The Widow Clicquot Read Free

contradictions, but her genius as a businesswoman was in refusing to see her options as black and white. Her success was not in bucking the system, but neither did she slavishly follow convention. As the daughter of a local politician with a cunning instinct for survival even in the midst of an ugly revolution, she had a talent for seeing the opportunities that existed in moments of cultural and economic instability, in the space between where the old structures and old ways of doing business (and those who stubbornly stuck to them) disappeared and innovative new approaches took hold. Hers is the portrait of a woman with the courage to step into the breach, emotionally, physically, and financially.
    Because of her willingness to take risks without fanfare, the Widow Clicquot became one of the most famous women of her era. Like the other great widow of her day, Great Britain’s queen Victoria, she helped to define a century. For decade after decade, her name was heard on the lips of soldiers, princes, and poets as far away as Russia. Before long, tourists came looking for a glimpse of the woman whom the writer Prosper Mérimée once called the uncrowned queen of Reims. In the Champagne, she was known simply as la grande dame —the great lady. Rare Veuve Clicquot vintages are still called “La Grande Dame” in tribute to her fame. She remained a contradiction to the end: a generous philanthropist and a hardheaded business owner; a small, gruff, and decidedly plain woman with a sharp tongue who sold the world an exquisitely beautiful wine and an ethereal fantasy. Then she disappeared, becoming little more than the name on a bottle of bubbly.
    Before this complex and sometimes contradictory woman was reduced to a brand name—or in twentieth-century caricatures to nothing more than a dancing bottle with legs—the Widow Clicquot defined the industry to which she was dedicated. At a time of increasing cultural rigidity, she opened the way for a second generation of enterprising women in the champagne business, women who had wit and talent as sharp as her own. Following in her footsteps, the young widow Louise Pommery went on to build one of the world’s great champagne houses, which reached dizzying heights of wealth and promise just as Barbe-Nicole’s own story was coming to an end. In doing so, the Widow Pommery invented the dry brut champagne that wine drinkers still adore today. It was a path Barbe-Nicole had opened for her. Sadly, there would not be a third generation of women with such scope in the champagne business. There would not be other women who transformed small family businesses into astonishing commercial empires. Those who came after—women like Lily Bollinger and Mathilde-Emile Laurent-Perrier—were above all stewards of enterprises first raised to public prominence by an earlier generation. By the first decades of the twentieth century, the wine industry in the region had become a large-scale commercial affair, controlled almost exclusively by men who could already be counted among the rich and the powerful, with few opportunities for untrained and untested fledgling entrepreneurs.
    But for nearly a century—the first century of its global transformation into the iconic symbol of luxury and celebration—the champagne business was a woman’s world. At the most critical juncture in the history of this celebrated wine, Barbe-Nicole dominated the industry. The result was a different future for women in the commercial arena. Today, the champagne house she founded gives a prestigious award in her name that celebrates the accomplishments of talented international businesswomen. And because of the Widow Clicquot, historians still claim that “no business in the world [has] been as much influenced by the female sex as that of champagne.”

Child of the Revolution, Child of the Champagne
     
    W hat people in the Champagne remembered later about the summer of 1789 were the cobbled streets of Reims resounding