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

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

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.