The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It

5 Responses to “The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It”

1. Annabel Ascher says:

   June 30, 2010 at 9:06 am

   The Widow Clicquot by Tilar J Mazzeo is clearly a labor of like. The leader goes into painstaking detail regarding a honestly obscure part of French history to tell us the tale of a remarkable woman and by extension the tale of how Champagne became the bubbly we like today. Barbe-Nicole Cliquot (nee Ponsardin)lived during the French revolution and would no doubt be even more obscure than she is had she not been pushed into business by the untimely death of her spouse.
   
   Mazzeo does a fantastic job of bringing Barbe-Nicole to life even while acknowledging the places where the past records are thin. She is able to educate the reader on a number of subjects, including wine building and French history, lacking losing sight of the main character.
   
   Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
2. Anonymous says:

   June 30, 2010 at 10:47 am

   Fantastic expose of a woman who brought home the bacon and fried it up in a pan…with her homemade champagne. She entertained Napolean, ran imports illegally into Russia all while inventing storage devices. An A+ fantastic work.
   Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
3. R. Hardy says:

   June 30, 2010 at 12:16 pm

   Naturally, the _Oxford English Dictionary_ contains the word “widow”, but if you look down the definition list, you will come across one that might surprise you: “champagne”. The entry clarifies (a small) that a “colloquial or slang” use of the word comes from “Veuve Clicquot”, French for “Widow Clicquot”, the name of a firm of wine merchants, and at its helm was indeed the widow Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin. Further clarification, and much more, can be establish in _The Widow Clicquot: The Tale of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It_ (Collins) by Tilar J. Mazzeo. Mazzeo is an assistant professor, a cultural historian, and a wine enthusiast. In her acknowledgements, she thanks all the “many friends who joined me so enthusiastically in the wide `primary’ research, with a bottle of the Widow in hand.” It is clear that Mazzeo loved the research, and that she admires the Widow and the widow, of whom she writes that she was no queen, duchess, or mother of some fantastic man, and she wasn’t even a widow of a fantastic man: “She was simply a formidable and independent woman, building her own name in the humdrum, dog-eat-dog world of business.” There were a few additional women of her time who were successful in huge business, but Barbe-Nicole was something extraordinary in her determination to make a product that everyone knows and values two centuries later. This is a excellent biography, along with descriptions of the science, art, and history of winemaking.

   When Barbe-Nicole came onto the wine scene, champagne was a niche market. She was born in 1777 to a wealthy family tree in Reims. She formed a excellent marriage with François Clicquot, whose family tree had become wealthy in the cloth trades, but who had a sideline in wines. They learned the craft of winemaking together, but he died when she was only 27, possibly of typhoid (which people thought might be treated by giving the uncomplaining champagne) and maybe from suicide because his business was going terribly. With considerable pluck, his widow held onto the company. Contemporary traditions and then the Napoleonic code dictated that the woman’s place was in the home, but there were additional widows preceding her in the wine business, and though they may have lost their husbands, they were the only women granted the freedom of running their own affairs. She had selected a excellent time to jump into the champagne market. Much of Mazzeo’s book has to do with the effects of history on the wine markets, including events like the Russian occupation of Reims. The widow was able at times to exploit current events and make sales, for instance, to Czar Alexander, who proclaimed that he would drink nothing else. There are also accounts of how the widow worked with her cellar master to make champagne clearer and with tiny, not gassy, bubbles.

   Mazzeo’s book traces the widow’s business and her decisions which were sometimes disastrous but were more regularly judicious and lucrative. It was her business skill and capacity to exploit new markets at just the right time that elevated champagne to the customary drink for celebrations. Although much of the building of champagne remained a hand-crafted process, she did institute techniques that, in tune with her time, allowed its increasing industrialization. Her wines are still made; the finest made at Veuve Clicquot is called “La Grande Dame”, and bears a rich yellow color on the mark. (The history of wine labeling is one of the tiny points covered here. Originally, the wine houses made do with merely branding their corks, and although the widow had used marks by 1814, it was only the advent of train transportation leading to simple international commerce that got every bottle labeled.) Mazzeo, in an entertaining book that covers a fantastic deal of wine history, has had to evaluate vast amounts of business records, but because the widow herself did not keep a journal or write many personal notes that have been preserved, Mazzeo uses a lot of judicious “perhaps” introductions to tell us what the widow might have been thinking or doing. There is one wonderful quotation from Mme. Clicquot in a letter to her granddaughter, which nicely sums up what the widow thought was vital: “The world is in perpetual motion, and we invent the things of tomorrow. One must go before others, be determined and exacting, and let your intelligence direct your life. Act with audacity.” It was advice to which she had been faithful all her career.
   
   Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5
4. S.F. Bookreader says:

   June 30, 2010 at 12:27 pm

   The Widow Cliquot is a tale of strong women who triumphed against all odds. It is too terrible that it is so wordy. The editor should have done a better job at removing the excess verbosity.
   Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
5. mojosmom says:

   June 30, 2010 at 2:06 pm

   This is the tale of probably the most legendary female “CEO” (had such a title existed at the time) in history, and the product to which she gave her name. Widowed young, Barbe-Nicole Clicquot-Ponsardin struggled to make what became one of the fantastic champagne houses. How she did it is a fascinating tale.

   What sets this book apart from mere biographies is the way Mazzeo relates birth and growth of Veuve Clicquot to the political and social history of France and Europe. Barbe-Nicole was born to an ambitious bourgeois family tree in Reims a decade before the French Revolution. Her father threaded his way successfully through revolution and régime changes, and his daughter clearly inherited his ability to go with the tides of circumstance. The Napoléonic Wars, with their shifting alliances, made the shipment and sale of her product unsafe at best, but she persevered.

   Mazzeo, rightly, I reflect, also points out that Mme. Clicquot-Ponsardin’s timing was casual. She was building her business right at the time when manufacture was transitioning from tiny, family tree-owned businesses to larger firms. As a result, women were transitioning from being active partners in these businesses to being the visible sign of success, but being relegated to the domestic and social scene. She was not too early to take advantage of the first change, nor so late that she was restricted by the second. In comparing Barbe-Nicole’s life to that she desired and achieved) for her daughter and grand-daughter, Mazzeo teaches us something not only about the lives of these women, but of an entire class of women.

   Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5