The Widow Clicquot

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Chapter 10

  A Comet over Russia: The Vintage of 1811

  Success brought with it new challenges and new opportunities—all of them risky and exhilarating. Like her father, Barbe-Nicole was not a passive idealist, and she was never more levelheaded than in moments of crisis. In an age of social unrest and economic uncertainty, Nicolas Ponsardin was a survivor. His daughter would be that and more.

  The first shipment was a stunning victory, her first major coup in almost six years of running the company. It was making her a local celebrity. As word of her daring and foresight reached her competitors in Reims, there were whispers of astonishment and—what a pleasant change—even whispers of professional jealousy. Soon Louis wrote, tongue in cheek, with his fantasies of driving the competitors mad with envy. “I am bored of seeing them leave us in peace taking the money,” he wrote. “When the time is right…celebrity is the natural result, it is this that I am after for you; better to be envied than pitied; while they backbite, we will fill our pockets, and when we have skimmed the cream of the pot, we will laugh in the corner to watch them grimace in their dens and wring their hands…. You [can rest] secure…in the exclusive confidence of Russia [and] in your bank account.” Indeed, in a matter of weeks she had brought in the equivalent of over $1 million in sales.

  Now, Louis could report that they had sold their entire stock of the first 10,550 bottles of the Widow Clicquot’s champagne. Some of it he had sold the moment he landed—just enough to recover the costs and make them a small profit, in case of disaster. The rest he had sent on to their distributor in Russia, Monsieur Boissonet, where the prices they commanded were even higher. In both markets, there was a buying frenzy. Barbe-Nicole wrote, breathlessly, “Great God! What a price! How novel! I am over the top with joy and satisfaction. What overwhelming happiness this change will pay out. The Heavens have showered me with blessings, after all the terrible moments I have passed. I owe you a thousand and thousand thanks.”

  While this news of their financial success was fabulous, even more heartening were the rave reviews. Winemaking was her passion, and Barbe-Nicole knew that she had been a relentless and sometimes even meddlesome employer. She didn’t keep to her offices and leave her winemakers to craft the vintage. An unrepentant perfectionist, she had her hand in everything. Now, that vigilance had clearly paid dividends.

  Louis reported from Königsberg that when people tasted Barbe-Nicole’s wines, the streets of the city buzzed. The Widow Clicquot’s 1811 vintage—the wine from the year of the comet—was extraordinary. “I am adored here,” Louis told her, “because my wines are adorable…what a spectacle.” Her champagnes were the toast when the king of Prussia celebrated his birthday, and Louis wrote to tell her that “two-thirds of the high society of Königsberg…are at your feet as a result of your nectar…. Of all the fine wines that have teased northern heads, none compare to Madame Clicquot’s 1811 cuvée. Delicious to taste, it is an assassin, and anyone who wants to make its acquaintance will become well attached to his chair, because after paying his respects to a bottle, he will go looking for crumbs under the tables.”

  Louis wasn’t kidding when he said that people who drank her 1811 champagne were likely to find themselves under the table come dawn. Not only was it delicious, it was powerful. The rich, sugary grapes of that perfect harvest had created a strongly alcoholic wine, with an excellent mousse that made the corks come flying out with a pleasant and resounding pop. What those British scientists discovered at the end of the seventeenth century that made the production of champagne possible in the beginning was the simple fact that adding sugar increased both alcohol and fizz. During the harvest of 1811, nature needed no assistance, and the result was intoxicating.

  In Saint Petersburg, the Widow Clicquot’s wine was an even greater sensation, if that were imaginable. It sold for higher prices than she ever could have dreamed. Those same aristocratic officers who had come to love her wine during the occupation of Reims were now prepared to buy her champagne at any price. Soon, Czar Alexander declared that he would drink nothing else. Everywhere one heard the name of the Widow Clicquot and praises of her divine champagne. Knowing that the Russian market was at their feet, Louis laughingly wrote a final letter from Königsberg to tell her that he was even now headed to the shops to buy wine for a farewell dinner. He had sold every last bottle, and he was on his way to Saint Petersburg, eager to take new advance orders. Before long, he wrote: “I have already in my portfolio [orders for] a new assault on your caves.” Barbe-Nicole was ready for them. She was ready—and then some.

  What came after those first few moments of unimaginable pleasure, rereading Louis’s letter with news of her triumph, was a sickening sense of relief. The secret gamble she had taken was far, far bigger than anyone had known, and it was enough to keep even the most hardheaded businessman—or businesswoman—up at night in a panic. Now, it would make her success more stunning than her competitors could imagine.

  Before she knew that her champagnes would command an astonishing 5.5 francs a bottle and could be sold from a hotel room—before she even knew that the wines had survived their perilous sea journey in the last days of a war that defined a generation—she had started making plans to send a second, larger shipment. More of that magical vintage of 1811, which those lucky enough to taste it agreed was nothing less than spectacular.

  While Louis and the first shipment were still making their uncertain way to Königsberg in the tossing hull of the Zes Gebroeders, merchants in Reims had learned that the Russian czar had lifted the ban on bottled French wines. It had been a ban calculated to thwart Napoléon and his dreams of making champagne a distinctive French luxury. Now, Napoléon had been defeated, and all of Saint Petersburg was thirsting for a taste of champagne.

  Word of the end of the ban had spread throughout the city’s commercial network with a feverish intensity. In the business offices and along the docks of the river, where local wines began the long, slow journey to Paris and the seacoast, all the talk was of the export trade—and of the astonishing prices champagne would bring as all of Europe celebrated the end of an agonizing war. Already cellar work was under way to prepare thousands of bottles for travel.

  Barbe-Nicole quickly realized that she faced another agonizing decision. Within weeks, it would be impossible to charter a ship. Throughout France, merchants were rushing to get their products to the export market, and there would not be enough boats to satisfy them all. If Louis was successful and if her wines survived the voyage, there would soon be no way to get more cases to him—unless she acted immediately. The advantage of arriving first, she knew, would soon be lost. And it wasn’t a matter just of sales. It was a matter of market share. She did not want to sell just ten thousand bottles of wine. She wanted to conquer the entire market.

  The risk of making plans to send the second shipment blind had meant that, should Louis fail in Königsberg, her financial ruin would be compounded terribly—perhaps hopelessly. She would have to make a bargain with a sea captain before she knew exactly how she would pay his bills. It took nerve and determination, but Barbe-Nicole saw that there was no real choice. She had not come this far to lose the first opportunity in years because her courage failed.

  Thank goodness she had not flinched. When news reached her competitors that she had beat them all to the international market, when they began scrambling to find ships to carry their wines, she had—for the second glorious time—a head start. Already Monsieur Cléroult, captain of La Bonne Intention, was waiting for her in Rouen, ready to deliver another 12,780 bottles of that legendary vintage of 1811. The sea journey would still be treacherous for these delicate wines. This time, no one would sail with them.

  Now, her greatest enemy was not a grueling wartime economic climate. It was the summer weather. Extreme temperatures—either hot or cold—would ruin her wines, and there were only two times during the year when a champagne dealer could reliably make shipments. Transporting bottles of champagne in the
summer heat was a sure way to end up with shattered glass. Frozen wines fared no better. But during the spring and fall, weather permitting, the wines could be sent by barge, along the broad river that runs through the Champagne region. This second midsummer shipment was being sent much too late.

  Even in season, there were perennial problems with the wines arriving in good shape. Barbe-Nicole did not have the advantages of contemporary winemaking technologies or modern transportation. Her bottled sparkling wines had to survive a bumpy and slow journey, packaged only in woven baskets and wooden crates, along the roads and docks of Europe, unprotected from delays, temperature variations, and robbery. Cask wines transported in barrels—barrels that were easy to tap and reseal on the road—were subject to the additional hazards of adulteration, when thirsty handlers siphoned off a bit of the product to ease the journey and replaced the missing volume with water. Or worse.

  Amazingly, however, the second shipment also survived. It was victory following on victory. Writing to her cousin Jennie, who was still struggling with wartime shortages in Paris, Barbe-Nicole was reeling from how quickly everything had changed in Reims. “If my business continues as it has gone since the invasion of the allies in France, if my daughter is someday married,” she wrote in November, “I will be able to live, if not as one of the rich, at least in affluence, and then my house will always be a safe port, where you can retire, without depending on anyone. We wait together for what divine Providence has planned for us. So we go day by day and do not despair. You remember how last year at this time I was desolate!…I didn’t have any hope of doing anything [and] the advance of the Russians over the Rhine was the last straw. And now, out of all these misfortunes came the good business I have had, and I dare to hope for more. Maybe for the rest you also have a dose of good luck coming. We can’t always be unlucky, in my experience. And so, my dear friend: courage, patience, and resignation.”

  In truth, her luck was not yet finished. Not even close. These two daring shipments were to make her one of the most famous women in Europe and her wine one of the most highly prized commodities of the nineteenth century. As Louis told her, it was a success born out of “your judicious manner of operating, your excellent wine, and the marvelous similarity of our ideas, which produced the most splendid unity and action and execution—we did it well, and I give a million thanks to the bounty of the divine Providence who saw fit to make me one of his instruments in your future well-being—and no trials in the world would stop me from doing it again, to justify the unlimited confidence you have placed in me, and which has produced such happy results. Certainly you merit all the glory possible after all your misfortunes, your perseverance, and your obvious talents.” As Louis recognized, it wasn’t the sales figures or the excellent quality of her wines alone that would finally turn her into a business legend. It was the astonishing ruse that got her champagnes to Russia first. The secret advance shipments were a breathtaking one-two knockout punch that turned the Widow Clicquot into a luxury brand name in one of the world’s largest—and most fashionable—markets.

  Ironically, the celebrity that followed had little to do with Barbe-Nicole the private woman. Like the poet Lord Byron, whose witty travel adventure Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage became the runaway best seller of 1812, she could say in all truth that she awoke one morning to find herself famous. Unlike that rakish devil-may-care young lord, however, few people who repeated the name of the Widow Clicquot in the first years of her meteoric rise on the world stage knew the story of the woman behind the company. Perhaps this curious manifestation of the public anonymity that should have been her destiny—the same pragmatic kind of self-effacement signaled by her decision to wear the black widow’s weeds permanently—was part of the reason a woman-owned business was able to flourish in an increasingly conservative postwar Europe.

  At the same time, it is also worth considering, even if only in passing, what it was about the first few decades of the nineteenth century that was so special. It was during these years that the champagne industry, like so many other industries in postrevolutionary Europe, went from being the craft of rural artisans to big business. The family-run wine brokerages of the late eighteenth century were on the brink of becoming large commercial companies—or they were on the brink of disappearing. A generation earlier, the actual winemaking had been in the hands of the rural growers, who raised the grapes, made the wines, and, especially with champagne, bottled them. François had been part of the small group of wine distributors who cautiously began to take this last stage of the winemaking process out of the hands of the farmers, and he had occasion to wonder sometimes if the new risks were worth the increased profits. What François had begun, Barbe-Nicole had embraced with a singular sense of mission, and it was because of this that she was poised to become an important figure in the evolution of champagne.

  Champagne, after all, was not going to be an artisan family affair for long: The future was in a manufacturing model of doing business. A boom was coming in the champagne industry, and those who benefited from it were the entrepreneurs who were starting to take control of the production process. Barbe-Nicole, who had always found pleasure in watching the harvest and learning the cellar work, was at the vanguard of this movement. She not only bottled the vast proportion of her own wines but she committed herself to blending and aging them. Thinking like the daughter of a manufacturer, she hounded her suppliers mercilessly. In the company archives in Reims, there are pages and pages of scolding correspondence where she writes about the shape of the bottles she needed delivered or the quality of the corks she wanted cut. The manufacturers soon learned that she would come to complain in person if it was the only way to get what she required. Before long, she would also begin buying new vineyards, in order to supply more of her own grapes.

  The world of business was changing, and the wine industry was changing with it. It seems obvious now, but at the beginning of the nineteenth century, capitalism was still a relatively new idea. “The world market which was slowly coming into existence acted as the engine of proto-industrial growth” in France, and mass culture emerged with it. In this quickly changing business climate, Barbe-Nicole was lucky—not so much in her choice of husband, but in Philippe and her father. Their creative engagement with the early industrialization of the textile industry and with the new economy of a peacetime Europe, combined with an old-fashioned willingness to entertain the possibility of a entrepreneurial daughter, at precisely that moment when this was becoming socially unacceptable, meant that Barbe-Nicole had a chance. A few years later, it was harder for a woman to enter the world of commerce. A few years earlier, and she wouldn’t have learned how the world of commerce was being transformed. The old model of the bourgeois family businesswoman was doomed, and what is truly astonishing about her story is that Barbe-Nicole was uniquely positioned to invent a new model.

  If she had tried to run an eighteenth-century company, no one today would remember the Widow Clicquot. I’ve never yet found the local who could tell me the story of the Widow Blanc or the Widow Robert, even in the coziest country bistro. Ironically, the rise of capitalism and the end of the bourgeois family businesswoman went hand in hand. As one scholar puts it, “Most gender historians, and even business historians, agree that those women would have disappeared between the end of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth century, pushed out by the combined impact of the separate spheres ideology and of structural changes, such as industrialization, the use of extra-familial capital, and the ‘managerial revolution.’” If Barbe-Nicole had clung to the old model of women in the commercial sphere, she might have struggled by. But she would never have become one of the most famous businesswomen of her century.

  Instead of clinging to the old ways and retreating to the safety of a modest, outdated, but still tacitly acceptable entrepreneurial role for women, Barbe-Nicole became an ardent industrialist. She was not just the first woman to build a commercial champagne house founded on new mercantilist
principles; she was one of only a handful of entrepreneurs to do it at all. She wasn’t amazing just as a businesswoman. She was amazing at business. When we look at the names of the famous champagnes on our grocery store shelves, the so-called grandes marques, it should come as no surprise that these are the names of Barbe-Nicole’s nineteenth-century competitors. Jean-Rémy Moët and his son-in-law Pierre-Gabriel Chandon. Jules Mumm. Louis Roederer. Charles Heidsieck. Her grandmother’s family, the pioneering Ruinarts. A small group of entrepreneurs modernized the champagne industry and made vast fortunes in the process. The Widow Clicquot was among them from the start.

  Chapter 11

  The Industrialist’s Daughter

  By the time she was in her late thirties, Barbe-Nicole had achieved something spectacular. When the summer of 1815 began, she was at the helm of an internationally renowned commercial empire—and she was one of the first women in modern history to do it. The odds against her had been genuinely staggering. There was not just a glass ceiling; there was an industrial culture that increasingly told women they had no place in the public world of business and economics, no foothold even on the first rung of the corporate ladder.