French widow gets credit for making bubbly an affordable luxury.
This is a story about power and privilege but also want, and about emergent feminism, albeit of an astonishingly contradictory sort, in a doggedly patriarchal society. There’s even some Russian collusion in the mix.
The plot revolves around bubbles, too, which makes it a seasonally perfect tale to tell. When you make a toast at midnight Sunday, contemplate the sparkling, happy-inducing beverage in your raised glass for a moment and think of Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin, La Grande Dame of Champagne. You, of course, know her as the widow Clicquot — veuve is French for widow — the brand name on those bright yelloworange labels.
She is credited with inventing both how modern champagne is made — the key was remuage, or riddling, which makes the lees easily extracted through the process of disgorging — and how to market bubbly as a luxury good, one that bestowed status on those who could afford to acquire and consume it. Barbe-Nicole’s turning the Russian aristocracy on to the sparkling wine of Champagne changed everything, turning a modest regional enterprise into an international phenomenon.
In 1805, the 27-year-old Barbe-Nicole was widowed, having been married for only seven years, under tragically murky circumstances. Her husband, François, was the son of a prominent Champenois businessman, and theirs was, for the want of a better word, a negotiated union. But they were kindred spirits who, by all accounts, enjoyed each other’s company and they shared the same vision of becoming successful Champagne merchants.
Although he’s said to have died of typhoid fever, their fledgling wine business was struggling because of terrible weather and poor market conditions and he had sunk into a deep depression, so speculation lingers that he took his own life. But Barbe-Nicole pulled herself together after the funeral, held in the great cathedral of Reims, and by virtue of being a widow she was allowed to control her own financial destiny. Within a dozen years, despite having had no formal training in either commerce or viticulture, Barbe-Nicole had become one of Europe’s wealthiest entrepreneurs.
At the apex of her career, she had arguably become the second most famous woman in the world behind another widow, Queen Victoria.
Her path, however, was hardly without intrigue and, on occasion, downright peril. The complications of the day, because of political/societal changes buffeting the continent and the Napoleonic Wars that resulted, were staggering. At one point, Russia banned the importation of Champagne, nearly destroying her company. But she persevered, finding a way to get the bubbles, thousands and thousands of bottles of them, through the onerous blockades, alternately defying both her own government and the czar.
It’s an extraordinary tale that begs to be turned into a major motion picture (Saoirse Ronan plays her as a young woman; Judi Dench, of course, as La Grande Dame). If you’re intrigued by her story, I recommend Tilar J. Mazzeo’s fascinating book, “The Widow Clicquot” ($15.99 from Harper Perennial). While the history of Veuve Clicquot the company, now part of Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (LVMH), is easily researched, little was known about the Veuve herself before Mazzeo began her determined quest to unveil the woman behind the brand.
Mazzeo found abundant head-scratching contradictions, not dissimilar to what we must routinely confront, risking whiplash, every day of late. Mazzeo summed up her discoveries thusly: “Barbe-Nicole quietly defied the expectations her culture had about what women were and what they were capable of achieving. Meanwhile, at home and in her opinions, she was anything but a revolutionary. … She was a deeply conservative and sometimes rigid woman. Her family remained staunchly Catholics, even when the religion was outlawed and dangerous in republican France.
“She was a devoted but frankly domineering mother, whose only child — a daughter — she undervalued intellectually and excluded from the family business, preferring instead to marry her off to an idle and flamboyant aristocratic playboy, one to whose charms BarbeNicole herself was dangerously susceptible. She did not advocate for the rights of women, although she lived in an era when feminism was born. Instead, she surrounded herself with men, as employees, partners and even friends. In the end, she gave away a large part of the family business and most of her vineyards to her male business partners.”
To put Champagne in perspective in BarbeNicole’s day, the average worker earned the equivalent of roughly $8,000 per year, Mazzeo says, while a bottle of good fizz cost about $70. But because of the technical strides that were made in production methods on her watch, the sparkling wines made by Clicquot and the other “Grande Marques” (Bollinger, Krug, Moët et Chandon, Pol Roger, Ruinart, et. al.) could evolve into a beverage ordinary folks can now enjoy.
“At the most critical juncture in the history of this celebrated wine,” Mazzeo writes, “she dominated the industry. The result was a different future for women in the commercial arena. And because of the Widow Clicquot, historians still claim that no business in the world has been as much influenced by the female sex as that of Champagne.”
Additionally, I love how the Veuve Clicquot circle gets closed by the fact that the chief winemaker in 2017 is Gaëlle Goossens, a native of the Marne Valley in Champagne. Goossens took charge in the vast historic cellars seven years ago at about the same age as Barbe-Nicole was when, suddenly isolated in a man’s world, she had no choice but to sink or swim.
“It is very inspiring for me to be in that house and to know this story,” admits Goossens, whose parents are both doctors and who honed her winemaking skills at Bollinger, having eschewed pursuing a career in international business, her original plan. She later observed that “making Champagne is not like making juice or yogurt. It is science but also art. You are making dreams (because) you are making people happy. It’s magic.”
Is that what motivated Barbe-Nicole from the very beginning, too? We’ll never know for sure, but it seems a reasonable assumption.