The Widow Clicquot

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Studying her new husband in the first days of their marriage, however, Barbe-Nicole had reason to be optimistic. François was an energetic young man, and he played the violin beautifully. He had been given a liberal and expensive education, and he could boast many accomplishments. Not only did he know the sums and figures of a businessman’s son, he could also quote from the great works of French literature and had read the famous philosophers of the Enlightenment, men like Diderot, Voltaire, and Rousseau. Barbe-Nicole’s private passion was reading, and it was common ground. François’s spelling, however, was dismal, and his command of the foreign languages necessary to the family business was not quite what his father wished. Still, he had big ideas and great enthusiasm, and unlike many husbands, he was willing to share both with her.

  Compared with Barbe-Nicole, however, it seems François was sensitive and moody, and she must also have noticed immediately the way in which his mother and father coddled him. She soon understood why. He could be cheerful and energized one moment and apparently turn melancholy and despairing the next. This was a side of her husband she would not have expected. Despite the close connections between their families, she had not seen much of him for several years. François had finished his education abroad, working as a business apprentice in the firm of a banker and merchant in Switzerland who was one of his father’s friends. This sort of hands-on business training was the norm for the sons of successful entrepreneurs, and he had returned to Reims only the year before their wedding.

  She heard, of course, the stories of his time in Switzerland. His parents had been anxious to help him avoid the military when the Revolution spiraled into war. The whole point of sending François to complete his education in Switzerland in 1792, just as conscriptions into the army were becoming inevitable, was to dodge the draft. Young men in France were being forcibly rounded up to serve in the military, and Philippe was anxious to get François out of the country. Like Barbe-Nicole’s father, Philippe put on a show of being a radical patriot. His revolutionary politics, however, did not go so far as having his son on the front lines. Having lived a double life as a Catholic and royalist during a decade of republican purges, Barbe-Nicole had learned to expect a different reality behind any public facade. It made her something of a cynic.

  She could also understand that with François as their only son, his parents had staked their financial future on the day when he could take over the family business. They would face an uncertain old age if he died in the muddy fields of Austria, and it was clearly in their best interests to keep him safe. What she could not have known and would have found less reassuring were the other reasons Philippe and Catherine-Françoise must have had for wanting to keep François out of the army.

  François’s letters home from 1792 to 1794 are filled with patriotic zeal. He had a romantic view of war and was naturally an idealist. He was also apparently prone to illness and—more worryingly—to depression. Philippe wrote urgent letters to his son in Switzerland, reminding François of his “weak temperament” and history of hernias. In other letters, he begged his son to fight melancholy and eat well. There was a darker side to François’s ebullient personality that his parents knew only too well.

  The result of it all was that the idea of their son facing the rigors of war sent them into a panic. Philippe was desperate to find a way out of the military for François, and his son’s enthusiasm for the service only worried him more. Soon they were caught up in the power struggle that seems to have defined their relationship. His father was a coolly rational man who, with the best of intentions, must have undermined his son’s confidence by questioning François’s characteristic zeal for every new plan. Doubting himself and seeking approval, François would always back down.

  So when a mandatory draft was announced, Philippe started pulling strings wherever he could find them, and François went along with it. When a medical waiver proved impossible, Philippe set about buying his son a noncombat commission. The young man had learned something about botany. Perhaps he could serve in the army’s pharmacy. Philippe wrote anxious letters urging his son to consider it, while he struggled to arrange an appointment to the medical corps. Later, he would consider any branch, as long as it did not mean sending his son into the battlefield.

  In the end, Philippe did manage to keep his son out of harm’s way. Whatever bribes he paid were effective. In the spring of 1794, François began his military service on French soil, working in commercial import and export administration offices. There was no great glory in any of it, and it was hard for François to feel that he had not missed out, although in the years to come, this experience in the export business would lay the groundwork for the new directions in the family business.

  When François was discharged in the final months of 1796—in the euphemistic words of one early biographer, “retired from active service”—he returned to Reims, and whatever courtship the young couple enjoyed took place in those eighteenth months between François’s return and a June morning in 1798, when they were wedded in a secret ceremony in the dank cellars that wound for miles underneath the ancient city of Reims.

  Now a married woman with her own home and a lively young husband, whose company and conversation she enjoyed, Barbe-Nicole looked forward to the future with happiness. But even if she did not realize it yet, she and François were essentially mismatched in at least one fundamental way. She had inherited all her father’s—and Philippe’s—ruthless pragmatism and keen business instincts. Barbe-Nicole, however, had married a dreamer. And he had his heart set on the wine business.

  In the first year of their marriage, François was determined to reinvent the family business. He was immediately brought into his father’s company as a partner, and before long he was preoccupied with developing the small wine trade that his father had started more than twenty years before. It was a commitment that Barbe-Nicole would come to share.

  The company had what should have been the most important asset for a wine trade: vineyards. The Clicquot family owned a good deal of property, including several excellent parcels of land in the countryside southeast of Reims, perfect for growing grapes. There were family vineyards in Villers-Allerand and Sermiers, on the northern slopes of the mountain that divides Reims from the nearby village of Épernay, in Bouzy to the east, and farther south along the river, in the grand cru village of Tours-sur-Marne.

  The French system of the échelle des crus—the ranking of vineyard growths—is a time-honored tradition still used today to indicate the quality of the grapes used by the winemakers. The title of grand cru (“grand growth”) is reserved for the highly select localities (currently only seventeen in the Champagne region) where the very finest grapes are grown, those rating a perfect 100 on a percentage scale. The second category, premier cru (“first growth”), refers to the next forty-three best wine-growing regions in an area and is given only to those rating from 90 to 99 percent excellent.

  It is an admittedly arcane system, and the laws governing it are occasionally comic to the uninitiated. In his authoritative work French Wine, Revised and Updated, for example, Robert Joseph explains that, today, “unless a wine is from a premier cru vineyard…the vineyard name must be printed in characters no more than half the height of the ones used for the village name.” Details like this make for superb satire, and I defy anyone to find them useful when confronted with the acreage of local wines found on the shelves of any sizable French grocery store. But the distinctions they represent are important.

  The soil and microclimate in which grapes are grown, after all, are almost as important to the final wine as the skill of the winemaker, and it was already well-known by the eighteenth century that these environmental conditions—known in French as the terroir—shape the character of the wine as distinctively as any house style. Perhaps François and Barbe-Nicole owned a copy of the philosopher Diderot’s famous encyclopedia, published in the 1760s and still popular during the 1790s. There, under the entry for “wine,” they c
ould read: “The climate, sun, and other causes contribute to the goodness of wine…[and] the nature of the terroir contributes greatly.” It is the potential of this terroir that the cru system is intended to rank and describe.

  The young couple personally owned a surprising amount of real estate when one considers that they were just beginning in life. Upon his daughter’s marriage, Nicolas gave the newlyweds a large farm and two windmills, along with a large dowry of cash. As a wedding gift, her father-in-law, Philippe, gave them more land and more capital—a small forest in Quatre-Champs and extensive fields in Tours-sur-Marne and in the nearby river town of Bisseuil, excellent properties in the heart of the French wine country. They had the resources to dream, and it was a dream of wine from the beginning.

  There were long afternoons when they could explore these small villages and study their prospects. Traveling in an open carriage along the dusty side roads, they soon became a familiar sight. In those first days of taking stock, of their future and each other, they doubtless stopped in the hillside village of Chigny-la-Montagne, where the family owned property. The village clings today to its steep incline and affords breathtaking views of the vast fertile expanses of valley below, although its name was changed at the end of the nineteenth century to Chigny-les-Roses, in tribute to Louise Pommery—later known as one of the great women of champagne but remembered by the locals for her love of roses. Everywhere in the Champagne the roses come tumbling out of the sides of the vineyards still. Unfortunately, it’s hard to make romance out of the reason for this glorious summer profusion. None of the celebrated French lover’s passion here, it seems. These roses are nothing more than the winemaker’s canary in the mine shaft, an early signal of impending disease and blight in a vineyard. They are planted because roses get sick with everything and usually before anything else in the garden.

  Here in Chigny-la-Montagne, Barbe-Nicole and François would have sought out the famous walled vineyards of the late Monsieur Allart de Maisonneuve, a former officer for Louis XV and one of the first men to produce champagne on the mountain of Reims. The grapes grown in this enclosed field, or clos, spread out beneath a small stone mill, were already among the most famous in the region. It has always been known as fabulous terroir, and Allart had developed it with talent. Wine connoisseurs would write about this special vineyard well into the nineteenth century, and no one with a passion for the wine business would have missed the opportunity to see the Allart vineyards—and to wonder what they could learn.

  Barbe-Nicole and François likely knew and sought out some of the local winemaking families as well, families such as the Cattiers. The wine business depended on a network of personal connections, especially between distributors like themselves and the local growers. When Barbe-Nicole and François first visited these hillside wine-growing regions in the early years of their marriage, the Cattiers were well established and respected vignerons in these small mountain villages and had owned vineyards in Chigny-la-Montagne at least as early as 1763. The young couple would have been eager to meet successful and reliable growers, already looking forward to new sources of wine when they had larger orders. Ironically, the Cattier family—still producers of a world-class champagne with a celebrity following—now owns the legendary Allart vineyards, known as the clos du moulin, after the mills (moulins) that have stood in these walled fields since before the French Revolution.

  Despite their enthusiastic beginnings in the wine trade, Barbe-Nicole and François did not yet have a personal role in making any of the wines they sold, although the family owned excellent vineyards. The textile trade was still the primary focus of his father’s company, and they were a long way yet from the day when François could focus all his attention on wine. The Clicquots were simply small-time wine brokers—people who made their money distributing the wines made by local growers like the Cattiers. Sometimes the wines were purchased directly from the vignerons, and sometimes they used a wine expert known as a courtier to make their selections for them. Even when the grapes were grown in the family vineyards, they relied on someone else to craft the vintage.

  Despite his vast reserve of energy and enthusiasm, moreover, François was proposing only a modest revision to his father’s business strategy in the beginning. The family company—now officially Clicquot-Muiron and Son (the Muiron a customary gesture to his mother’s family)—had a small secondary focus on wine distribution. For decades, Philippe had been supplementing his textile shipments in France with wine sales, charging a small commission of around 10 percent on each bottle. François wanted to increase those sales so they were more than a sideline, and he wanted to find those new clients internationally, in capital cities as far away as Germany and Russia.

  His father must have had his doubts. Sensibly enough, Philippe saw that most of Europe had been at war for nearly a decade. There were better moments for trying to reenter the international market. Even in the best circumstances, shipping overseas a fragile product like wine—so easily destroyed by changes in temperature or rough handling—was a risky business. Philippe had been in the trade long enough to know. But this time, François was determined not to let anyone spoil his enthusiasm, and, remarkably, the new partners came to an agreement. As soon as there was peace, François would have his way. If it was going to succeed, the young man had a lot to learn. He would have to develop an expertise in finding the best local wines. Above all, he would have to find a new way of marketing wine to the fashionable trendsetters of his generation.

  Chapter 3

  Champagne Dreams

  When François first set out to learn about the local wine industry, he hoped to find a wine that he could sell to the international luxury market. His father had once sold wines around the world. But after the Revolution, Philippe was reluctant to take on the headache of shipping across war zones, refocusing his small sideline in the wine business instead on selling wines at home. The war was still dragging on in 1799. In fact, it would be an on-again, off-again affair for the next fifteen years. François, however, had the idea that his military service in the national export office—ungallant though it had been—had taught him something about the ways around closed ports.

  Considering his goals, it was inevitable that the local sparkling wine caught François’s attention. Clicquot-Muiron was in a good position to expand its sales in champagne. Most of the wines sold in this northeastern corner of France left the region in wooden casks, destined for a midrange market. It was quality table wine, which a family or an innkeeper would plan to consume within the year. Bottled wines were still rare. With all the additional costs—labor, glassware, storage, breakage—bottling made sense only if the wines could be sold at a premium.

  Selling premium wines had been Philippe’s business model from the beginning. He was one of the earliest distributors in the Champagne to see the advantage of specializing in fine bottled wines, especially. Since the local growers who supplied his business did all the actual winemaking, he could cleverly avoid many of the obvious technical risks of the craft. By the 1790s, the offices of Clicquot-Muiron were shipping about 15,000 bottles of wine a year—and, of course, some of it was the local bubbly.

  We know this wine as champagne. François and Barbe-Nicole would have called it just vin mousseux—sparkling wine. It wasn’t regularly called champagne even in France until the 1860s, when it had all become big business. What is most surprising is how different champagne looked and tasted at the end of the eighteenth century. It would have been virtually unrecognizable to most of us.

  We have to imagine that François conducted some of his market research at home. Any sensible businessman would have wanted to know his product. Marital harmony would have been the obvious casualty of greedily conducting this research alone. So François and Barbe-Nicole surely taste-tested some of the local wines. What filled their glasses was nothing like the crisp champagnes that we enjoy today. In fact, dry—or what the specialists call brut—champagne, like the word champagne itself, did not b
ecome popular for another sixty years. It certainly wasn’t served as a predinner aperitif. Instead, people drank champagne as a dessert wine, sometimes so cold that it was almost frozen slush. And it was shockingly sweet.

  Today, champagne is ranked from driest to sweetest in categories that progress from brut nature (naturally strong), extra brut (extra strong), and brut (strong) on the dry end and then—despite the hopelessly misleading names—on into the categories of sec (dry), extra sec (extra dry), demi sec (half dry), and doux (gentle) on the sweeter end. Essentially, brut is dry and sec is sweet. Our demi sec—one of the sweeter champagnes on the market—has up to twenty grams of sugar per bottle.

  François and Barbe-Nicole sampled wines that were at least ten times sweeter than today’s demi sec champagne. Champagne sold in France during their lifetime often had two hundred grams of residual sugar. The Russians liked it sweeter still. François hoped that Russia would become an important market for the future of Clicquot-Muiron wines; there, three hundred grams of sugar was common. To get an idea of what this must have tasted like, consider that even our most sugary dessert wines are positively tart in comparison. An ice wine or a sauternes only rarely has two hundred grams of sugar. The 2001 vintage sauternes made at the legendary Château d’Yquem in France, one of the most concentrated harvests in years, has only 150 grams of residual sugar. One of the sweetest wines around—the late-harvest dessert wine made in California’s Napa Valley by Grgich Hills known as Violetta—has just 250 grams in an average year. Imagine it with bubbles, and that’s more or less what a glass of champagne in the eighteenth century tasted like.