In the early summer of 1814, with Napoleon freshly exiled to Elba and Europe's trade routes still tangled in blockades, a chartered Dutch ship slipped out of a French port bound for Königsberg. In its hold lay more than ten thousand bottles of champagne from the celebrated 1811 "comet vintage" — wine made in the year a great comet blazed over Europe's vineyards, which growers took as an omen of quality. The cargo belonged to a widow from Reims who had gambled her house's survival on reaching thirsty Russian customers before any competitor could. The gamble paid off spectacularly, and Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin became one of the first great businesswomen of the modern age.
She had not chosen the role. Born in Reims in 1777 to a wealthy textile family, she married François Clicquot, heir to a modest wine trading firm, in 1798. When he died suddenly in 1805 — probably of typhoid — she was twenty-seven, with a small daughter and a business that her father-in-law fully intended to wind up. She persuaded him instead to stake her, an extraordinary arrangement in Napoleonic France, where a married woman could barely sign a contract but a widow — a veuve — could run a company in her own name. The house became Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, and the word "widow" has been on the label ever since.
The early years were brutal. Napoleon's wars closed sea lanes and markets, and shipments rotted in warehouses or fell to privateers; the house came close to failure more than once. In 1814 the war arrived in person, when Russian troops occupied Reims and helped themselves to the contents of her cellars. She is said to have taken the looting with remarkable calm, remarking that those who drank her wine today would be her customers tomorrow — a line that may be polished legend, but proved to be sound forecasting.
The Russian coup made her famous. Russian aristocrats had a passion for champagne, and when the Napoleonic Wars ended she raced her wine to Saint Petersburg while rivals hesitated over half-lifted blockades. The comet vintage arrived to rapturous demand; Tsar Alexander I is said to have declared he would drink nothing else. Whatever the truth of that story, the orders were real, prices soared, and "Klikofskoe" became shorthand for champagne itself in Russia. Within a few years a provincial widow was supplying the courts of Europe.
The kitchen table that clarified champagne
Her greatest legacy, though, was technical. Champagne gets its sparkle from a second fermentation in the bottle, which leaves behind dead yeast — a cloudy sediment that early producers either decanted messily or left swirling in the glass. Around 1816, Clicquot and her cellar master attacked the problem with a piece of furniture: a table (legend says her own kitchen table) pierced with angled holes. Bottles were slotted in neck-down and given a small turn and shake each day, coaxing the sediment down onto the cork, until the plug of yeast could be shot out and the bottle topped up, leaving the wine brilliantly clear. The technique, called riddling — remuage in French — remained standard practice for over a century and a half, and the angled racks, or pupitres, still stand in champagne cellars today. She guarded the method jealously, but her workers were eventually poached and the secret spread through Reims.
She was a brand-builder before the word existed. The house pioneered what it claims was the first single-vintage champagne, in 1810, and an early rosé made by blending in red wine rather than elderberry colouring. The famous egg-yolk yellow label, trademarked in 1877 after her death, turned a colour into a signature that needs no name on it. A remark attributed to her — that the house should have "only one quality, the finest" — became its slogan, and the top cuvée, La Grande Dame, is named for her.
She ran the firm for decades, weathering bankruptcies, wars and frosts, and died in 1866 at eighty-eight, one of the richest women in Europe. She also set a curious pattern: champagne became the industry of widows. Louise Pommery, Mathilde Laurent-Perrier and, in the twentieth century, Lily Bollinger all took over houses on their husbands' deaths and built them into giants — as if the region had learned from Barbe-Nicole that a widow with nothing to lose is the most dangerous competitor of all. The woman toasted at millions of celebrations never remarried; she had, she might have said, already found something that would keep.
Quiz nuggets
- Barbe-Nicole Clicquot was widowed in 1805 at 27 and ran Veuve Clicquot for decades — veuve is French for "widow".
- Her celebrated 1811 wine was the "comet vintage", named for the great comet visible that year.
- In 1814 she shipped more than ten thousand bottles to Russia, beating rivals as Napoleonic blockades lifted.
- Around 1816 her house invented riddling (remuage), using angled tables called pupitres to clear sediment.
- Veuve Clicquot's yellow label was trademarked in 1877, and its prestige cuvée La Grande Dame is named after her.