Table Of ContentWIDOW CLICQUOT
The Story of a Champagne Empire
and the Woman Who Ruled It
TIL A R J. M A ZZEO
F OR NOE L L E A N D RO BE RT A , MOR E T H A N E V E R
Contents
Map v
Prologue vi
CHAPTE R ONE: Child of the Revolution, Child of the Champagne 1
CHAPTE R TWO: Wedding Vows and Family Secrets 11
CHAPTE R THR EE : Champagne Dreams 24
CHAPTE R FOU R: Anonymity in Their Blood 36
CHAPTE R FIVE : Crafting the Cuvée 49
CHAPTE R SIX: The Champagne Widow 60
CHAPTE R SEV E N: Partner and Apprentice 70
CHAPTE R EIGH T: Alone at the Brink of Ruin 84
CHAPTE R NINE : War and the Widow’s Triumph 100
CHAPTE R TEN: A Comet over Russia: The Vintage of 1811 113
CHAPTE R ELEV EN: The Industrialist’s Daughter 121
CHAPTE R TWEL VE : The Wine Aristocrats 130
CHAPTE R THIRTE E N: Flirting with Disaster 143
CHAPTE R FOU RT E E N: The Champagne Empire 155
CHAPTE R FIF TE E N: La Grande Dame 166
CHAPTE R SIXT E E N : The Queen of Reims 178
Afterword 187
Acknowledgments 193
Notes 195
Selected Bibliography 239
Index 257
About the Author
Other Books by Tilar J. Mazzeo
Credits
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
Map
Prologue
T
his is the story of French champagne, but it didn’t start amid the
splendor of a countryside château. Its origins were a more modest
little luxury: the aisles of a well-stocked wine shop. It was a re-
markably simple way to have begun an obsession with the history of one
of the world’s great wines—and one of the world’s great women. As much
as we associate champagne with celebration and the good life, I should
also tell you that, for me, it was a passion that began without fanfare in a
small town in the American Midwest, where I was trying to weather what
turned out to be the last months of a less than glamorous job.
It was in the midst of this daily living—and those occasional splurges
that any sensible woman uses to temper it—that I discovered the Widow
Clicquot. Although the writer in me wishes to tell you that my love affair
with the Widow began in the spring, with the loosening of the earth and
the promise of new life, that is not true. Winter had the Midwestern plains
firmly in its Anglo-Saxon grasp, and I found myself gazing wistfully at a
row of bubbly, dreaming of distant appellations and the sun-soaked vine-
yards of France.
I already knew the champagne. I don’t mean that. My girlfriends and
I drank it with a degree of enthusiastic regularity that might not be wise
to detail. It was the story of Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin that I dis-
vii THE WIDOW CLICQUOT
covered that afternoon, printed on a small card tucked into the box of the
1996 vintage Grande Dame that I had decided I certainly deserved.
The elegant little biography was less than thirty- five words, but it was
a story that even in its outlines captured my attention that winter. 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. Here, I thought, is a
woman who refuses to compromise.
In the years that followed, her story stayed with me, even after we had
left the Midwest and settled in my then husband’s home state of California
in the hills of Sonoma County, where the winters are green-misted and
indescribably soft. Something about this woman who took such immense
risks to pursue her passion still resonated deeply, and I began odd little
researches, hunting down nineteenth-century references to the Widow
Clicquot in the local wine library in Healdsburg, practicing my rusty
French reading old travel narratives written at the height of the Napo-
leonic empire. And, of course, never one to stint on rigorous research, I
made sure that we tasted all the sparkling wine we could find, locally at
first, and later in France, where I spent a windy January in a sprawling old
farmhouse surrounded by nothing but muddy vineyards.
The trouble always was how to find the woman herself, this young widow
with the unwieldy name of Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin, the Veuve—
or Widow—Clicquot. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, when
Barbe-Nicole was settling into her adulthood and all the compromises that
come with it, the lives of entrepreneurs and commercial innovators rarely
made the history books. This was especially true if that entrepreneur or
innovator happened to be a woman. The archives are filled with the letters
and diaries of statesmen and princes, but few librarians thought to collect
the personal records of businesspeople, even businesspeople who did excep-
tional things. It is still true today. Most of us will never see our love letters
preserved in the world’s great libraries. For a young woman in the nine-
teenth century it was particularly true, unless she was a queen or a duchess
or the sister, wife, or mother of some great man.
PROLOGUE viii
Barbe-Nicole was none of those things. She was simply a formi-
dable and independent woman, making her own name in the humdrum,
dog-eat-dog world of business. When I finally made my way in the early
months of 2007 to the Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin company archives in
Reims, confident of discovering her private secrets, I found that the walls
were lined with shelf after shelf of careful account books, all evidence of
Barbe-Nicole’s singular resolve. But there were few clues as to the woman
behind the trademark yellow label.
So, instead, I dragged willing friends around the countryside of the
Champagne that winter, looking for some trace of the life Barbe-Nicole
must have known. Something that would explain not just how a young, shel-
tered woman broke free from the life other people had charted for her, but
why. We bumped down rutted dirt roads in the rain, looking for the Wid-
ow’s vineyards in the fields above the village of Bouzy. In a fit of collective
charm one afternoon, we persuaded the reluctant winemaker at Château
de Boursault, once her favorite country home, to give us just ten minutes in
the private grounds she had loved. I sat for hours in the cool silence of the
cathedral of Notre-Dame de Reims, thinking that Barbe-Nicole knew these
same walls well. Throughout it all, I found myself staring at buildings and
street corners, stealing glimpses through windows like some thief, looking in
vain for a woman and the finely woven texture of her life.
Sometimes I wondered if finding her private life—rescuing her from
the silence that engulfed her story—would be possible. Before my quest
was over, I would meet with women winemakers and company presidents
in sunlit Napa offices, searching for the modern incarnation of the Widow
Clicquot, hoping to find in their experiences of a woman’s life in wine
some way to untangle the past. Later, there was France. In small towns
throughout the Champagne, La Veuve—and in France there is only
one—lives in the shadowy half-life of oral folk legend. Frustrated with the
dusty books and the archives, some days I simply asked the locals in bars
and bistros to remember, knowing that remembering and inventing are
close cousins, especially at the distance of two hundred years. We passed
the wine from table to table in open bottles, and the chef came out from
the kitchen to relax with a cigarette and to listen. In those moments, her
presence was with us.
