. François hoped that Russia would become an important market for the future of Clicquot-Muiron wines; there, three hundred grams of sugar was common. To get an idea of what this must have tasted like, consider that even our most sugary dessert wines are positively tart in comparison. An ice wine or a sauternes only rarely has two hundred grams of sugar. The 2001 vintage sauternes made at the legendary Château d’Yquem in France, one of the most concentrated harvests in years, has only 150 grams of residual sugar. One of the sweetest wines around—the late-harvest dessert wine made in California’s Napa Valley by Grgich Hills known as Violetta—has just 250 grams in an average year. Imagine it with bubbles, and that’s more or less what a glass of champagne in the eighteenth century tasted like.

To give customers the jarringly sweet champagne they wanted, winemakers added generous dollops of sugar syrup and brandy to the bottle before the final corking, and the brandy often tinted the wine a light golden brown. The pink color came when the skins of the grapes stained the clear juice inside. It was a sign that the red grapes had not been crushed quickly enough at harvest or early enough in the morning to produce a perfectly clear white liquid, known as the must. A bit of staining was so common that even when the technology improved, some winemakers began deliberately coloring their champagnes a brighter red, using elderberry syrup. People had come to expect color in their bubbly.

Eighteenth-century wine manuals talk about the gris de perle, or pearl gray tints.

As one wine tourist in the 1760s tried to explain: “In the Champagne gray wine refers to those wines which in other places are called white Champagne. Gray wine is made with black grapes.” The logic was simple: Black and white makes gray. So gray wine was a white wine crafted with some black—or what

people today often call red—grapes. Under current French law, champagne is still made in this same way.

Strict regulations assure that real champagne can use only three grape varietals—the black pinot meunier and pinot noir gra...

Blanc de noirs is a white wine made with at least one of the black grapes in the mix, while blanc de blancs is a white wine made only from white grapes.

Since chardonnay is the only white grape used in champagne, blanc de blanc champagne is essentially a sparkling chardonnay.

Since pinot meunier doesn’t hold up particularly well in aging, a lot of vintage blanc de noirs are actually ...

In our modern era, the style is designated on the label, along with information about whether it is vintage (using grapes from a single harvest) or nonvinta...

At the end of the eighteenth century, when Barbe-Nicole and François were first imagining a future in the wine business, nobody put labels on their bottles. And champagne was made only as a b...

The best wine-growing areas in the region were either in the little villages that grew up along the banks of the river Marne or along the sunny slopes of the mountain to the southeast of Reims. Today, these two areas are in the heart of the Champagne wine country, and wines made in this microregion—crafted mostly from pinot noir grapes—are labeled simply with the appellation “Montagne de Reims.”

This curious sparkle that appeared in the wines of the Champagne region first began to plague the local vintners during the Middle Ages, and it was apparently the result of unexpectedly cold weather. By the end of the late fourteenth century, Europe was experiencing what has been called “the little ice age.” This shift in climatic patterns, which lasted well into the nineteenth century, transformed winemaking in France as dramatically as scientists now predict global warming will.

Next, the must is placed in unsealed wooden casks. Here, within the right temperature range, the yeasts naturally lurking on the grape skins begin to consume the fruit sugars. There are two important by-products of this “hot” organic reaction: carbon dioxide, which escapes into the air; and alcohol, which thankfully stays put. When the fermentation runs its course—when the yeast has consumed all the sugar—the wine is then racked and clarified to remove the residue, including the yeast cells, which begin to die and decompose. At this point, we could drink the wine, although it would taste quite sharp. So instead, eighteenth-century wines were usually put into sealed wooden casks sometime during the winter and stored until the next autumn, letting them mellow. During the freezing cold winters of the seventeenth century, winemakers in the Champagne discovered that they had live yeast showing up again in the spring, pumping out more carbon dioxide and more alcohol after the wines had been placed in those sealed casks. Since now the carbon dioxide had nowhere to go, the result was fizzy wine.

What had happened was that the temperatures went too low in the winter for the yeast to finish consuming all the sugar. It had just gone dormant. Without the technology to test the amount of sugar remaining in a barrel of wine, the winemakers were at the mercy of the seasons and their intuition. When the warmer temperatures returned in the spring, the process of yeast fermentation just picked back up again. Winemakers today refer to this as a “secondary fermentation.”

They called a bubbly vintage the ...

At its most basic level, champagne is a still wine that has been coaxed into undergoing a secondary fermentation process in a bottle. This time, the carbon dioxide is concentrated in the wine, giving it the celebrated sparkle.

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, and it is essential to producing those nose-tickling bubbles that we enjoy in fine champagne.

Making wine sparkle takes some knowledge; making champagne requires the art of a master blender. The base wine used to make champagne is often a blend or, in French, assemblage of over forty different growths, and a master blender is like an alchemist of the senses, capable of transmuting the lowly grape into a silky liquid gold.

This is one of the great ironies—we might even say great deceptions—of wine history, for conventional wisdom tells us that Dom Pérignon was the delighted inventor of champagne. He is supposed to have quipped to one of his sandal-shod brothers, “Come quickly! I am drinking the stars!” Yet it only made sense that Dom Pérignon wanted to rid champagne of its bubbles. There was no market for sparkling wines yet.

the idea that Dom Pérignon invented champagne was always just imaginative marketing. It was a brilliant but misleading sales pitch.

In her book When Champagne Became French, scholar Kolleen Guy shows how it wasn’t until the 1889 World Exhibition in Paris that the region’s champagne producers saw the marketing potential and started printing brochures about Dom Pérignon.

The truth is that no one in the seventeenth or even the eighteenth century associated Dom Pérignon with the discovery of sparkling wine. His friend Dom François, writing the biography of the famous monk, never mentions bubbles, and even the abbey’s lawyers in the nineteenth century—looking for things to claim rights to—didn’t think they could convince anyone that Dom Pérignon had anything to do with making wine sparkle. As the lawyers knew, the monks at Hautvillers didn’t even start bottling their wines until the 1750s.

Wine historians now claim that champagne did not even originate in France. Champagne was first “invented” in Great Britain, where there was already a small commercial market for sparkling champagne by the 1660s. British enthusiasts were investigating ways to control the production of its so-called mousse—the fizz—several decades before the wine was sold at all in France. It seems that wealthy British consumers, anxious to prevent their imported barrels of wine from turning to expensive vinegar, first bottled wines from the Champagne region and, in doing so, discovered sparkling wine.

Seventeenth-century British connoisseurs would order their fine table wines from vintners in the Champagne region, and, as required under French law in those days, it would be sold in wooden barrels. The wines arrived without a hint of bubbles. Winemakers in the Champagne, in fact, were not legally allowed to sell their wines in glass bottles until the passage of a special royal decree given to the city of Reims in the 1720s. Unfortunately, without a sealed

bottle, there is no sparkling...

So these wily merchants and consumers began considering ways to preserve their wines. It was no mystery that brandy could act as a preservative. They also began bottling. Great Britain was producing far stronger and less expensive glass than could be found on the other side of the English Channel, giving British wine lovers the advantage. After bottling their imported wines and maybe dosing them with brandy, people inevitably found that some of this wine—wine where a bit of yeast happened to be present—started to fizz. In their efforts to preserve imported still wines from the Champagne, they had haphazardly started the process of secondary fermentation required to make sparkling champagne.

This oenological curiosity soon developed a cult following, and one of history’s great gourmets, a Frenchman by the name of Charles de Saint-Évremond, helped to create its new celebrity. He had made an enemy of the king and was forced to flee for his life into exile in Great Britain. The consummate Frenchman, he brought with him a love of fine wines and good food. 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.

Most wine experts now believe that the British were converting their barrels of imported wine from the region around Reims—wine with a natural tendency to fizz easily—into sparkling champagne by the 1670s, a full decade before the wine was first produced in France.

by the end of the seventeenth century the royal court at the Palace of Versailles certainly had. King Louis XIV of France now wanted nothing more than bubbles in his wine. Suddenly winemakers on both sides of the English Channel were scrambling to find ways to make champagne sparkle, and in order to support his taste for bubbly, the king gave the city of Reims an exclusive license to sell their wines in bottles. It was the beginning of a regional monopoly that would survive, in one form or another, for centuries. In the 1720s, Barbe-Nicole’s Ruinart ancestors founded the first champagne house, but soon there were a dozen more, and dealers selling “foamy” wines from the Champagne enjoyed a period of rocketing sales until as late as the 1740s. After all, if Louis XIV began the fashion for sparkling wine, his successor Louis XV turned it into a royal frenzy. He would do anything to please his mistress, the powerful Madame de Pompadour—a woman whose family conveniently owned lucrative property in the Champagne. For more than thirty years, local winemakers could command astonishing prices by supplying the king of France and his friends with bubbly.

Champagne’s iconic status would only emerge much later, because the boom times ended as suddenly as they had begun: By the 1740s, fashion suddenly changed. The growers and distributors, counting on regular extravagances in Paris and looking to make easy money, had planted too many vines, many of them cheap, and the wine market in the Champagne crashed. As bad wines flooded the market, the reputation of the entire region suffered. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the local sparkling wine that François had dreams of once again selling to the world was little more than an extravagant curiosity, known only at the royal courts of Europe. It might well have stayed that way. Had the local wine industry not been reinvented by a handful of talented entrepreneurs—and had champagne not been transformed into the world’s most powerful symbol of celebration and the good life—this sparkling wine would have soon faded into the background of world history.

It was a privileged life, but it was still life in a gilded cage.

“Anonymity runs in their blood.”

As the historian Bonnie G. Smith put it: “A prejudice against women acting in the marketplace appeared in the Napoleonic Code [which] pointed women toward an exclusively reproductive life.”

A light red wine was often made from the grapes grown on the property, and some of it probably made its way to London in the years to come. Curious wine lovers can try something very like it today, because Bouzy red is still crafted in the Champagne. It is something of a rarity, and in my experience the quality of the wine varies dramatically from one producer to another. But no matter who makes it—and no matter how well or how poorly—Bouzy red commands the same steep prices as a bottle

of sparkling champagne.