The Widow Clicquot

by Tilar J. Mazzeo

  Once again, they were faced with having to adapt in order to survive—although survival now meant something more than a modest middle-class existence. And they delayed. It just didn’t seem possible that the British market could matter. It was a tiny part of their annual sales—perhaps a few thousand bottles a year. Barbe-Nicole, in particular, could never forget how even Louis Bohne had failed to sell their wines in London during that disastrous expedition of 1801.

  While the directors at Clicquot-Werlé hemmed and hawed and made halfhearted efforts to look beyond the vast Russian market that had made their fortunes, another young woman—only just widowed herself and left with two small children to raise—seized the opportunity. It was an opportunity that Barbe-Nicole’s own career in the wine business had inspired. Jeanne Alexandrine Louise Pommery (née Mélin) was thirty-nine years old in 1858, and the new widow certainly knew Madame Clicquot. The Widow Clicquot—one of the nineteenth century’s premier brand names—was among the most famous women of her century, even if few of the consumers who celebrated her wines knew much about the woman behind the label. Faced with the same decision that Barbe-Nicole had confronted half a century earlier, after the death of François, and despite a culture that actively discouraged the ambitions of budding young businesswomen, Louise came to very much the same conclusion. She would run the family wine company. Her determination to capture the British market was matched only by Barbe-Nicole’s passion for conquering Russia. The decision to sell sparkling wine in mass quantities to the British would make her the second of her century’s great “champagne widows” and—more than the shy and domestic Clémentine had ever been—Barbe-Nicole’s cultural heir.

  Like Barbe-Nicole, Louise Pommery did not inherit either a big business or an established champagne house. In this respect, these two women are unique in the history of champagne. Also like Barbe-Nicole, Louise came to the winemaking business with remarkably little firsthand experience. In fact, her husband, Alexandre, another of Reims’s dabbling wool merchants, had become a partner with Narcisse Greno, a traveling wine salesman, in a company that specialized in local still wines only two years earlier. The company offices, tucked in a small street in the shadow of the great cathedral, were not far from the Hôtel Ponsardin or from the cellars of the Widow Clicquot. Alexandre may have been new to the wine trade, but he owned large vineyards in the hills beyond Reims and had invested in this new enterprise substantially—so substantially that when he died, it was left to Louise to run the business or to liquidate.

  And run it she did. Louise took control of the Pommery and Greno wine company with enthusiasm. Approaching retirement, Narcisse stepped happily to the sidelines, and with her new voyageur and sales director, Henri Vasnier, the brother of an old school chum, Louise turned her attention to mass-market production of the finest champagne. It was a large investment, and becoming a major player in a market then dominated by a handful of companies was a dicey business. But Louise was skilled in the arts of marketing and self-promotion, and she had a decisive air of authority. As one of her contemporaries put it, “She was just as equipped to run a government as a business.” Certainly, there could be no doubting her entrepreneurial talents or her sharp intelligence. In just over a decade, she turned the house of Veuve Pommery and Company into an immensely profitable and important business, with annual sales soon exceeding one million bottles of sparkling wine a year—more bottles than were produced even in the busy cellars of the Widow Clicquot.

  Madame Pommery’s success was founded upon innovation, and one of her commercial discoveries would change how the world drank champagne. Half a century earlier, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Barbe-Nicole had turned her company into one of Europe’s most widely celebrated businesses by leading the way toward the mass production of champagne. In the process, she had helped to create a new model for the modern businesswoman. By the 1850s, it was advertising that was poised to transform the champagne industry again, and Louise was prepared to lead the way in mass marketing. She set off for Great Britain to assess the possibilities and came back knowing that there were clients, but they were clients who wanted something entirely different: a crisp, dry champagne. She had her future direction. In 1860, she “invented” champagne in the style we still enjoy today as brut: sparkling wine without the syrupy sweetness that had been the fashion for so long. Today, it is this light style of wine, perfect before dinner as an aperitif or in a summer picnic basket, that signifies the ideal champagne for many of its most devoted admirers.

  In just over a decade, Madame Pommery captured an astonishing share of the growing champagne market, and it all happened with the same sudden intensity that Barbe-Nicole had enjoyed earlier in the century. Like Barbe-Nicole, Louise wasted no time building a magnificent château or marrying her daughter into the aristocracy. The Pommery château, however, anticipated today’s enthusiasm for wine tourism. In fact, it was during the next twenty years in France that wine tourism, as we know it today, was first developed. Her domaine was built not in imitation of the great châteaus of the Loire but in the style of the noble British estates, a strategic nod to the market that had made her fortune. In a sign of the changing times, it was built not out in the country overlooking the vineyards and harvest, but in the heart of commercial Reims, an extravagant and fanciful champagne factory. Even the cellars of this woman with her flair for marketing were named after the great cities to which she shipped—London, Manchester, Leeds, and, before long, dozens of other places around the world. Soon, those cellars were also adorned with great works of art in carved stone. Visitors flocked to the Pommery estates to see the sights and, of course, to buy her champagne.

  Louise Pommery—who followed so self-consciously in the footsteps of Barbe-Nicole—was the last generation of women this powerful in champagne. Only the widowed Lily Bollinger in the 1940s would so famously lead one of the great champagne houses in the twentieth century, and she did it brilliantly. But she did not build the company that she inherited. By the 1880s, Champagne Bollinger was already one of the industry giants, with a royal warrant to supply sparkling wine to Great Britain’s queen Victoria. The Widow Bollinger was the steward of a family corporation that was already a legacy. Barbe-Nicole and Louise raised theirs to spectacular heights from modest beginnings.

  But if Louise was the last woman to build a commercial empire in champagne and one of only two in her century to achieve not just international fame but also dominant roles in the industry they had helped market to the world, there were other women winemakers in the nineteenth century. Conditions did not encourage women in business, and astonishingly few middle-class entrepreneurs were able to keep pace with industrialization and the era of big business. But after the fairy-tale success of Barbe-Nicole, there were bourgeois women who tried.

  In 1808, a woman named Apolline, the widow of Nicolas-Simon Henriot, founded another small champagne house. It was never more than a modest success. But unusually in the French wine country, seven generations later, her ancestors still run Champagne Henriot as a flourishing boutique winery. After the death of Louis Roederer in 1880, his sister, Madame Jacques Olry, headed for a time one of the region’s oldest and most successful champagne houses. Many believe that it was, by the 1860s, “the largest and wealthiest of all” the local companies. Unfortunately, Madame Olry was either not as lucky or perhaps not as talented as Barbe-Nicole and Louise. Despite inheriting one of the jewels of the champagne industry, business declined under her leadership. And in the closing years of the century, Mathilde Emile Laurent-Perrier, after the death of her husband, Eugène, continued to run his family’s large champagne business under the name Veuve Laurent-Perrier and Company. She, too, made a fortune selling the brut champagne that Louise Pommery had invented, and she prospered until World War I. But by the 1920s, she was on the brink of bankruptcy, and her successor—the Widow Nonancourt—struggled for decades.

  Champagne had always been a difficult business. By 1858, it had become big business
as well. Those who succeeded in the second part of this century were by and large wealthy industrialists and the men—and just occasionally the women—who had had the foresight and perseverance to enter the contracting market in wine decades earlier. Now, with the rise of modern advertising and reliable transportation, with industrialization and technologies of mass production from the cellars to the vineyards, the challenge was staying at the forefront of a booming market that was changing almost as quickly as the world around it. Eventually, Édouard and Barbe-Nicole saw that their way of doing business would have to change as well. Within the next decade, the house of the Widow Clicquot would break with tradition and follow where Louise Pommery had led. Its brut champagne, aimed at “the high-class English buyer [who] demands a dry champagne,” was advertised with a bright yellow label. Today, this label—the “color of the egg yolks of the famous corn-fed hens of Bresse” and a company trademark—is immediately recognizable to wine lovers everywhere as the mark of the Widow Clicquot.

  Chapter 16

  The Queen of Reims

  Sitting motionless and stiff, Barbe-Nicole could see a bit of sky out in the distance beyond the broad windows. Around her were the distant sounds of the household and her staff going about its daily routine and the quiet rustle of her great-granddaughter, Anne, now fourteen, growing restless at her feet.

  This would be her last portrait. In the 1860s, Léon Cogniet had returned to create a second likeness of the celebrated Widow Clicquot, dressed in plain gray silk, embroidery in hand, child at her feet. Although surely painted indoors, before some sunny window and surrounded by the cultivated wealth and splendid luxury that were the spoils of her champagne empire, it is the image of a modest domestic lady, sitting on a small terrace, surrounded by rolling hills. The only hint of her great fortune and the business that built it is the wispy view of the Château de Boursault off in the distance.

  Barbe-Nicole knew, however, that the picture was more fanciful than real. The painter had an alfresco vision, but she was too old to sit for hours outdoors while he dawdled with his brushes. Indeed, she was too old to sit in such a prim fashion for long at all. And however much this man might like to imagine her as the retiring grandmama, however much she might sometimes try to act the part, her whole heart had been in business. It still was. A great deal had changed these last fifty-odd years since she had said good-bye to François and embarked on her own adventure. But her devotion to the business had never faltered. She had made Édouard and herself millionaires many times over. She had seen France transformed into an industrial nation, now crossed by railroad lines and manufacturing centers. Above all, she had seen a lot of life and more than her fair share of early death—her husband, a brother, a father, even two of her great-grandchildren in the space of a few years. Yet she still pored over her account books, still came alive again when Édouard told her of his plans for the company and its future. He told her, too, about his political ambitions and his campaign that year for a seat in the legislature of his friend Louis-Napoléon. How like her father he was.

  Now an old woman who had lived decades beyond the age when illness or accident claimed most of her peers, Barbe-Nicole knew her time would not be long. Those around her were passing away steadily, and sometimes it was difficult even to imagine who would carry on the family tradition. Her sister, Clémentine, soldiered on, and sometimes the two sisters sat together and remembered all the changes they had witnessed and all that they had shared in eight decades of living. But already, Barbe-Nicole saw that the health of her daughter, Clémentine, the Countess of Chevigné, was failing. Within the year, she was dead. By 1863, having buried her only child, Barbe-Nicole turned her thoughts to Anne—a pretty brown-haired adolescent on the brink of womanhood and, before long, inevitably, marriage. Anne and her older cousins brought laughter to the formal rooms of Boursault, and now that the young girl was old enough to take part in adult society, there were once again parties and elegant houseguests at Boursault. Anne, after all, was the sole heir to one of France’s greatest fortunes, and there was unrestrained curiosity to see “the little Mortemart.”

  People also came from around the world to see the Widow Clicquot. According to the man who wrote her biography in 1865, “Strangers and visitors were welcomed with an open hospitality, with polite grace and a worldly spirit…. All the world was met by the hosts without reserve.” With the railways, more friends from Paris showed up for more parties. Then there were curious tourists as well. Boursault offered splendid views of the picturesque scenery of the wine country, and the railroad ran just at the foot of the stone outcrop on which the castle was perched. Nothing was easier than making a pilgrimage to see the Widow Clicquot, and for vacationers and wine lovers, “the Château de Boursault was a must see on their list.” It really was the world at her table. Or so it must have seemed.

  Writers and artists, princes and politicians, all found their way to the hilltop castle, where they were entertained splendidly. Barbe-Nicole laughingly told them that she was a tyrant in just one thing: They could drink only champagne. The autocratic Louis XIV had announced, “L’état, c’est moi”—“I am the state.” She quipped, in her sternest manner, “Le vin, c’est moi.” She found in her midst few revolutionaries. As the writer Charles Monselet remembered, visiting her salons, it was easy to believe that the Widow Clicquot was the exclusive supplier to “every prince, czar, archduke, Roman cardinal, nabob, or lord mayor” in the world. During her pleasant reign, they had all vowed never to drink anything other than her champagne.

  And although she was old, Barbe-Nicole was still vitally alive. Victor Fiévet described her as having “delicate features and full of energy…underneath the flaws of age and the weakening of the body, her spirit remained mistress and queen…. The lively intelligence and the prodigious activity of Madame Clicquot never let her rest. In the calm hours of the evening, if she took up a needle and did some embroidery or sewing, her active and penetrating eye was never fixed on her work; the head moved around, the thoughts wandered, and the spirit was somewhere else.”

  Barbe-Nicole recognized some of this same ungovernable spirit in Anne. There had been a reason Barbe-Nicole never remarried, and it was that she could never bear to have anyone cosset and restrain her. She had wanted a life in the world. She could imagine the same for her great-granddaughter. Now of a marriageable age, Anne was stubbornly refusing her suitors. Marriage, she thought, didn’t suit her, and there was a trail of broken hearts and frustrated aristocratic mothers in her wake. Half the dukes of France and the king of Serbia were vying for her hand. Anne was stonewalling them all. Barbe-Nicole looked on, if not quite with approval, at least with a hearty dose of admiration.

  The archival record of Barbe-Nicole’s life rests in a small stone building just at the entrance to the Champagne Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin company offices in Reims. Inside, an entire room is filled with the details of the business she ran and the vineyards she purchased. Every shipment of bottles, every wage paid, every order filled, is recorded for posterity, and sometimes, in the midst of all this record keeping, Barbe-Nicole’s own voice shines through. Mostly, however, the archivists confess that it does not. So her rare personal letters are that much more important, and in the last years of her life, she wrote one to Anne that speaks more clearly than any other document to the woman Barbe-Nicole was and to how she wished to be remembered. It is her own account of her life, stripped to its essence.

  “My dear,” she writes to her last surviving great-grandchild,

  I am going to tell you a secret…. You more than anyone resemble me, you who have such audacity. It is a precious quality that has been very useful to me in the course of my long life…to dare things before others…. I am called today the Grand Lady of Champagne! Look around you, this château, these unfaltering hills, I can be bolder than you realize. The world is in perpetual motion, and we must invent the things of tomorrow. One must go before others, be determined and exacting, and let your intelligence direct yo
ur life. Act with audacity. Perhaps you too will be famous…!!

  This is the heart of Barbe-Nicole’s story. A woman who lived with audacity and intelligence, who could look forward to the future and grasp the reins of her own destiny at a moment in her life when the natural thing to do would have been to retreat into grief and misery and a paralysis of inaction. Anne did go on to be immensely fashionable, if perhaps not quite as famous as her legendary great-grandmother. By 1867, she found herself unexpectedly in love, after a frightening accident, with one of her hunting companions, Emmanuel de Crussol. That summer she married Emmanuel, who was also the Duke of Uzès and head of the most honored noble family in all of France. It was a magnificent, even fairy-tale, event, with liveried valets in powdered wigs and golden carriages rolling through the streets.

  But Barbe-Nicole was not there to see any of it. In the last days of July, just a year before, in 1866, when the gardens at Boursault were sending forth their intoxicating blooms and the grapes were beginning to grow heavy on the vines that clung to the hillside below the château, the Widow Clicquot breathed her last. She was eighty-nine years old, and she almost alone of her family did not bear an aristocratic title. But she was remembered in death, regardless, as the uncrowned queen of Reims.