The Widow Clicquot (6 page)

If not these women, then Barbe-Nicole certainly learned of others like them. There were dozens more. Dame Geoffrey was only one of nearly twenty small-time women winemakers from Épernay whose names appeared in the Moët family account books during the eighteenth century but whose lives, like those of so many women from this period, are lost to history. No one has written their biographies, in part because at the time no one thought the ephemera of their personal lives worth saving for the archives. But their stories would not have been lost to Barbe-Nicole. In fact, increasingly, they would have been the cause of raised eyebrows in a small city like Reims. Businesswomen—once part of a bourgeois family economy—were quickly becoming something daring and faintly disreputable.

A generation older than Barbe-Nicole, women like the Widow Blanc and the Widow Robert were typical of the earlier tradition of family entrepreneurs, and the tradition was fading fast. Already in 1801, Barbe-Nicole’s presence on the fringes of the Clicquot commercial concerns was an exception, especially for a woman of her class. Even a decade or two later, I think it would have been impossible for Barbe-Nicole to exercise an active interest in her husband’s business and to have access to the essentials of the wine trade. It was in part because these other women came from the working and lower middle classes that they were able to run these small businesses in the new postrevolutionary climate. Barbe-Nicole came from the other end of the social hierarchy. Historian Béatrice Craig, who has studied the lives of women in Barbe-Nicole’s day, found that “the wives of manufacturers were less likely to have an occupation than wives of craftsmen.” The burden of supporting families trumped the demands of feminine delicacy, and for these independent women, working was a matter of financial survival.

Above all, Barbe-Nicole surely did not miss the other thing these women had in common: They were all widows, the only women granted the social freedom to run their own affairs. Having lost their husbands, they could make their own decisions—but it was hard to wish for opportunity at that price.

Perhaps part of the
reason François was so willing to talk with his wife about his business ambitions was that he struggled with his father. All the evidence suggests that they were very different men. Philippe was a cautious and conservative businessman who couldn’t muster much excitement for his son’s plan to travel halfway across the continent, trying to sell luxury wines to people crippled by years of economic crisis. Even if François landed the sales, there was still the problem of how to ship the orders. François, however, had it in his head that this would be a great opportunity, and off he went. He even managed to drum up enough sales that his father couldn’t point to the trip as an obvious failure, and while on the road, he did make—albeit by pure chance—the single most important discovery for the future of his family’s wine business.

This discovery was named Louis Bohne. Louis was a short and portly traveling salesman from Mannheim, Germany, with red hair and a rare talent for closing a deal. François met him in the port town of Basel, where the Rhine runs out to the sea and at the crossroads where modern-day France, Switzerland, and Germany converge. Louis spoke half a dozen languages, had a head for numbers, and—most important—was immediately as enthusiastic about the Clicquot family wine business as François himself.

When François returned to Reims, he had to admit that Germany and Switzerland had been disappointing markets, but new prospects and a glittering future seemed just on the horizon. By the spring of 1802, especially, there was reason to be hopeful. In March, with the Treaty of Amiens, economic relations with even Great Britain were restored, and for the first time in nearly a generation, France was at peace. Now François and Louis came up with a grand plan for selling wines in Great Britain. They were certain there was an untapped market just waiting for French product. On the face of it, they weren’t wrong. With the end of the war, after years in which luxuries like French wine and silk had been contraband, the British people were starved for these pleasures, and François and Louis were determined to capture their share of the sales. So in the first flush of collective enthusiasm, Louis set out for London to sell the high-end company wines, while François came home to run the business.

Although the British were hankering for French wines, champagne was a harder sell. London had been the commercial birthplace of champagne at the end of the seventeenth century, and there had even been a brief fashion for this special sparkling wine again during the 1770s, when François’s father was first beginning his small trade as a wine broker; but the British passion for sparkling wine had cooled since the days of the Revolution. Current demand was only for the most mildly effervescent champagne known as
crémant
or for the finest still wines of the region. There was even a brief resurgence of interest in the delicate red wines grown on the southernmost slopes of the mountain of Reims.

François’s grandmother owned large vineyards and a farm in the most famous of those villages, Bouzy. A light red wine was often made from the grapes grown on the property, and some of it probably made its way to London in the years to come. Curious wine lovers can try something very like it today, because Bouzy red is still crafted in the Champagne. It is something of a rarity, and in my experience the quality of the wine varies dramatically from one producer to another. But no matter who makes it—and no matter how well or how poorly—Bouzy red commands the same steep prices as a bottle of sparkling champagne. The laws governing winemaking strictly limit the total weight of the grapes that can be harvested in the Champagne. Every grape in a bottle of this still red wine counts against the total harvest for the entire region. Bouzy red is as expensive as champagne because it is made from grapes that would otherwise have found their way into one of the region’s famous sparkling wines.

We can still savor a Bouzy red. An authentic champagne
crémant
, on the other hand, is now forbidden. The rigid rules for controlling how wines are labeled in France, a system known as the AOC, or
appellation d’origine contrôlée
, today ensures that prestigious winemaking areas like the Champagne have a geographic monopoly on certain words. The word
crémant
now belongs to someone else, making the commercial production of champagne
crémant
impossible despite the local origins of this remarkable sparkling wine with froth like rich cream.

In spite of their hopes and the opening markets abroad during the peace, Louis’s trip to Great Britain was a sales disaster. Plenty of people were buying French wines, but breaking into the market as a newcomer turned out to be impossible. Sales depended on access to aristocratic circles, where people had the money to buy extravagantly expensive wines. An average bottle of champagne was expensive indeed, easily costing 3 to 4 francs—more than half the weekly salary of many of the people who labored to produce it. In today’s figures, this would be as much as $80 a bottle. It would take years to cultivate this clientele, and their competitors had the market locked up until then. Dukes and duchesses did not readily open their doors to traveling salesmen, even those peddling fine wines.

One of the competitors who dominated the champagne sales in Great Britain was the Moët family, headed at the time by Jean-Rémy Moët. If his portraits are any indication, Jean-Rémy was a trim and handsome man in his youth. The Moët family had been distributing the local sparkling wine since the heyday of the 1730s, but like everyone in the industry, they were struggling. In fact, newcomers like François, whose companies had not had to ride out a forty-year slump in the wine market, often had more financial resources than their established rivals.

It may be because of the Moët family contacts in the British market and the fashion for champagne
crémant
that François and his father ended up selling some of their 1800 vintage stocks to Jean-Rémy not long after Louis had returned with sorry sales figures. French scholar Michel Etienne, who has made an exhaustive study of the Veuve Clicquot company business records, has discovered on the books a deal for the sale of two or three thousand bottles of nearly flat champagne, made from the high-quality grapes of Aÿ, sold to the Moët wine company. Perhaps, recognizing that such wine was marketable only in England, where they had failed to secure orders themselves, François decided to move the product.

All things considered, François must have been discouraged with the results of his first few years in the wine business. Sales were only modest where he had hoped for stunning ones, and there was no way to put a good spin on the trip to London for his watchful father. But with the new peace, things could only get better, and although Philippe must have been reluctant to cede control of the business, it was time for him to step aside. François had his own energy and vision, and he had not actually done badly. Besides, at sixty-two, Philippe was tired. In the summer of 1802, his father retired from the business, leaving François for the first time completely in charge of shaping the direction of the company.

As luck would have
it, François’s first year solo at the helm was a disaster. This time the problem was not the lack of sales orders. After the disappointment in London, Louis had returned to central Europe, a territory that he knew far better, and that summer he returned from the extended trip abroad with solid orders for the wines they would harvest that fall.

The problem was now it didn’t look as though they would be able to fill them. The weather conspired against the vintners in the Champagne that year. The final months of the growing season in 1802 were so hot that the vines shriveled in the fields. It was the beginning of a three-year period of exceptionally hot, dry summers that meant disastrous harvests throughout Europe. That summer, the English poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were in France, and Dorothy’s journals make note of the sweltering weather. The heat in August was oppressive, even in a seaside town like Calais: “The day very hot,” she writes, “the sea was gloomy…overspread with lightning…[and] calm hot nights.”

By the end of August, François knew what the heat wave portended for his business. “In the memory of man,” he wrote to a friend, “no one [can] remember a year this unfortunate.” In nearly three-quarters of the Champagne there was no harvest at all that year. The Clicquot family found themselves, like all the other distributors in the area, hard-pressed to buy enough wine to fill the orders for which they had struggled and sacrificed. That year, all the profit went to the intermediaries and brokers with the foresight to store significant reserves.

In these early days of the wine industry in the Champagne, only a handful of dealers kept reserves of this sort. Most of the people who traded in wines purchased them—like François—ready-made from local vintners. François usually bought his wines by the bottle, although some enterprising businessmen had started purchasing cask wines to bottle themselves, taking on some extra risk in hopes of making a better return. Nobody wanted to store wines for extended periods unless they had to. Many of the wines from the region, especially those grown along the banks of the river Marne, didn’t have a reputation for aging well. Even today, it is not wise to keep your champagne for too long.

Winemakers had recognized the fleeting qualities of the local wines as early as the seventeenth century. The local pinot meunier grape, grown in the river towns along the Marne, was particularly short-lived, although it made a satisfying, mellow wine. Ironically, the better-quality wines were often the most delicate. Wines that were fine and rich, with the subtlest flavors and made from the very first pressing of the grapes—the
cuvée
—were delicious but fragile. They rarely lasted in casks more than a year or two in the cellars.

In most cases, it was a much better idea to sell the wines quickly and be done with it. The risk of spoilage and the storage costs didn’t make stockpiling wines an attractive idea to many businessmen. Wines only started to be bottled in the Champagne during the eighteenth century because brokers in the industry slump could extend the life of their product by a few years if the wines were stored in glass. Philippe had built the family business by selling the finest of these stocks.

More daring winemakers sometimes turned those bottled wines into sparkling champagne, hoping to add greater value to the product. The risks were huge, especially in warm weather. During the hot summer of 1747, Allart de Maisonneuve woke up to find that over 80 percent of his bottles—wines worth perhaps as much as $200,000—had simply exploded. During the heat wave that gripped the Champagne in 1802, things weren’t much better.

In the midst of a ruinous summer, when most vignerons had nothing to show for an entire year’s labor, Barbe-Nicole discovered that her husband was now seized with a new idea. Barbe-Nicole would always have a dangerous weakness for men who were gamblers, perhaps because she had married one. His intensity was exhilarating. When the chips were down, François wanted nothing more than to roll the dice—and reinvent the family business. One company insider later described how François “visited the neighboring vineyards, went down into all the cellars, compared, weighed, mediated, and then finally laid the foundation of an entirely different commercial system.” No longer content with the modest commissions of a distributor, he wanted to play for bigger stakes. Despite the risks—and despite what he knew the town’s more experienced businessmen must be thinking—François was determined to start bottling his own wines. As always, his timing would prove disastrous.