On the last day of July, she opened her own new account ledger for the business that she would call, from that moment forward, Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin and Company. Her account book showed on the order of 60,000 bottles of wine in stocks, six dozen additional casks, 10,000 empty bottles, and nearly 125,000 corks. Her father-in-law, Philippe, still prepared to gamble on her ambition and talent, reinvested his 30,000 francs, maintaining a share in the company both were both determined to keep alive.
To hurry the liquidation and settlements, she began sending out announcements that summer to clients, asking for the prompt payment of outstanding accounts. She was anxious to settle the books. On some of these announcements, we see her elegant and carefully looped signature, reading simply: Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin. It is the same distinctive signature reprinted today on every bottle of the yellow label nonvintage champagne that bears her name.
In the cellar and with the direction of the business, she had other new ideas and new plans as well, but they were initiatives she wanted to discuss with Louis Bohne when he returned from his travels. Louis was in love, and he had delayed beginning married life during his long years on the road for the Clicquot family. Now he was engaged to Miss Rheinwald, the daughter of a town councilman. There are no other details about this young woman who captured Louis’s heart. All we can guess about her is that, like Louis, she came from a German family. Louis planned to take several months off from work while the liquidation details were arranged. It would be an extended honeymoon, a chance to start a family for a man who had spent much of the past five years far from home.
Barbe-Nicole welcomed the opportunity to have Louis close at hand during the early months of her new solo leadership. The other salesmen would be back on the road immediately, bringing in new orders even as the final business of Veuve Clicquot Fourneaux and Company was resolved. Louis, however, would be able to advise, and she would be at leisure to talk through her plans with this reliable—and undeniably expert—employee, just as she had heard François do in that long summer before his death. A number of important decisions needed to be made that would shape the future of the business profoundly. If Barbe-Nicole had the advantage of seeing things with the fresh eyes of inexperience, she also had the sense to learn from those she trusted.
There was the question of her trademark, but that was simple enough, at least. During her partnership with Alexandre, they had burned the symbol of the anchor into the corks of the wines blended and bottled by the company. It was as close to a trademark as any champagne house had at the turn of the nineteenth century, when wine labels were still virtually unknown. Shipping cases and casks were often labeled with the company initials and with some information to identify the client and the type of wine to avoid things going astray on the crowded docks of wartime Europe, but the colorful marketing of bottles that we know today had not yet been invented.
At this time, once a bottle of wine was unpacked, only the cork and the color of the resin sealing wax around the collar of the bottle distinguished the wine of one house from another. The sealing wax collar, the so-called goudron, was often elaborate and pretty, but it was not particularly reliable as a way to distinguish the wines of one vintner from another. Moët colored his caps in brilliant greens flecked with gold or silver. But Philippe Clicquot used exactly the same color scheme. So did Barbe-Nicole after him. Marketing was in its infancy, and at a time when many brokers still purchased their bottled wines ready-made from a variety of local suppliers, few champagne houses or few of their clients thought of particular wines as the distinctive product of an individual company.
Apart from the colorful goudron, the only other way to identify a bottle of wine as coming from the cellars of the Widow Clicquot was the symbol branded on the cork. The family had first used the anchor as a company symbol just after her marriage, when Philippe and François started Clicquot-Muiron together, and she was determined to continue the tradition. Perhaps it reminded her of François’s presence in the company that they had dreamed of building together. Perhaps it was a nod to the export markets and the ocean trade that François had worked to open. From the beginning, it had always been used because it was the traditional symbol of hope. They had started using it when the future seemed promising, when they could look forward to a life together and to prosperous new directions. She would not give up on it now—and the symbol can still be found today on the labels of a bottle of the Widow’s famous bubbly.
Now at the helm of her own company, she had other, more thorny questions to tackle about work in the cellars and the direction of her business in a disastrous economy. With the intensification of the blockades and the unstable currency rates, it was a difficult time to export wine, and Barbe-Nicole could not afford a major financial setback. She was risking her own independence, and the company had been struggling for several years. She retrenched and diversified. Under her new direction, the company began selling more local red wines by the barrel on the domestic French market, rather than going to the unnecessary expense of bottling these wines for an international luxury market that in many cases she could not reach. The largest proportion of these wines was from the grapes raised on her own estates, sold to clients within a few hundred miles of Reims.
When she did export bottled wines, Barbe-Nicole also made a point of including an impressive selection of high-end vintages from other, more fashionable parts of France. The red wines from the Champagne, which had once rivaled the wines of Burgundy in their bouquet and delicacy, were no longer so highly reputed. The exceptions were wines from a handful of renowned villages in the Champagne, villages that most fortuitously included Bouzy, where it was now left to her to manage the Muiron vineyards that she and François had inherited. She could still remember spending the long hours of the early morning watching the crush in the coolness of the pressing room, and she knew that it was excellent land. Involvement in every aspect of the business was to be her hallmark, and the barrels from the Bouzy estate are likely to have been the first wines that Barbe-Nicole could boast of being crafted under her sole direction. By selling them directly to customers, she maximized her slender profits.
She also continued making champagne. The obstacles to international trade made an exclusive focus on sparkling wine impossible for a young broker still establishing her name, and she would have to be prepared for some proportion of her stocks to sit unsold in her cellars for months, perhaps even years. On those long summer nights before the harvest, when François and Louis had dreamed together of vast new markets in Great Britain or in Russia, Barbe-Nicole had been enchanted, and she still believed in their shared vision. Even as she turned to concrete sales in domestic markets, she kept her travelers seeking out new opportunities abroad and keeping up old contacts on the other side of closed borders.
Barbe-Nicole’s workday, in the cellars or at her desk, began at seven in the morning, and she rarely set aside her account books and letters until nine or ten in the evening. Running a family business required a staggering amount of work, and she prided herself on quickly and carefully answering the endless correspondence she received. This commitment came at a high personal cost. At some point during her first years of running the business with Alexandre, Barbe-Nicole sent her daughter, Clémentine, away to a convent boarding school in Paris. Since six or seven was the usual age for girls to be enrolled in convents, it is likely the loss of her daughter as a companion coincided with the founding of the joint company in 1806. She had already learned, like so many single mothers, the heartbreaking challenges of raising a child while running a business.
Sending Clémentine away to school in Paris had not been a coldhearted decision. Barbe-Nicole’s sister had been sent to school at the same age, and strange as it may seem to modern parents, who would no more send their young children away to a convent than leave them on the side of a busy street unattended, boarding school for young girls was normal. But that did not mean Barbe-Nicole didn’t miss her daughter. Her letters show that she was a dev
oted and pragmatic mother, determined to protect her daughter’s future and her happiness but also convinced that Mentine, as the girl was known in the family, had not inherited the same sharp intelligence of her mother or grandfather. Still, Barbe-Nicole knew that the nuns would look after Clémentine and that she would be taught to read and write. Clémentine surely learned, as her mother had done before her, the art of fine needlework and the Catholic catechism, and Barbe-Nicole could rely on her mother’s Paris cousins to keep an eye on the girl in the event of something unexpected. There was no doubt, however, about the life that Barbe-Nicole imagined for her daughter. It would not be a future in business. It would be the same life of quiet domesticity and affluent privilege that Barbe-Nicole had rejected.
That summer, Barbe-Nicole had reason to think about that life of luxury and the risks she was taking with the business. She had decided to sell some of her jewelry in order to finance the business. She could have spent her days finding occasions to wear it. Now, much of her capital was tied up in the company, and there must have been cash flow issues. Otherwise, it is unlikely she would have parted with these family assets.
During the first year of the transition, when her affairs were being disentangled from those of Alexandre Fourneaux and when joint holdings were being liquidated, the company would make only a small profit. She owned sizable vineyards and had some excellent stocks in her cellars. None of that was much help in paying the salaries of her cellar workers or settling the inevitable bills, however. By August, Barbe-Nicole had come up with a plan, asking her salesman Charles to sell her jewelry at the royal courts of eastern Europe.
The letters that she wrote about the sale are anxious ones, and worry about the jewelry occupied her mind for much of the autumn. Charles was using all his persuasive charms drumming up orders in Léopol (now Lviv, Ukraine), then part of the Austrian Empire, and Barbe-Nicole hoped he might also find a noble family to buy some jewelry: a large quantity of rose pearl necklaces and a diamond valued at an astonishing 3,000 francs—close to $60,000. By mid-October, Charles had shipped half the necklaces to one of his friends, who had offered to act as an agent. She begged him not to let the diamond out of his sight. “I pray that you will keep it on your person,” she wrote him. It would be far too valuable to lose. A month later, the diamond remained unsold, and then it disappears from the account books in the company archives at Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin. Few people had money to spend on extravagances of this sort. Louis wrote from Vienna that the nobility were short of cash. For the working people, it was worse. It had been three years since the wheat harvest had been sold. People couldn’t afford to buy even this staple crop. It seems likely that Barbe-Nicole got to keep her diamond, although she needed the capital more.
Much of her energy that autumn was also given over to worrying about technical difficulties in the cellars. Her chief winemaker was now Jacob, the same man who had worked for François and his father at Clicquot-Muiron, and they were in constant communication. Often, Jérôme Fourneaux could be found advising or lending a hand. Cloudy wine or ropey wines still frustrated her, and there were the inevitable disappointments of breakages.
Then there were problems with the bubbles themselves. Sometimes customers complained that they were too big and gassy, with a tendency to froth and leave an unappetizing thick and beady foam on the top of the glass. Barbe-Nicole and Louis referred despairingly to these large bubbles as yeux de crapaud—toad’s eyes. Louis, quite serious but with a bit of the honeymooner’s rakish charm, confessed, “This is a terrible thing that gets up and goes to bed with me: toad’s eyes! I like large eyes everywhere except in Champagne wine. May Heaven preserve us from their destructive effect.” He and Barbe-Nicole often shared flirtatious little jokes like this. Just because she was a widow and just because she educated her daughter in a convent didn’t mean she lived like a nun. But the concern about toad’s eyes was not a laughing matter, when it came down to it. The flaw, likely caused by allowing the wine to rest too long in wooden casks in the early stages of production, was a serious obstacle to luxury sales because clarity and mousse mattered more to their customers even than taste. And they had no clear idea how to solve the problem.
Unfortunately, the glasses used to drink champagne in the nineteenth century, although not the cause of toad’s eyes, would not have helped the problem. Barbe-Nicole drank her sparkling wine from the broad, shallow glasses that we call coupes and usually associate with the glamour of the Jazz Age and early Hollywood films. These glasses were first made popular during the seventeenth century, and wine lovers everywhere used them for drinking champagne well into the twentieth century, despite firm instructions to hosts and hostesses after the 1850s to “never use the present round saucer animalcula-catching champagne glasses, but…tulip-shaped ones.”
Today, the staunch preference is for the tall, slender champagne flute, and if you care about your champagne having the smallest possible bubbles—and many connoisseurs do—the flute is the glass to use. Owing to basic mechanics, the bubbles are smaller and prettier in narrow glasses. Still, more often than not, which glass to choose and the size you like your bubbles comes down to a question of appearance rather than taste. Bigger bubbles do not taste appreciably different from smaller ones. The finest champagnes are celebrated for their small, slow bubbles, which rise with mesmerizing grace to the surface of the glass and leave a light and airy foam. This is because the older a champagne is, the smaller the bubbles become. Because only vintage champagnes are aged extensively, we naturally associate small bubbles with the finest-quality wines.
By December, as Barbe-Nicole was looking forward, perhaps with some trepidation, to her thirty-third birthday, the books had been mostly closed on Veuve Clicquot Fourneaux. The Clicquot family still owned cellars and offices on rue de la Vache, and Barbe-Nicole also owned a country estate outside Oger, in the heart of the Côte des Blancs, just south of the renowned vineyards at Avize and Cramant and on the edge of the great forest that stretched for miles to the west. Although architecturally imposing in the classical French style, with a broad hip roof and big open windows looking onto the fields, the house was her refuge, decorated for comfort, with soft sofas and chairs in the cheerful blue chintz that was then the height of fashion. From the rooms, Barbe-Nicole could watch the progress of her vines, chardonnay grapes destined to become champagne.
Despite the allure of Oger, she spent most of her time in Reims, running the business as often as not from one of the pleasant rooms at home. She still lived in the house she had shared with François before his death, on rue de l’Hôpital, named after the hospital that stood in that part of town. It was a serene and airy place, and the focal point of her private office was a pretty wooden desk, built in the popular style of the Empire period and still on display at the tasting rooms of Champagne Veuve Clicquot in Reims. From here, she maintained the account books and wrote pages and pages of correspondence to her salesmen, clients, and suppliers. It was reassuring to know that the cellars beneath her home connected, in their dark circuitous way, to the cellars underneath her childhood home at the Hôtel Ponsardin.
Less reassuring was the news from ports across Europe. The British had intensified their policing of the blockades, and conditions for international trade were growing steadily worse. Back on the road, Louis was exasperated, and he had nothing nice to say about the British, either. He called them “maritime harpies” and the “assassins of prosperity.” More bluntly, he wrote to Barbe-Nicole in a fit of pique, “The more I come to hate the English, the more I wish for the corruption of their morals. That God would give us peace so we could avenge their evil gullets…[and] make them addicted to habitual drunkenness.” Louis fantasized that drowning the British in the champagne of the Widow Clicquot would be a just retribution. How they would have suffered!
In fact, despite the closed ports, few British wine lovers were feeling very parched. During the holiday season, the British market was one of the strongest in Europe for champagne
makers, and Louis himself made some lucky sales there. “Here,” he wrote to Barbe-Nicole, “2,000 bottles have been easily sold because of the season…on Christmas day all the English…drink their champagne wine, it is the day exclusively privileged in their homes for this drink.” Jean-Rémy Moët, with his far stronger contacts in Great Britain and his better name recognition in the island nation, was having even greater success. But the seasonal British market could not keep all the champagne makers in the region afloat. The next year they learned that one of their competitors, the firm of Tronsson-Jacquesson, was bankrupt.
By the summer of 1811, Barbe-Nicole could be forgiven for feeling a bit panicked. Despite the slow collapse that year of the French economic blockades, the allied counterblockades had lost none of their sting. That spring, she had orders for fewer than thirty-three thousand bottles. With Napoléon and the czar again at odds, in large part because of Alexander’s lackluster support for the French emperor’s crippling trade restrictions, the Russian market—where she had once been recognized as an emerging name in the champagne business—was effectively closed, and war on that front again seemed certain. The Russians were building up troops on the distant borders of French territories in the east, and the British ruled the English Channel. Much of Europe was still broke, and the continent was limping along on the brink of fresh economic collapse. All export required licenses, but Barbe-Nicole knew what they really were: heavy war taxes on her wines.
As France began to lose ground, everything seemed to become more vicious. Louis sent back to Barbe-Nicole letters from Austria telling her about the destruction and misery that he saw everywhere. Napoléon controlled Austria, along with Prussia and Denmark, as client states, but the “independence” of these “sister republics” came at a high and often humiliating cost for their citizens, and the very idea of offering to sell a luxury like champagne was offensive to people who had been brutalized by Napoléon’s armies. Louis quickly understood that he would not find a warm welcome.
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