I have to be honest, I am not a big drinker. I’m not particularly fond of the taste of hard liquor and beer makes me pee way too much. I do like mixed drinks and cocktails but they’re too complicated to make and too expensive to drink much of. But there is one drink that I do like. Champagne. Whether your brand is Dom or Cristal, (or a $10 bubbly from BevMo like me), we all have Madame Clicquot Ponsardin to thank for making champagne into the international drink that it is today.
Wait, who?
She is sometimes just called “the Widow” – in fact, that’s what her brand name in French “Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin” means and many often just ask for glass or bottle of the Champagne by that moniker. Many of the characteristics of modern champagne – the clear/golden color, the relative sweetness of the drink, and even the fact that modern culture associates champagne with celebrations of all kinds – we owe it all to the Widow.
Oh, and did I mention that she was one of the first women in modern history to be the head of a highly successful international business?
It all began way back around the time of the French Revolution. She was born Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin in 1777, the eldest daughter of Ponce Jean Nicolas Philippe Ponsardin, a successful textile merchant in Reims, France. When she was 12 she went to the city’s royal convent school of St. Pierre-les-Dames, where all the daughters of the social elite of the city went to learn their manners and graces. It should’ve been a safe haven for them, but the timing was not good for Ponsardin. Reims is 90 miles from Paris and she went in the summer of 1789, just a month before the storming of the Bastille that marked the beginning of the French Revolution. And when the Revolution began, the streets of Reims exploded with class warfare. One of the targets of the mob’s ire was the royal convent school.
There’s a story that Ponsardin escaped the school with the help of the family tailor dressed as a peasant. The family itself escaped the worse excesses of the French Revolution because although the patriarch was a staunch monarchist, he was a pragmatist first. At the first sign of the rise of the Jacobins, he joined them. And later, when Napoleon came to power, he joined his side too. This streak of opportunistic pragmatism (and I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way) allowed the Ponsardin family to weather the French Revolution with their fortunes intact – a tricky feat for an upper bourgeois family. This pragmatic streak was also evident in what Madame Ponsardin was able to do later in her life.
When she was 20 or 21, she was betrothed to and married the son of a business rival of her father. Phillipe Clicquot was also a successful textile merchant in Reims, and a sometime rival to her father. And in the grand tradition of kings and emperors since time began, the two families decided to end their rivalry and join their fortunes – by having their children marry each other. This is how Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin married Francois Cliquot and became Madame Clicquot.
Although the marriage was arranged, their relationship was a good one. In fact, Francois and Barbe-Nicole often worked together on their enterprise – which allowed her to learn much about their fledgling business. And this business was champagne.
Now the bubbly had been invented back in the 17th century – legends say by Dom Perignon – but it wasn’t a big business yet. It was often an afterthought behind the wines that were made in the region. What’s interesting is that Francois, wanting to branch out his family’s business in a different direction, decided to focus on champagne. The Clicquot were wine brokers as well as textile merchants, but it was merely a way to fill out containers to get the most out of a shipment contract. They did own a small vineyard, but nothing that would form its own business base.
Francois wanted to change this. He learned as much as he could about the Champagne business, and in the process, so did Mdme. Clicquot. Afterall, they worked hand in hand. And while Francois had some initial successes, given the conditions of the war (the Wars of the French Revolution plus the Napoleonic Wars that would come after them), embargoes were in effect and markets were difficult to penetrate. In the end, his champagne business teetered on the edge of ruin.
Always somewhat moody, the stress of the business made Francois depressed and despondent. He died in 1805, officially of typhoid, but there are not-unrealistic rumors that it was actually suicide. This left Barbe-Nicole Clicquot-Ponsardin a widow at 27, with a young daughter, and in charge of her husband’s now failing business in a country at war.
Most other upper class women of her time would’ve remarried. It was the most socially accepted and secure way for her to maintain her lifestyle and possibly her fortune as well, and secure a future for her daughter. But not the Widow. No, she decided to remain a widow for only widows were given the social leeway to run their own affairs, and especially, their own business. She instead went to her father-in-law, Phillipe Clicquot with a proposal.
There is a great little book called The Widow Clicquot byt Tilar Mazzeo that tells the story of the Mdme. Clicquot’s life. I’m going to steal a passage from the book to explain what happened.
“Barbe-Nicole goes to her father-in-law and says, ‘I’d like to risk my inheritance, I’d like you to invest the equivalent of an extra million dollars in me running this wine business.’ And he says ‘yes’…It’s surprising that he would let a woman who has no business training take this on, and what it speaks to is that Philippe Clicquot was no fool. He understood how very keenly intelligent his daughter-in-law was.”
And because he was no fool, Phillipe Clicquot gave her the money under one condition – apprentice herself under an expert in the industry. So she did. She invested 80,000 francs of her own money and went into a partnership with one Alexandre Fourneaux, a well-known vinter. But the business still floundered. There was still a naval blockade of France in place, Europe itself was still at war, and her sales dropped to just 10,000 bottles per year. In 1810, her partner, Fourneaux, gave up the business. She was still at the edge of bankruptcy.
But the years she had spent with Fourneaux hadn’t all been a waste. Mdme. Clicquot had a nose for innovation, and working with her cellarman Antoine-Aloys de Muller, she perfected the art of remuage, or riddling.
Now a small aside about how champagnes are made. I’m going to steal a small passage from the Smithsonian article on Mdme. Clicquot that nicely summarizes this:
“Champagne is made by adding sugar and live yeast to bottles of white wine, creating what is known as secondary fermentation. As the yeast digests the sugar, the bi-products created are alcohol and carbon dioxide, which give the wine its bubbles. There’s only one problem: when the yeast consumes all the sugar, it dies, leaving a winemaker with a sparkling bottle of wine–and dead yeast in the bottom. The dead yeast was more than unappetizing–it left the wine looking cloudy and visually unappealing. The first champagne makers dealt with this by pouring the finished product from one bottle to another in order to rid the wine of its yeast. The process was more than time-consuming and wasteful: it damaged the wine by constantly agitating the bubbles.”
Clicquot and Muller figured out that by holding the bottles at an angle on specially designed racks, they could make the bi-products settle out. They’d rotate the bottles a quarter turn every day for about six to eight weeks to draw more of the bi-products out and at the end of this process, the sediment could be removed. Some liqueur (still wine and sugar) could be added to adjust the dryness of the bottle, but this process will essentially give you the gold/clear liquid that we are all familiar with today.
So Mdme. Clicquot had developed a technical innovation to improve the look and taste of champagne, but there was still a war going on and shipping was still a bottleneck. The business was still on a knife edge, so what does she do? She goes back to her father-in-law to ask him to invest in the business (and her) one more time. And he does. It speaks volumes to both the persuasiveness and intelligence of Madame Clicquot, as well as the prescience and faith of Phillipe Clicquot.
Now she has some additional funding to, as they say in start-up speak nowadays “extend the runway”, and an innovative product – the new clear/gold champagne, the best of which were bottled in 1811. Modern scholars say this vintage was the first truly modern champagne. But there is a war still going on and an entire continent aligned against her country.
Around this time was when France was on the losing side of the Napoleonic Wars, and swarms of foreign soldiers came to French to occupy and plunder. The south of France was filled with Russian troops, and to save their businesses and bottles, many wine houses closed up and locked up all of their wares. They tried to protect their vineyards against marauding soldiers to mixed success.
Madame Clicquot took the opposite approach. She knew she couldn’t completely protect her business from pillage, so she did what all good entrepreneurs do – take a problem and make it into an opportunity. She decided that she would get the Russian soldiers awesomely drunk.
She gave them her wine freely. Her bet was that when the soldiers returned to Russia after the war ended (and she was betting that as with all wars, it would end at some point), they would’ve developed a taste for her brand. She famously said, “Today they drink. Tomorrow, they will pay!”
When the French drove the Russians out later she freely gave the French soldiers her wine as well. In all this, she smartly saved her new 1811 vintage champagne. She used her unavoidable occupation of her lands by soldiers of both sides of the conflict as marketing opportunities to whet their appetites for the inevitable peacetime to come.
To prepare to conquer the Russian market, Mdme. Clicquot had 10,550 bottles shipped to Königsberg on the Baltic Sea, a major port for the Russian market. This was as far as she could go since technically Russian at the time had an embargo on French wine. She had specified that only the 1811 champagnes would be sent and the ship carrying them sailed on June 6, 1814, as soon as Napoleon was exiled to Elba, and arrived on August 2. She had the cargo stored and ready, and as soon as peace was declared, the whole shipment was quickly sold. After her champagne debuted in Russia, Tsar Alexander I declared that it was the only kind that he would drink. In this time and place, the Tsar was THE influencer of the whole of Russia, so the rest of the court quickly followed suit. And after the imperial court, the rest of the aristocracy, and then the bourgeois and then rest of Russia. Smelling success, the Widow sent another 12,000 bottles a week later. Soon, the entire Russian market was at hers.
With the defeat of Napoleon and the convening of the Congress of Vienna, there was much to celebrate all across Europe. And this partying mood continued into 1815 with the final defeat of Napoleon, where by then, the new coolest drink on the Continent was this bubbly clear wine that the Tsar of Russia liked – the Veuve Clicquot champagne. It got to a point that people were simply referring to the bottles by the name “the Widow”. It was the beginning of our association of celebrations and spectacles with a bottle of champagne.
Within two years, Barbe-Nicole Clicquot-Ponsardin, the Widow of Reims, was the head of an internationally famous and successful commercial empire. And she was one of the first women in modern history to do it.
By the time Barbe-Nicole passed away in 1866 at the age of 89, she was known as the “Grande Dame of Champagne.” Today her legacy lives on in the award for female business leaders that was launched in her name in 1972.
But her real legacy may be the example she’s set for others, both male and female alike. From risking her inheritance on a failing business to gambling her champagne against a naval blockade, Madame Clicquot built her champagne empire on bold decisions, a business model she never regretted. As she wrote in the later years of her life in a letter to a grandchild:
“The world is in perpetual motion, and we must invent the things of tomorrow. One must go before others, be determined and exacting, and let your intelligence direct your life. Act with audacity.”
References:
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/oct/31/madame-clicquot-france-woman-champagne
https://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/28/books/review/Stern-t.html
http://scandalouswoman.blogspot.com/2010/12/story-of-widow-clicquot.html
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/the-widow-who-created-the-champagne-industry-180947570/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madame_Clicquot_Ponsardin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veuve_Clicquot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution
https://vinepair.com/wine-blog/history-champagne-sabering/