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Her competitors in champagne making, such as Jean-Rémy Moët, were frustrated by her success and the secret technique that made her champagne clear. Luckily, her many employees were extremely loyal, and it was decades before any other winemakers learned about riddling.
A century later, an enterprising young widow known as Veuve Clicquot would revolutionize the champagne-production process and turn it into the most sought-after libation in Europe and beyond.
With the revolution in full swing, the wealthy merchant families decided to hold the wedding in secret. They were married in a cellar, and as if to prophesize their future, the priest gave them a book by the famous Dom Pérignon.
A famous Benedictine monk called Dom Pérignon has been credited with turning this unfortunate error into an exciting new kind of sparkling wine. Today, his name is associated with the exclusive champagne brand Moët & Chandon, which purchased the Abbey of Hautvillers where he produced his wine in 1823.
The Clicquot couple developed a passion for the wine industry and began to increase their champagne production, but disaster would soon strike. As François' father had predicted, the business struggled, but worse still, François suddenly became extremely ill with a fever in 1805. Within 12 days, he was dead.
Veuve Cliquot never remarried after losing her husband in her twenties, although some historians say she was known to have dalliances with younger men. Had she remarried, she would almost certainly have had to give over control of her business to her new husband.
While Clicquot had certainly one-upped her competitors with the quality of her champagne and the speed of its production, she faced competition from fraudsters. Many winemakers were producing sparkling wine outside of the Champagne region and calling it champagne. Clicquot had the good sense to keep the product exclusive and took each of them to court.
The monks believed that the devil was working to destroy their produce. As such, the drink that would later be known as champagne was originally named le vin du diable, or "the devil’s wine."
The champagne market was still small at this time, but Russians were known to be particularly enthusiastic drinkers of the new product. However, the Russian Tsar had placed an embargo on French wine. Clicquot devised a plan to dodge this embargo by smuggling her champagne to Russia in coffee barrels, but this wasn’t enough to clear their cellars of the thousands of bottles they had in surplus.
Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin was the daughter of a wealthy textile merchant, born in Reims (in the Champagne region) in 1777. It was a tumultuous time in French history, as the country rebelled against Napoleon’s leadership, headed straight for revolution.
Soon after its Russian debut, Tsar Alexander I declared that Clicquot’s champagne was the only kind he would drink. This free promotion of her brand was highly effective in increasing sales across the country. Popularity spread through Europe as they celebrated the defeat of Napoleon.
While Dom Pérignon and his contemporaries may have turned le vin du diable into a drinkable wine, their techniques left plenty of room for improvement. The champagne of that era was cloudy and filled with sediment, and was still prone to explosions!
The estate Ponsardin grew up on was located next to that of another wealthy family involved in textiles: the Clicquots. Their fathers made the crafty decision to set up their children and combine their family businesses. Ponsardin married the only Clicquot son, François Clicquot, in 1798 at the age of 21. With that, she became Madame Clicquot.
Clicquot chartered a Dutch ship to bring her champagne to Russia in much larger quantities. Luckily, by the time the ship arrived, Napoleon had been exiled and tensions between Russia and France had diminished. The champagne was quickly sold, and the celebrating nation was thirsty for more.
With business booming in Russia and Europe, Clicquot set her sights on global expansion. By the time she died in 1866, her champagne was being sold all over the world, and she had been dubbed “the Grand Dame” of champagne.
Ponsardin was heavily influenced by her father’s politics during this period. He turned against the monarchy as outrage and a desire for change spread, even though he was an affluent bourgeoisie businessman.
Despite the fact that they were more or less pressured into an arranged marriage by their parents, the newlyweds seemed to form a genuine partnership. Madame Clicquot was intelligent and strong-willed, taking an unusual interest in business for a woman of the time. Women were encouraged to be subservient and meek in Napoleonic France.
Champagne is made by adding sugar to white wine to create a second fermentation process. The yeast in the wine eats the sugar and creates the bubbles as a bi-product. However, the dead yeast remained in the bottle making it cloudy and unappetizing, with unsightly pieces of sediment floating around.
Madame Clicquot became Veuve Clicquot ("Widow Clicquot") after just six years of marriage. In spite of the gender roles at the time, Clicquot convinced her father-in-law to allow her to carry on running the family wine business. This unusual state of affairs suggests that the young widow’s intelligence and business savvy were evident to all who knew her.
François Clicquot decided that he wanted to expand the family’s wine business, against the wishes of his father, who believed wine to be an unnecessary and unstable product given the Napoleonic Wars that were underway. François ignored his father and began educating himself (and his wife) about wine production. His dream was to perfect the production of champagne and elevate its status.
Clicquot and her associates came up with a method by which the champagne bottles were stored at an angle as the wine fermented and rotated slightly at regular intervals. This resulted in all of the dead yeast gathering at the mouth of the bottle. It could easily be removed once the champagne was ready, after which the bottle was recorked and ready for sale, clear and sparkling like the champagne we know today. This process is known as remuage, or riddling.
Several years on, Clicquot had undergone a business apprenticeship and convinced her father-in-law to invest in her winery on two occasions just to keep it afloat. She had also developed a new technique to make her champagne more appealing than any other.
While her wine was originally made without labels, she began marking the corks with an anchor and a green wax seal to certify them as originals. Later, in 1811, a comet was seen in the sky at the same time that she produced a particularly good vintage. She called it le vin de la comète, and started adding stars to the corks. She also stamped the initials ‘VCP’ for her own name, Veuve Clicquot-Ponsardin.
The Clicquot champagne brand had created a superior product to other winemakers, but the business was on the verge of bankruptcy. Europe had been ravaged by war and revolution. This was where Veuve Clicquot’s unique business sense came into play.
Like many of the world’s greatest inventions, champagne was created by accident. Seventeenth-century winemakers in France’s Champagne region, who happened to be monks, discovered the effervescent delicacy during one particularly cold winter.
The brand’s iconic yellow-gold labels wouldn’t appear until 1876. At first, they were just used on bottles of dry champagne sold in Britain, but the company soon trademarked the design and applied it to all of their bottles.
When they entered their cellars to check on their stores of wine, they were dismayed to find that many of the bottles had exploded. The unusually low temperatures had started a second fermentation, producing gas in the wine bottles, which caused many of them to expand and burst.
Intrigued? Click through this gallery to learn how Madame Clicquot built a champagne empire that’s still thriving.
The Clicquot family had a small wine business in addition to their textile enterprise. While champagne had been invented by this time, it hadn’t gained much popularity and the Champagne region was more famous for its white wines.
If this had happened, who knows if we would be popping bottles of champagne at every celebration, particularly those exclusive bottles with the yellow-gold labels.
Sources: (The Guardian) (Smithsonian Magazine) (France Today)
Discover the fascinating woman behind the golden label of Veuve Clicquot
The widow who sparkled
LIFESTYLE History
Veuve Clicquot is one of the most popular and recognizable champagne brands in the world today, selling millions of their distinctive gold-labeled bottles every year. However, it wasn’t always such an easy sell. In fact, it was a young widow who made champagne into the exclusive celebratory drink we know today, and made Veuve Clicquot the must-have brand.
Intrigued? Click through this gallery to learn how Madame Clicquot built a champagne empire that’s still thriving.