Sadly, women like Barbe-Nicole are still a rarity in the modern world of winemaking. They are a rarity in the world of champagne especially. In France, a handful of women run wine estates—prestigious, wonderful places like Château Margaux or Château Mouton Rothschild. Still, they are not champagne houses. Only at Champagne Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin is there a woman at the helm today, and even that is a relatively recent development.
But Barbe-Nicole did more than just run the boardroom of a world-renowned champagne business; she also took a central role in crafting the sparkling wines that carried her name. Today, in all of Europe, there is not a single woman who does both. If one wants to find the modern equivalent of the Widow Clicquot, the best place to look is not the Champagne but the still emergent wine country of Northern California, in those golden oak–covered hills of Napa and Sonoma counties. The collapse of the California wine industry in the 1970s and 1980s had the same effect as the Champagne crisis of the 1780s and 1790s: An “industry in retreat” opened doors for new entrepreneurs and especially for women winemakers.
In my own journey to find the Widow Clicquot—to discover what it must have been like for Barbe-Nicole in her first decade of running her own wine company—I sought out some of these modern champagne women. What amazed me most was that they displayed the same steely charm and no-nonsense style that were Barbe-Nicole’s personal hallmark. One of the most charming is Eileen Crane, president and winemaker of Napa’s Domaine Carneros, whom I first visited because of a curious bit of company history. Domaine Carneros was founded in the 1980s by the champagne house once run by Barbe-Nicole’s first business partner, Alexandre Fourneaux—now known as Champagne Taittinger.
I visited Domaine Carneros on a warm, clear October afternoon. Until you drive through the vineyards of wine country in the weeks after the crush, it is easy to forget that this corner of California has foliage to rival the back lanes of my native New England. In the days before the rains come to soak the dry chalk hills, the grapevines slowly turn orange and red. The estates at Domaine Carneros are set against this leafy canvas, a great French château rising out of the fields—or at least an imitation of one.
It is a building that Barbe-Nicole would have recognized instantly. Here, in the midst of the rugged American West, the champagne company has raised a replica of the Château de la Marquetterie, which still stands in the southern village of Pierry in the heart of the Champagne. Barbe-Nicole passed it every autumn, on her way to the vineyards in the southern Côte des Blancs, renowned for its chardonnay grapes. Built in the 1750s on the site of the ancient estate of the monks of Saint-Pierre aux Monts de Châlons, the château was named after its famous vineyards, where the local black pinot noir and white chardonnay grapes were laid out in a playful checkerboard fashion—like a piece of the inlaid veneer woodwork known as “marquetry.” In the first days of the revolutionary terror, when Barbe-Nicole’s family was caught up in the dangerous turmoil of Jacobin politics, the château’s owner was among the thousands who fell victim to the guillotine in 1793. But already the château was renowned for the role it had played in the history of champagne. It was here, only a few miles from Hautvillers, that the seventeenth-century monk Jean Oudart—one of Dom Pérignon’s lay brothers and probably another of his local collaborators—conducted some of the earliest but least remembered experiments with that sparkling wine once known simply as vin mousseux.
Barbe-Nicole would also have recognized Eileen Crane, I think. We sit in her office overlooking the veranda of Domaine Carneros, where visitors enjoy her sparkling wine at café tables, and she talks with passion about winemaking. About making champagne not just something for the rich and famous but something for ordinary middle-class people ready to celebrate little luxuries as wonderful and as simple as the beginning of a weekend. Barbe-Nicole had the same vision. People still worry, Crane says, about champagne: how to open it, how to serve it. They worry that they have to wear a tuxedo and use the right glasses. The truth is, champagne is great with pizza and a bubble bath. Even the legendary wine connoisseur Hugh Johnson tells us—and who could possibly dispute such transparent wisdom—“Any big glass is good for champagne.” Barbe-Nicole, with her disdain for all things fussy and her love of champagne, would agree.
Ironically, the glasses we use to drink our champagne today also owe a great deal to Barbe-Nicole’s legacy as a winemaker. This is because Barbe-Nicole was not just a brilliant businesswoman, she was also one of the most important technical innovators in the commercial history of sparkling wine. I ask Eileen Crane which glasses she prefers for drinking champagne, and with a laugh she tells me that her sister has a collection of dozens of unique and mismatched champagne glasses, some modern and some antiques, that she uses at parties. Each guest chooses whatever strikes his or her fancy, and that, she says, is the best method. But, more soberly, she also reminds me that in the early days of champagne, before the Widow Clicquot came on the scene, before even the stylish rounded coupes of the mid-eighteenth century, the first champagne glasses looked like miniature versions of the V-shaped stemware that we use today for drinking pilsner beer, and they were made of frosted glass. This was the custom because for a long time champagne was served just like pilsner beer—carbonated and a bit clouded. Barbe-Nicole became obsessed with producing clear wine that sparkled like mineral water. Without her single-minded devotion to this element of craft, champagne would never have become a luxury product accessible to the middle-class market.
Barbe-Nicole today is credited with three achievements: “internationalizing the Champagne market,” “establishing brand identification,” and developing the process known in French as remuage sur pupitre—literally “moving by desk.” In 1815, with her triumph in Königsberg already the topic of business legend, no one doubted her international prowess. In early pamphlets trumpeting her accomplishments, it was said that she had conquered Russia with her champagne—and from a commercial and cultural perspective, it’s not much of an exaggeration. In the first years of her fame, the Widow Clicquot had already become synonymous with sparkling wine throughout much of Europe. Before long, young playboys in the clubs of London were calling simply for “a bottle of the Widow” when they were low on bubbly. In Russia, she was known as Klikoskaya, and her name was celebrated in some of the greatest nineteenth-century works of Russian literature. But it’s the last achievement that makes Barbe-Nicole most famous in winemaking history. Without her discovery of remuage—an efficient system for clearing champagne of the yeasty debris trapped in the bottle after secondary fermentation—champagne could never have become the world’s most famous wine.
After her stunning coup in Russia, Barbe-Nicole discovered that she had a new set of problems. Increasingly, it was production that worried her. With Louis in Saint Petersburg capitalizing on their success, the orders were rolling in. The problem was how she was ever going to fill them. “It is cruel,” Louis wrote, “to have to refuse orders, as I am going to have to start doing, when I am easily able to place twenty or thirty thousand bottles.”
The weather was not cooperating. The harvest in the autumn of 1815 was dismal, which was sure to lead to a supply crunch when the bottles came to market in 1817. More immediate for the local peasantry, crop failure meant the distinct possibility of starvation. The situation was so grave that Barbe-Nicole’s father led a fund-raising charity campaign among the local businessmen to help feed the poor, raising 60,000 francs—well over $1 million. The local entrepreneurs had good reason to pay attention to the workers’ plight, Barbe-Nicole in particular. Winemaking was a labor-intensive undertaking. By winter, grain was impossible to come by in the markets, and the countryside had become dangerous. She knew there would be problems in the fields again in the spring. Her problems were small compared with those faced by her vignerons, of course. But for her they were troublesome enough, because by the beginning of 1816 there simply wasn’t any finished champagne left in the cellars. She had sold all her reserves. After years of struggling ju
st to stay in business, nothing was more frustrating than having to turn away orders. Worse, without champagne to send, Barbe-Nicole knew that she risked losing all the customers her daring adventures had won her, just at the moment when her sparkling wine was becoming a recognized luxury product in the world market. She needed champagne—excellent champagne—and she needed it fast.
But there is no hurrying the birth of a great wine. Standing grim-faced in the dim light of her cellars, Barbe-Nicole knew that her only real hope was in finding a way to solve the worst production bottleneck: the tedious delays in disgorging the wines. During the secondary fermentation, when sugar and yeast were added to the bottle to make the wine sparkle, the new champagne was left with a layer of sedimentary gunk. All the traditional methods of removing the debris had drawbacks. Transvasage—pouring the wine from one bottle to another—destroyed some of the sparkle and wasted too much good wine. Meanwhile, the elaborate techniques of disgorging bottles that had been stored on their sides by tilting and shaking them, however gently, was costing her a fortune in labor, and—worst of all—it took forever. Filtering with a colle spoiled the quality of the champagne, and in the hands of some winemakers it was positively dangerous. As Robert Tomes tells the story in The Champagne Country (1867), “The old way, which involved knocking the bottles upside down to settle the sediment, used drugs and clarifiers that could be poisonous, [and] took many months.”
Surely there was a better way of clearing the wines, a faster way that would allow her to produce the best-quality wines, in large numbers, at a nice price. In the cellars, she tried to urge her workers to speed the process, but they told her it couldn’t be done.
“You only have fifty thousand bottles ready,” she told them, “I asked for double!”
“Madame,” they replied, “you can’t ship muddy wines.”
“No, I want to ship very clear wines and in sufficient quantity.”
“You will never get it,” the workers assured her. “No one knows any other method besides the one we are using.”
“I will find one,” she promised.
But her cellar workers just laughed, leaving Barbe-Nicole annoyed and determined.
Before long, Barbe-Nicole was mulling over a new and astonishingly simple idea. Perhaps storing the bottles not on their sides, but on their necks—sur pointe—would allow the debris to settle into the neck of the bottle more efficiently and thoroughly. When she told the cellar workers about her plan, they laughed again. It would never work. She would just end up having to do all the work twice, they predicted. “Great advance,” they whispered. “Is this going to make the wine settle any faster? Take a look at this stupidity. It is still muddy, and now we have to wait for the deposit to fall back to the bottom again. A mess. It’s a complete mess.”
But Barbe-Nicole was determined to find a solution to her new business crisis. Secretly, she had her sturdy kitchen table moved into the cellars and ordered that it be riddled with slanted holes just large enough to hold the neck of a champagne bottle at an angle. Working with her cellar master and collaborator, Antoine Müller, she stubbornly conducted her experiments; “slipping quietly into the cellar day after day, while all the workmen were at dinner, she moved herself some hundreds of bottles in the rack” and began slowly turning and tapping the bottles each day, coaxing the sediment onto the cork. After only six weeks, Barbe-Nicole was amazed—and gratified—to discover that with a quick flick of the cork, all the residue came shooting out, without any harm to the wine and without all the tedious work. With this new system, she would be able to accelerate her production and keep her hard-won share of the export market. Above all, she knew that what it meant was growth—and a devastating advantage if she could keep it out of the hands of her competitors.
There was one competitor Barbe-Nicole particularly looked forward to devastating: Jean-Rémy Moët. In Russia, Moët was her greatest competitor, and the satisfaction of beating him to the opening of the Saint Petersburg market had been profound. She knew that he had already been working with the talented inventor and wine lover André Jullien to find a way to perfect the process of transvasage. There was word of preliminary cellar experiments with siphons, “rigid tubes fitted with a tap” that would prevent winemakers from losing the prized sparkle when moving champagne from one bottle to another, and Jean-Rémy was experimenting with new botanical colles. The industry was poised on the brink of transformation, but it needed new innovations to flourish. Now that the market for champagne was exploding, it was a question of whether winemakers could discover new techniques for mass-producing this delicate wine—and a question of who would discover it first.
With the success of their experiments, Barbe-Nicole brought all the work in her cellars to a halt. Immediately, they would change over to her new way of disgorging the wines. There was grumbling still. And she pleaded with her workers not to reveal what she already knew would be a crucial company secret, as important to the future of her business as those stealthy plans that got her wines to Russia before any of her competitors. It is a sign of the loyalty she inspired—and the effects of a generous profit-sharing system with some of her key employees—that remuage remained a secret for the better part of a decade.
What she and Antoine Müller discovered changed the way champagne is finished to this day. In his book A History of Champagne (1882), the wine aficionado Henry Vizetelly describes remuage as he saw it done in the nineteenth century. A “loose brown sediment,” he writes, “has been forming…to get rid of which is a delicate and tedious task. As the time approaches for preparing the wine for shipment, the bottles are placed sur pointe.” Then it is left to the cellar workers known as riddlers to slowly twist and turn the bottle, “sharply turned in one direction every day for at least a month or six weeks” until the sediment “forms a kind of muddy ball…finally expelled with a bang when the temporary cork is removed.” In Barbe-Nicole’s cellars, the cork was released with a small hooked knife, the debris flying free. They topped off the bottle with a bit of wine—the so-called liquor d’expédition—and sealed it again with her trademark branded corks using a tool they wryly called the guillotine, “from which tragic instrument,” Robert Tomes tells us, “the idea was derived.” Barbe-Nicole could still remember images of those from her revolutionary childhood.
Today, the system of riddling that Barbe-Nicole used in her cellars is still practiced in many champagne houses, although in recent years there has been a move by the large commercial producers to mechanized rotation in crates known as giropalettes. An expert cellar worker, it is said, can turn as many as fifty thousand bottles in a day, and these skilled employees carry on the tradition when making vintage champagne in France. But, of course, champagne houses no longer use kitchen tables. By the 1830s, winemakers throughout the Champagne turned instead to standing A-frame racks called pupitres. The word means “desk,” but in fact they look more like old-fashioned childhood easels. They can be found in cellars and antique shops in any part of the world where sparkling wine is crafted.
Within months of her discovery, Barbe-Nicole had the pleasure of knowing that they would be able to produce clear champagnes in increasingly greater numbers. Perhaps she also had the pleasure of hearing before too long that Jean-Rémy was frantic. “We must wrack our brains to obtain as good a result” as the Widow Clicquot, he wrote in one letter during the years to come. Her brilliantly clear wines were maddening. Unfortunately, the intense competitive environment also brought out some equally spirited—but less attractive—feelings in Jean-Rémy. His letters reveal a bitter condemnation of Barbe-Nicole that hints at the powerful gender stereotypes she continued to face as a businesswoman. “The adventure of Madame Clicquot,” wrote Jean-Rémy, “is infamous.” It was an infamous adventure for a woman, perhaps. And, as Jean-Rémy’s biographer puts it, these letters are “sufficiently eloquent to show the rivalry that existed between Jean-Rémy Moët and the Widow Clicquot…. A climate of imitation that flirted with espionage reigned between
the two houses.”
The climate of espionage aside, Jean-Rémy would not discover her secret any time soon and adopted her technique only in 1832. In the meantime, the discovery of remuage in her cellars gave Barbe-Nicole the edge she needed in a burgeoning industry to become—and remain—a major international player. During the second decade of the nineteenth century, champagne went from being a regional curiosity, known only at the royal courts of Europe, to becoming the world’s most recognizable wine and an iconic symbol of celebration and style. Writing in the 1860s, Robert Tomes noted, “It is only within the last fifty years that the trade in champagne has become important…. Its origin hardly dates beyond the eighteenth century, and it was still, even in the middle of that century, so rare that only a few rich and privileged amateurs tasted it. Moët and Chandon in 1780…thought it a bold venture to have made six thousand bottles in a year.” In the year following the legendary vintage of 1811, Barbe-Nicole was scraping by on sales of under 20,000. By the 1820s, industry leaders like Barbe-Nicole and Jean-Rémy were exporting upward of 175,000 bottles a year. Champagne never looked back. But for Barbe-Nicole, it would not always be such clear sailing.
Chapter 12
The Wine Aristocrats
As her gaze took in the assembled guests of the small family party on this winter evening, Barbe-Nicole caught the twinkling, knowing eye of her father across the room and she smiled back at him wryly. She knew what he was thinking; she was watching the tension in the far corner of the parlor mount with the same sense of gentle amusement. Two eligible bachelors were vying for the attentions of her daughter, Clémentine, seventeen years old and just home from her convent education in Paris.
The one, sitting at Clémentine’s side showing her card tricks, seemed to be winning, but perhaps only for the moment. Barbe-Nicole had already heard him confess that he would have to leave town in the morning and miss the chance to dance with her at some ball or another next week. Probably it was the ball hosted by their neighbor Marie Andrieux that the young man had in mind. Barbe-Nicole knew Marie well and could even say that she was a friend. They had known each other for years. But sometimes it was Marie’s husband, Florent Simon, whose company and talk Barbe-Nicole most enjoyed. A man with political ambitions, he was her father’s deputy mayor. He was also a businessman, and his business was champagne. Marie, meanwhile, occupied herself with hosting one of the most stylish salons in the city, and there were always balls and parties being planned. Clémentine—never graceful and confident in social situations—was already in a state of anxiety about this upcoming dance, as she was about all dances. Even a simple game of cards like whist could leave the girl in tears at bedtime, ashamed of her own awkwardness. “Don’t cry, Mentine,” her mother had told her only recently, “I’ll buy you wit when I marry you off.” Clémentine had only sniffled more quietly.
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