And what Barbe-Nicole learned about winemaking in the first years of her marriage sparked a passion that would last a lifetime. Although she had to sit on the sidelines while François made the financial decisions, she was determined not to be excluded from the vineyards. In the early mornings of those hot, dry summers, family legend tells how Barbe-Nicole accompanied François as he drove through the fields of the Champagne, anxious about the fate of the harvest. They would stop to check the progress of the grapes or to talk with those who knew the land and the craft of winemaking best: the weathered vignerons and the peasantry. In the fall there was the harvest—the vendange in French. According to local custom, it lasted for twelve days, and the harvest began at dawn. The grapes were best when harvested on cool, foggy mornings, while the moisture of the dew left the fruit plump and full of juice. The early hours were critical for the production of champagne, because this vin gris—a white wine made with red grape varietals—depended on the immediate and gentle pressing of grapes unstained by the color of the skins.
Barbe-Nicole was there at sunrise. Her favorite haunt at harvest-time was in the village of Bouzy, where she could watch as the field-workers gathered in the grapes grown on the family vineyards. François’s grandmother Muiron owned the vineyards, and the storeroom on the estate had a modern winepress, built in 1780 and now one of the oldest surviving presses in the Champagne. Here, Barbe-Nicole would sit for hours, watching as the grapes were slowly and gently crushed.
She was never happier than when studying wine. As the baskets were trundled in from the nearby fields, the grapes were spread carefully across the floor of the press, and, with the slow creak of heavy wood and the mixed scents of rope and warm fruit, she could anticipate the gentle aroma of the first pressing. The juice of this initial crush—the cuvée—was light, with little body but great delicacy, and it would make an excellent component of the final wine. Known as vin de goût, this was the wine made from the juice that flowed freely from the grapes when the heavy wood of the press was left to settle gently on the fruit, and it could not be exported alone. It made a delicious vintage, but without enough body to age or transport reliably unblended. It is in part because of the fragile nature of the finest must that it is said the French never export their best wines.
After the must from the cuvée was drained away into barrels, roughly filtered through plaited baskets, the première taille, or the first cutting, began. The man working the press would gently crank, adding enough pressure to break or “cut” the grapes, coaxing from them more of their ripe juices. Perhaps Barbe-Nicole tried her hand at the press, to the wry amusement of the farmworkers. The première taille gave what some considered to be the most valuable juice from the grapes—a fine and full-flavored must, rich with promise and strong enough to age deliciously.
With each successive cutting, the pressure exerted on the grapes would have to be increased, with consequences for the quality. The next pressing was the deuxième taille, or second cutting, and it gave full-bodied and clean juice, often with the tawny hue known as “partridge eye.” For a superior wine, Barbe-Nicole knew that the winemakers would use only the juice from the first three pressings. By the time of the fourth and fifth cuttings, the must was ruddy and sharp. Most common cask wines were a blend of the third, fourth, and fifth cuttings, and they were sold inexpensively and as quickly as possible.
There were also family estates at Verzenay and Chigny-la-Montagne, where Barbe-Nicole could have learned the essentials of fermenting and clarifying cask wines as well. Although François would still depend on others to make the raw wines that he would blend and bottle, as wine merchant and speculator he had learned early in his career how to judge a well-made vintage. Perhaps as their carriage rolled along mile after mile through the fields of the Champagne, this was part of what François talked about during those summers.
After the harvest, fermentation began as a natural process. First, the must was racked and the bits of organic debris were allowed to settle. It was then moved to a new cask. Because making the best wines took considerable skill and some luck, winemakers had all sorts of tricks of the trade. One of those tricks can be a real headache even today. Winemakers would smoke their casks with “brimstone,” gently lowering into the barrel a burning rag dipped in sulfur, in hopes of producing a bright, clear wine. Without knowing the reason, these early winemakers were on to something. Winemakers today still rely on sulfur’s antiseptic qualities to prevent the natural bacteria at work in fermentation from taking over and ruining the wine, and sulfur is widely used as a preservative in many wines on the market. But some unlucky people find that it gives them a pounding headache, and for a small percentage of people it is even a life-threatening allergy.
Over the course of the next three months, the must would be allowed to ferment naturally in the barrels, slowly becoming a sharp young wine. With the dead yeast cells and other organic debris floating in it, however, this raw wine did not make for elegant drinking. Sometimes, clearing the wine was relatively simple. Racking was a straightforward business, relying on gravity. The wine was poured from one barrel to another, leaving the gunk behind. If the cellars were cool enough, all the sediment would fall to the bottom, leaving the wine clear and appetizing.
More often than not, however, the wines were still cloudy, and clarifying the wine from here was a hit-or-miss proposition, involving considerable ingenuity. When a wine wouldn’t clear easily, winemakers had to turn to a colle—the French term for the secret concoction used to separate the particles from the wine. Usually in cloudy wines the problem was suspended tannins or yeast cells, and here the solution was a colle made of egg whites or bone-marrow gelatin. Sometimes winemakers used milk, cream, or blood. Or they could substitute a commercial mixture, probably quite unsavory in its origins, known as “powder number three” and thought to be particularly suited to the production of champagne.
Essentially, a colle acts as a positively charged chemical magnet, attracting the negative wayward particles and gathering them in a big mass that will settle to the bottom of the barrel when chilled. Anyone who has mastered the skill in French cooking of clarifying a consommé knows that a mixture of beef marrow and egg whites can be used to produce a perfectly clear broth with an exquisite flavor, because the coagulants trap the smallest impurities in an unappealing mass. The principle is exactly the same in winemaking.
Now that François was planning to bottle his own champagnes, getting the wines to stay crystal clear would be one of his biggest frustrations. There was no easy solution to the problem. A second fermentation in the bottle—when the sugar and yeast added in the liqueur de tirage are slowly transformed into alcohol and trapped carbon dioxide—is necessary to create the ebullient sparkle of champagne. But the process also created more dead yeast cells, which no one found any more attractive in the nineteenth century than we would now.
As with cask wines, the process of clearing champagne could range from the time-consuming to the downright tedious. After the bottles had rested on their sides for a year in the cellars, developing their sparkle, someone had to find a way to get rid of the debris trapped inside. The easiest way was to rely on gravity. The process was known as transvasage, but we can think of it as racking wines in the bottle. The cellar workers could just pour the wine from one bottle to another, leaving the debris behind. It worked in theory, but the sparkle of the wine wasn’t exactly improved by all this pouring.
The other way to dispel the debris was called dégorgement. Nineteenth-century wine manuals make disgorging sound pretty arduous. The cellar worker had to invert the bottle and pop the cork off just long enough to let a bit of the wine and all of the debris come shooting out—but not a moment longer. The trick was in having a good eye to track the sediment and an excellent thumb, capable of stopping up the bottle fast, before all the wine poured onto the floor in an expensive puddle. Working bottle by bottle, disgorging champagne was a time-consuming and expensive process. Even with modern advances in
winemaking, it is part of the reason champagne continues to command luxury prices.
Still, it would be foolhardy to wish for too easy a solution to this sediment—or to wish for too much cheap champagne. Ironically, experts today recognize that this irritating debris is actually crucial to the birth of great sparkling wine. During the year or more that the bottles are resting in the cellars, the fermentation is creating more than just alcohol and bubbles. The yeast cells also break down in the chemical process called “autolysis.” Autolysis begins when wine is left in contact with the enzymes naturally produced during the decomposition process—in other words, when a wine is aged while containing the dead yeast cells. Winemakers elegantly call it “aging on the lees” or, in French, sur lies. The important thing to know is that the result is a happy one, giving fine champagne its characteristic rich, nutty flavors.
Now that the Clicquots were bottling their own wines, there was also the chance to experiment with blending the wines, creating a “marriage” of flavors. Making great wine—and making great champagne in particular—depended on skillful blending. Dom Pérignon may not have invented champagne, but he was a pioneer in the art of blending. World-class champagne today is often a carefully selected mixture of as many as forty different growths, or crus, with grapes from different varieties and grown in different parts of the region.
Barbe-Nicole already knew that blending depended on terroir. She had watched enough harvests and tasted enough of the juice to know that each grape was the product of the soil that had produced it. In winemaking, experts talk of the indefinable essence of terroir, the gift that the land gives to the grape and that creates the potential range of tastes and aromas it can express. Just as the minerals of the Dead Sea are thought to have inexplicable healing qualities for the sick and the infirm, so the soil of a great vineyard—from the composition of its clay and chalk to the wild plants that prosper in it—is spoken of reverently and in ways that can make it seem magical.
In the twenty-first century, scientists have undertaken chemical analysis of the vineyards of the Champagne and have confirmed their special properties. The chalky and acidic soil of the region develops the aroma of the fruit, and its northern location prevents the grapes from developing too many natural sugars. The moist springs and dry summers slowly deprive the grapes of water, allowing them to ripen gradually, without being overshadowed by foliage. The chalk in the soil lets the ground retain water in the winter and release it slowly in the dry summer periods.
Just as serving champagne at the right temperature—around 45°F or 7°C, best achieved by chilling the bottle in a mixture of ice and water for half an hour—will open up the flavors of the wine, so the right conditions in the vineyard will bring out the most striking qualities in the grape. It is because these conditions are so subtle and complex, depending on a combination of the right amount of rain and sun, at the right moments, in the right soil, that vintage years are rare. Vintage years are exceptional harvests, years when the winemaker does not need to rely on fine reserve wines, saved from a previous harvest, to round out the blending.
Perhaps above all, Barbe-Nicole and François soon learned that bottling wine—and especially the sparkling pink champagne that proved so popular—was a risky business. Breakage rates could be ruinous. In a hot summer, eighteenth-century vintners sometimes lost as much as 90 percent of their champagne stocks when the pressurized contents of the sparkling wine exploded. Unlucky vintners could awaken to discover their storerooms, filled with the wine on which they had staked their future, flooded with wine and broken glass.
Local growers like the Cattier family in Chigny-la-Montagne must have still remembered the legend of Allart de Maisonneuve’s staggering losses in the sweltering summer of 1747, when his cellars were so toxic with the fumes of spilled wine that no one could enter them for months. Now, vintners again were faced with cellars throughout the Champagne awash in pools of ruined wine. The heat wave that began in 1802 would grip France for three consecutive summers. What could be saved from the wreckage was turned into vin de casse—breakage wine—but it had to be sold at rock-bottom prices and had little appeal.
They soon realized that the quality of the bottles was part of the problem. French glassmaking was often a shoddy business, and ordering bottles could be maddening. Staring down at misshapen and flawed glasswork, Barbe-Nicole and François must sometimes have despaired. If they put champagne in these bottles, there would be little left to sell come autumn. Yet glass bottles were absolutely essential to the manufacture of champagne.
The shapes of the bottles created more obstacles. It wouldn’t be until 1811 that someone would invent a machine for molding commercial glassware. Until then, wine bottles were blown by hand. The result was bottles with inconsistent shapes and sizes. Customers might not have cared, but François had reason to worry when he saw them. In a cellar, bottles had to be stacked on top of one another, and uneven bottles did not stack steadily. Collapsed rows of ruined champagne were distressingly common, even when the cellar workers tried to stabilize the rows with wooden slats. When the bottles came with different-size openings, corking them became a tedious and time-consuming business as well. Sometimes, if the lip at the mouth of the bottle was wrong, it was impossible to tie the cork in place securely with string. Making a profit was difficult enough after a decade of war, but they were learning that winemaking had its own dangers.
These were simply the risks that came as a matter of course with the business of bottling wines. Barbe-Nicole and François still needed to learn whether he could blend wines good enough to justify the premium prices they would have to charge. Thanks to his father’s first forays into the wine trade in the 1770s, François had been trained as a boy in tasting wines and evaluating their potential. But it would turn out that Barbe-Nicole was the one with the gift for blending wines.
Perhaps she was what wine experts today sometimes call a “supertaster”—someone gifted with a higher proportion of taste buds on her tongue than the rest of us. Women are more likely to be supertasters than men. Even more than this, however, it was her nose that mattered. While we can experience only five tastes—sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and the elusive “other” taste known as umami—we can recognize over a thousand smells.
All wine has a distinct bouquet, which chemists tell us is the result of a dizzying array of volatile compounds. These compounds are volatile because they react—with one another and with the air—and their aromas are largely responsible for the experience of taste we have when we drink a glass of wine. Lactones can be nutty, while phenols can be spicy. Sulfur gives a cool summer’s glass of sauvignon blanc in the backyard its grassy notes. In his book Molecular Gastronomy, gourmet and scientist Hervé This explains in fascinating detail how this experience is intensified when white wines are aged “on the lees”—aged resting in the dead yeast cells, which have the highest sulfur concentrations. And as Eileen Crane, one of California’s master winemakers and president of Napa’s Domaine Carneros, explained to me one warm autumn afternoon, with champagne these aromas are doubly important. The popping bubbles in a glass of champagne are an unrivaled aroma delivery system, bringing a thousand scents and associations to our minds, all of them elegant and gleeful, before our first sip.
Barbe-Nicole probably knew none of this. Given the state of science in the beginning of the nineteenth century, she could have no conception of how sulfur molecules reacted with the enzymes in our saliva to create the experience of a great wine. But she did have the gift of blending great wines. While the science is amazing, there is nothing in winemaking that substitutes for the instincts of a connoisseur.
Perhaps the science of winemaking and the mysteries of craft were on Barbe-Nicole’s mind the following year as she stood in the cavernous reception rooms of the Hôtel Ponsardin. She was proud, but she was also anxious. Already, row upon row of their sparkling wines were waiting in the cellars, slowly concentrating their small, delicate bubbles. But the tenuous peace, they no
w knew, had not lasted. The deal brokered with the British at Amiens was unraveling. It had been just the briefest reprieve—a mere fourteen months. She watched as her father worked the room, dreaming again his old aristocratic dreams. Clémentine and Thérèse swayed elegantly in their rustling dresses. At the center of the crowd stood a wiry man with sharp eyes. Napoléon had come to study the local wine industry—and he was staying for a few days as the guest of the Ponsardin family.
Perhaps on this visit, when he was feted at Reims with opulence and ceremony, Napoléon first tasted the Clicquot champagne, although it was not yet memorable. The young couple was working hard to make the winery a success, but theirs did not have the appeal of the more celebrated cellars at Moët. There would have been no reason yet for a great statesman to seek it out, but there would be. Before the decade was out, the Clicquot champagne and the soon-to-be-widowed young woman who was left to produce it would take Europe by storm.
Chapter 6
The Champagne Widow
By 1804, François had changed the direction of the family wine business emphatically. Sales in France were now a mere 7 percent of their sales, down from nearly 25 percent only a few years before. With the renewed hostilities with Great Britain, orders came largely from Prussia and Austria or not at all. And, at the beginning, things looked promising. At the end of 1803, when their first house wines were available to customers, total orders were up modestly, and Louis Bohne had managed to find buyers among the dukes and princes of these eastern empires.
Once again riding a wave of enthusiasm, François was planning to expand the market even farther to the east. Early that summer, the ruddy and good-natured Louis visited François and Barbe-Nicole in Reims, and all the talk was about Russia. Louis was going to open the market for them, and he was already preparing to set off on his third voyage for the company. The trip would last well over a year and would take him to the frontiers of the Russian Empire, in search of new clients for their wines.
The Widow Clicquot Page 8
