Raise a glass to the Grande Dame of champagne
enjoy huge success, producing around 100,000 bottles a year. Today, Veuve owns just short of 400 hectares and produces several million bottles a year.
Dom Perignon had introduced new techniques in the 17th century which elevated champagne from the fermented, naturally fizzy wine originally made by the clergy as a source of income in the 7th century. But even with Perignon’s new techniques, the
had yet to be tamed – the finished product was cloudy, with sticky filaments which spoiled its taste. Madame Clicquot would change all that, with an innovation called the “riddling rack”, which allowed her to remove sediment from the bottles without exposing the champagne inside to the air.
Though her contemporaries were sceptical (mainly, Pierre says, because she was a woman) the riddling rack is still in use today.
Pink champagne is still made using her method of blending red and white grapes together, rather than dyeing white wine with elderberries as it once was. And the majority of champagne bottles have the same elegant shape she insisted on when she began labelling her bottles in the mid 1800s.
In a letter dated 1814, as the Napoleonic wars were coming to an end, Madame Clicquot wrote: ‘‘Do you remember last year how distressed I felt? Business was dull and I was hopeless. When the Russians crossed the Rhine, my grief couldn’t have been deeper. But still, after all these mishaps, I’m doing fair business now and hopefully will keep doing well.’’
More than 200 years later, the legacy of the Grande Dame de la Champagne is undeniable.