The Widow Clicquot

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  The life of the international salesman was treacherous even in the best of times. A commercial traveler took risks with his life on the road. Roads were generally in bad condition, deeply rutted and narrow. Carriages overturned frequently, in the modern equivalent of the deadly car crash. Ships were lost at sea. That year, another of Barbe-Nicole’s employees had nearly been shipwrecked off the coast of Norway; his letter, describing the terror onboard a sinking ship, made for sober reading in Reims.

  During wartime, all these dangers were intensified, and Louis knew that he was risking his life going to Russia. The risk was not simply being caught in the crossfire between opposing armies. The problem with a Frenchman arriving in enemy territory in the middle of a war that the Russians were on the verge of losing and setting out to ply the aristocracy with his sparkling wine and cultured charms was that it looked downright suspicious. Before crossing into Russian territory, Louis wrote to Barbe-Nicole and Alexandre, warning them to censor their letters. Avoid “talking politics,” he pleaded, “this is dangerous in this country.”

  Despite all their precautions, Louis soon found that he was suspected of being a French spy. By the spring of 1807, having endured a bitter winter in Saint Petersburg, there was something like panic in his letters to Reims. He was afraid that he would be arrested at any moment, and he knew that his posted letters were being scrutinized. When the chance came, he seized the opportunity to send a hand-delivered note to his employers with a friend returning to France. “In the name of God, don’t ever talk of politics,” he urged them, “if you don’t want to compromise my liberty or my life, deportation to the mines of Siberia is the chastisement for all indiscretions; all the letters are opened.”

  Perhaps a blistering winter in the capital had given him too clear an idea of what Siberia promised. Leaving precipitously, however, would certainly arouse almost as much suspicion as staying, so Louis was forced to remain at least through spring, when the roads were open for easy traveling. When warmer days returned, they found a relieved Louis promptly on the road, heading west out of Russia.

  Despite it all, Russia turned out to be another colossal failure. The empress had given birth to a daughter in the autumn, and this child, like her first, died quickly. Besides, the child was rumored to be the daughter not of the czar, but of Elizabeth’s handsome lover, and somehow the emperor wasn’t in the mood to throw any fabulous champagne celebrations. Louis had taken some good orders, but the cost of doing business so far from home was turning out to be fabulously expensive, and it was still not clear how they would manage to get their wines into the country. If they couldn’t deliver their wines, there would be no staying afloat.

  Barbe-Nicole spent much of the next year trying to find some way to get their wines to customers overseas. By the time news came in the summer of 1807 that a Franco-Russian peace treaty was on the horizon, they were faced with a sickening dilemma. When the trade restrictions with Russia were lifted, there would be a mad rush for the border, and the wine merchants able to get product there first would take all the easy sales. They already had requests for champagne pouring in from Russia, Austria, and the Prussian Empire. But no one was going to wait for their wines if their competitor Jean-Rémy Moët got there first. The only option was, once again, to send a shipment of wine to Amsterdam, where it would be ready to sail for Russia as soon as trade opened—and where it would sit waiting in the meantime.

  There would be a while to wait. By autumn, it was all depressingly familiar to Barbe-Nicole. No peace treaty still. Wines once again stuck in a warehouse in Holland. The account books were enough to leave her with a pounding headache, and there could be only so many disasters before Veuve Clicquot Fourneaux was out of business. Slowly, the company letters reveal Alexandre fading into the background. Perhaps he already suspected that his initial investment could not be saved. Or perhaps tensions between the two partners were mounting, because despite the setbacks, Barbe-Nicole stubbornly insisted that they needed to focus on international markets. She was so determined that she even considered breaking the law for the first time.

  She started to toy with the idea of sending her wines as contraband. Up to now, they had simply been sending their wines in private ships around closed ports, hoping to avoid detection and confiscation at sea. Sending the wines as contraband was something far more serious. It meant cutting a deal with a foreign ship captain—usually someone on the other side of the war. In the final months of 1807, it began to look like the only remaining option, unless she wanted wines sitting in uncertain storage in Amsterdam for a second time.

  For a heavy fee, it was possible to have foreign sea captains—and British and American sea captains especially—transport cargo into closed ports by disguising the French origins of the products. Barbe-Nicole was considering it. But she hesitated, probably because she realized some of the unique risks of contraband champagne: In the event these ships were stopped for inspection, it would be difficult to disguise the French origins of this sparkling wine.

  Part of what had saved champagne dealers thus far was the exclusivity of the product. At the royal courts of Europe, a lucky few had enjoyed it for more than a century, and the war had perversely whetted their appetite for this luxury wine. It was an impulse pretty near to looting the wine cellars as the Titanic went down. Champagne has always had the advantage of coming from one place only—the French are insistent on this point. Real champagne is made only in the Champagne region of France. Today, the region is limited to 323 classified villages, and everything from the dates of the harvest to the pruning of the vines is strictly controlled.

  This determination to protect the integrity of champagne, both as a product and as a marketing monopoly, was just getting its start in the early nineteenth century, much like the industry itself. It wasn’t until 1844 that champagne makers—recognizing that a brand name was fast becoming a generic category—sued for the right to prevent other sparkling-wine makers from using the word. The legal battle is still not over. Hoping to avoid the branding destiny of products like Band-Aid and Q-tips, winemakers in the Champagne challenge all comers. Even the descriptive term champenoise, or “champagne style,” used to describe sparkling wines crafted in the traditional style, is contested property.

  In the first decade of the nineteenth century, the winemakers of the Champagne weren’t yet worried about the misuse of their name. Champagne was not yet big business, and in the mind of the consumers—a select and mostly royal crowd—it naturally came only from this small part of the world. Even so, when it came to sending champagne through closed ports, the singularly French origins of the wine already meant that there could be no disguising its source. Barbe-Nicole would have hesitated to gamble on a ruse that had such an obvious and singular flaw.

  The cruel irony was that by 1808, the wines of the Widow Clicquot were in great demand in Russia. It just goes to show that name recognition in the marketplace sometimes doesn’t square with the actual sales figures. She owed much of this success to Louis Bohne. Political tensions had eased, and Louis was back in Russia again, hell-bent on capturing the market. In fact, for the next four years, France and Russia would maintain an uneasy and always fragile peace in the midst of the ongoing European conflict. Now, at the beginning of this peace, Louis knew that he had helped talk Barbe-Nicole into her international strategy, and his business judgment was on the line. Besides, Louis was working on commission. Although he wrote that “a large part of Europe [was] ruined by the famine, the exigencies of occupation,” and that “the misery of the times is contrary to the effects of luxury,” he had persevered doggedly.

  Already, both the name of their company and the limited quantities of wine that they managed to get into the country had excellent reputations. Increasingly, it was Barbe-Nicole’s name alone that the customers recognized. Ironically, the faceless Widow Clicquot was becoming a brand in Russia before she could even make her own decisions as an entrepreneur. Unlike the popularity of so many famous brands named
after women in the years to come, this success owed nothing to conventional stereotypes of personal beauty or charm. The Russians can have had no idea that behind these wines was a hardheaded and diminutive woman of just thirty. As Louis told her, already in the most fashionable homes “there are rare advantages that give us a rising name brand among our competitors and which we need not wait for a general peace to realize…. [The] favorable reputation attached abroad to the name of Clicquot…is invariable and can be considered as the unique foundation of your establishment.” “Your establishment.” Already, it seemed, everyone understood who was at the heart of this commercial partnership.

  In the autumn of 1808, for a marvelous few months, there was a reprieve. During those heady weeks, Barbe-Nicole could imagine what business might be like without all the obstacles. The blockades were lifted, and they scrambled to ship their wines. Fifty thousand bottles arrived safely in Saint Petersburg, and orders for more were pouring in. For a moment, it seemed the worst was over.

  But by the spring of 1809, Barbe-Nicole knew that it was really just the beginning of another long haul. Suddenly, everything turned more ugly than anyone could have imagined, as economies across the continent unraveled. Trade came to a virtual standstill, and in letter after letter word came back from her travelers with the same report: “Everywhere…business is absolutely dead.” In July, even Louis admitted defeat. There was no point in staying in Russia. Europe was on the verge of financial collapse, and the French were largely to blame. In the midst of it, Napoléon only turned the screws tighter. In Krakow, their sales agent was threatened with arrest and given “an order to leave the city and the states of Austria.” Suddenly, no one was in the mood for luxuries like champagne. No one wanted anything to do with the French, either.

  Barbe-Nicole now understood that the ports would stay closed for months, maybe even years. There would be no more sly exports. No amount of cunning or energy could get her wines safely to her international clients now—even if there had been clients waiting for them. And there were not. The business was in trouble. There was no question about it. In 1809, she managed to sell only forty thousand bottles of wine, many of them to markets no farther than France. She turned to the domestic market in hopes of staying in business, but few people at home had the money to indulge in champagne or expensive fine wines. Fewer still had cause to celebrate.

  In the spring of 1810, the orders were once again a dismal trickle, and in July came the final blow. On the emperor’s orders, all export trade would require expensive government licenses, and banks throughout Europe began to fail at an alarming rate. There had been no word at all from Louis for months, and Barbe-Nicole was beginning to worry that something terrible had happened. Finally, a letter arrived. We can only imagine what went through Barbe-Nicole’s mind as she held the slender packet with its bright wax seal. Perhaps, she thought, Louis had once more saved them. Perhaps inside was news of stupendous orders or peace just on the horizon. Her hand hesitated a moment before she unfolded the sheets, and she read with devastating simplicity the only news he could send: “Business totally dead.”

  Looking at the letter for a long while, she must have dreaded writing her reply. There was no easy way to reassure Louis, nothing she could say to buoy his spirits that he would believe. And there was one other thing that she would need to tell him. On July 10, the four-year contract that had kept Veuve Clicquot Fourneaux in business expired. It would not be renewed. Alexandre couldn’t see a future in this company, and he was taking the opportunity to walk away—with his half of the operating capital. The cycle of hope followed by crushing failure had taken its toll on all the partners at Veuve Clicquot Fourneaux. For the second time in her life, Barbe-Nicole found herself facing an uncertain future, and this time she really would be on her own.

  Chapter 8

  Alone at the Brink of Ruin

  For Barbe-Nicole—indeed, for the entire Ponsardin family and the wine industry in general—1810 was a year of great transitions. Barbe-Nicole had known that the contract with Alexandre would expire that summer, and the decision not to renew the partnership was no mystery. The continuing war with Great Britain and Napoléon’s Continental System were making export sales impossible, and profit margins were slender. She had known since spring that, soon, expensive licenses would be required for all shipments abroad.

  Besides, Alexandre’s son Jérôme had now completed his commercial education, and Alexandre was understandably eager to set up his son in the trade. There was no reason to commit Jérôme to a long-term partnership in a failing family business with a young widow several years his senior—especially one who clearly wanted to run the family business herself.

  Barbe-Nicole, it seems, had no intention of marrying again, although if she had, Jérôme Fourneaux might have been a convenient choice. Perhaps some small spark of romance or admiration had been ignited, for although Jérôme and his father had turned their energies to expanding their own family wine business—founded in 1734 by Alexandre’s grandfather under the name Forest-Fourneaux—the young man continued to help Barbe-Nicole with the finer points of winemaking in her first few years alone, despite the fact that she was now a competitor.

  The family business to which Alexandre and Jérôme returned their attentions, now renamed simply Fourneaux and Son, never made either famous. If the direction of their company is any indication, they didn’t have the same competitive ambition that always characterized Barbe-Nicole as an entrepreneur. Still, both were talented winemakers, and the tradition of delightful champagne wines that they initiated continues to this day. In 1931, the company they had nurtured was bought out by a family of winemakers who would turn it into one of the world’s most prestigious estates. It is now known as Champagne Taittinger—thanks to Alexandre and Jérôme, the third oldest champagne house in existence.

  That spring, when Barbe-Nicole’s days were filled with preparations for the necessary liquidation and with plans for her own future as a sole proprietor, there were also monumental changes for the Ponsardin family. Their star was on the rise. Her father, Nicolas, always a charming and politically savvy man, had been currying favor with Napoléon since the early years of the century, when Napoléon and Joséphine had stayed as guests at the Hôtel Ponsardin during the year of the first Clicquot family vintage.

  Poor Joséphine—unable to produce an heir and a bit too free with her favors—had been since then unceremoniously dumped, but Nicolas’s reward for his hospitality and his zealous support of the new regime was to become the mayor of Reims, not by public election, as one might have expected of a former Jacobin revolutionary, but by the imperial decree of the emperor.

  In the spring of 1810, even Barbe-Nicole was caught up in some of the excitement surrounding her father’s new position and Napoléon’s impending second marriage to the Austrian archduchess Marie Louise—niece to the ill-fated Marie Antoinette and, like her aunt before her, being sent to her future husband as so much checked baggage in a train of magnificent carriages from the east. Her destination was the Château de Compiègne, a grand royal palace some fifty miles northeast of Paris. The road passed very near to Reims. Barbe-Nicole certainly witnessed the arrival in the city of the pretty archduchess and her convoy. Living in the center of Reims, she would have found it hard to miss. But it was especially hard since her father, always a royalist at heart, had personally organized the extravagant celebrations to welcome her.

  While more fashionable women like her sister were aflutter with talk of seeing the new empress and of the magnificence of her court, Barbe-Nicole had just one wish. She hoped that this new marriage to one of Napoléon’s most powerful sparring partners would buy them some peace. The “marriage of the Archduchess Louise is fixed for the 25 of March at Compiègne [and] she will pass our village,” she wrote to Louis Bohne. “If she can give us the peace it will be a great good for the people.”

  Whatever her father’s personal feelings about Napoléon—and personal feelings don’t seem to have
guided his political allegiances unduly—Barbe-Nicole by now hated the man. She had no patience with his wars any longer, and she and Louis referred to him in their letters simply as “the devil.” His open support for her competitor, Jean-Rémy Moët, undoubtedly played some small role in their antagonism.

  Her feelings for the brazen emperor were probably not softened when she learned that Napoléon had been spreading his influence further in the vineyards of the Champagne. He awarded another competitor, Memmie Jacquesson, proprietor of Jacquesson and Sons in nearby Châlons-sur-Marne, with a gold medal intended to reflect the emperor’s personal appreciation of “the beauty and richness of their cellars.” Then, as an additional mark of his favor, Napoléon asked Jacquesson to supply the champagne for his wedding to Archduchess Marie Louise. It was discouraging. These were sales Barbe-Nicole hated to see go to a competitor—especially one who had been in business for just over a decade. In the luxury wine market, she was already learning that name recognition meant everything, and here was another newcomer nurturing a personal relationship with the most powerful man—and purchaser—in all of France.

  The biggest change of all for Barbe-Nicole that year was the most obvious one: Against all the odds, she would soon be an independent woman running a well-funded international business. That fact alone makes her an exceptional woman in her era. A surprising number of women—widows especially—ran small companies in order to ensure their family’s economic survival, especially in traditionally feminine businesses like dressmaking or innkeeping. But in the entire century, only a handful of women in France owned businesses with the sort of capital that Barbe-Nicole commanded. She was already a pioneer, just by having taken these enormous chances.