The Widow Clicquot (12 page)

That summer, Barbe-Nicole had reason to think about that life of luxury and the risks she was taking with the business. She had decided to sell some of her jewelry in order to finance the business. She could have spent her days finding occasions to wear it. Now, much of her capital was tied up in the company, and there must have been cash flow issues. Otherwise, it is unlikely she would have parted with these family assets.

During the first year of the transition, when her affairs were being disentangled from those of Alexandre Fourneaux and when joint holdings were being liquidated, the company would make only a small profit. She owned sizable vineyards and had some excellent stocks in her cellars. None of that was much help in paying the salaries of her cellar workers or settling the inevitable bills, however. By August, Barbe-Nicole had come up with a plan, asking her salesman Charles to sell her jewelry at the royal courts of eastern Europe.

The letters that she wrote about the sale are anxious ones, and worry about the jewelry occupied her mind for much of the autumn. Charles was using all his persuasive charms drumming up orders in Léopol (now Lviv, Ukraine), then part of the Austrian Empire, and Barbe-Nicole hoped he might also find a noble family to buy some jewelry: a large quantity of rose pearl necklaces and a diamond valued at an astonishing 3,000 francs—close to $60,000. By mid-October, Charles had shipped half the necklaces to one of his friends, who had offered to act as an agent. She begged him not to let the diamond out of his sight. “I pray that you will keep it on your person,” she wrote him. It would be far too valuable to lose. A month later, the diamond remained unsold, and then it disappears from the account books in the company archives at Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin. Few people had money to spend on extravagances of this sort. Louis wrote from Vienna that the nobility were short of cash. For the working people, it was worse. It had been three years since the wheat harvest had been sold. People couldn’t afford to buy even this staple crop. It seems likely that Barbe-Nicole got to keep her diamond, although she needed the capital more.

Much of her energy that autumn was also given over to worrying about technical difficulties in the cellars. Her chief winemaker was now Jacob, the same man who had worked for François and his father at Clicquot-Muiron, and they were in constant communication. Often, Jérôme Fourneaux could be found advising or lending a hand. Cloudy wine or ropey wines still frustrated her, and there were the inevitable disappointments of breakages.

Then there were problems with the bubbles themselves. Sometimes customers complained that they were too big and gassy, with a tendency to froth and leave an unappetizing thick and beady foam on the top of the glass. Barbe-Nicole and Louis referred despairingly to these large bubbles as
yeux de crapaud
—toad’s eyes. Louis, quite serious but with a bit of the honeymooner’s rakish charm, confessed, “This is a terrible thing that gets up and goes to bed with me: toad’s eyes! I like large eyes everywhere except in Champagne wine. May Heaven preserve us from their destructive effect.” He and Barbe-Nicole often shared flirtatious little jokes like this. Just because she was a widow and just because she educated her daughter in a convent didn’t mean she lived like a nun. But the concern about toad’s eyes was not a laughing matter, when it came down to it. The flaw, likely caused by allowing the wine to rest too long in wooden casks in the early stages of production, was a serious obstacle to luxury sales because clarity and
mousse
mattered more to their customers even than taste. And they had no clear idea how to solve the problem.

Unfortunately, the glasses used to drink champagne in the nineteenth century, although not the cause of toad’s eyes, would not have helped the problem. Barbe-Nicole drank her sparkling wine from the broad, shallow glasses that we call
coupes
and usually associate with the glamour of the Jazz Age and early Hollywood films. These glasses were first made popular during the seventeenth century, and wine lovers everywhere used them for drinking champagne well into the twentieth century, despite firm instructions to hosts and hostesses after the 1850s to “never use the present round saucer animalcula-catching champagne glasses, but…tulip-shaped ones.”

Today, the staunch preference is for the tall, slender champagne flute, and if you care about your champagne having the smallest possible bubbles—and many connoisseurs do—the flute is the glass to use. Owing to basic mechanics, the bubbles are smaller and prettier in narrow glasses. Still, more often than not, which glass to choose and the size you like your bubbles comes down to a question of appearance rather than taste. Bigger bubbles do not taste appreciably different from smaller ones. The finest champagnes are celebrated for their small, slow bubbles, which rise with mesmerizing grace to the surface of the glass and leave a light and airy foam. This is because the older a champagne is, the smaller the bubbles become. Because only vintage champagnes are aged extensively, we naturally associate small bubbles with the finest-quality wines.

By December, as Barbe-Nicole was looking forward, perhaps with some trepidation, to her thirty-third birthday, the books had been mostly closed on Veuve Clicquot Fourneaux. The Clicquot family still owned cellars and offices on rue de la Vache, and Barbe-Nicole also owned a country estate outside Oger, in the heart of the Côte des Blancs, just south of the renowned vineyards at Avize and Cramant and on the edge of the great forest that stretched for miles to the west. Although architecturally imposing in the classical French style, with a broad hip roof and big open windows looking onto the fields, the house was her refuge, decorated for comfort, with soft sofas and chairs in the cheerful blue chintz that was then the height of fashion. From the rooms, Barbe-Nicole could watch the progress of her vines, chardonnay grapes destined to become champagne.

Despite the allure of Oger, she spent most of her time in Reims, running the business as often as not from one of the pleasant rooms at home. She still lived in the house she had shared with François before his death, on rue de l’Hôpital, named after the hospital that stood in that part of town. It was a serene and airy place, and the focal point of her private office was a pretty wooden desk, built in the popular style of the Empire period and still on display at the tasting rooms of Champagne Veuve Clicquot in Reims. From here, she maintained the account books and wrote pages and pages of correspondence to her salesmen, clients, and suppliers. It was reassuring to know that the cellars beneath her home connected, in their dark circuitous way, to the cellars underneath her childhood home at the Hôtel Ponsardin.

Less reassuring was the news from ports across Europe. The British had intensified their policing of the blockades, and conditions for international trade were growing steadily worse. Back on the road, Louis was exasperated, and he had nothing nice to say about the British, either. He called them “maritime harpies” and the “assassins of prosperity.” More bluntly, he wrote to Barbe-Nicole in a fit of pique, “The more I come to hate the English, the more I wish for the corruption of their morals. That God would give us peace so we could avenge their evil gullets…[and] make them addicted to habitual drunkenness.” Louis fantasized that drowning the British in the champagne of the Widow Clicquot would be a just retribution. How they would have suffered!

In fact, despite the closed ports, few British wine lovers were feeling very parched. During the holiday season, the British market was one of the strongest in Europe for champagne makers, and Louis himself made some lucky sales there. “Here,” he wrote to Barbe-Nicole, “2,000 bottles have been easily sold because of the season…on Christmas day all the English…drink their champagne wine, it is the day exclusively privileged in their homes for this drink.” Jean-Rémy Moët, with his far stronger contacts in Great Britain and his better name recognition in the island nation, was having even greater success. But the seasonal British market could not keep all the champagne makers in the region afloat. The next year they learned that one of their competitors, the firm of Tronsson-Jacquesson, was bankrupt.

By the summer of 1811, Barbe-Nicole could be forgiven for feeling a bit panicked. Despite the slow collapse that year of the French economic blockades, the allied counterblockades had lost none of their sting. That spring, she had orders for fewer than thirty-three thousand bottles. With Napoléon and the czar again at odds, in large part because of Alexander’s lackluster support for the French emperor’s crippling trade restrictions, the Russian market—where she had once been recognized as an emerging name in the champagne business—was effectively closed, and war on that front again seemed certain. The Russians were building up troops on the distant borders of French territories in the east, and the British ruled the English Channel. Much of Europe was still broke, and the continent was limping along on the brink of fresh economic collapse. All export required licenses, but Barbe-Nicole knew what they really were: heavy war taxes on her wines.

As France began to lose ground, everything seemed to become more vicious. Louis sent back to Barbe-Nicole letters from Austria telling her about the destruction and misery that he saw everywhere. Napoléon controlled Austria, along with Prussia and Denmark, as client states, but the “independence” of these “sister republics” came at a high and often humiliating cost for their citizens, and the very idea of offering to sell a luxury like champagne was offensive to people who had been brutalized by Napoléon’s armies. Louis quickly understood that he would not find a warm welcome.

The cash flow problems were becoming increasingly serious, and Barbe-Nicole urged him—and all her travelers—to bring in whatever sales they could. Lower the prices if need be, she wrote to Louis in Holland. By autumn, as he traveled through Belgium in search of clients, he could only report the same problem. He begged and cajoled, he lowered his prices, and still there were no sales. He was lucky if he was not insulted or abused.

Making matters a hundred
times worse was something that should have been cause for celebration. The harvest of 1811 was marvelous. As one nineteenth-century tourist in the French wine country observed, “There had never been…a grape so ripe, so sugary, and one harvested under such favorable circumstances of weather.” Since spring, much of the northern hemisphere had been watching the passage of a great comet, and the vintage that autumn had coincided with its most brilliant appearance in the night sky. As far away as America, “the great comet was attracting all eyes,” and one man who saw it later recalled “how many superstitious terrors it gave rise to.” Throughout the Champagne, the rural people whispered that it was a portent of great change and of the fall of empire. In homage to a perfect harvest, winemakers abandoned their own trademarks and branded their corks with stars, the mark of the
Vin de la Comète.
Barbe-Nicole was among them.

This abundance meant that prices for wine plummeted. It would be one of the two greatest vintages of the century, but despite the falling prices, few people could afford it. Even barrel wines would go to waste, so Barbe-Nicole did the sensible thing—what winemakers had done throughout the previous century when the market was soft. In the spring, when the cask wines had been racked and clarified, she bottled the wine and turned it into champagne. It would sit, slowly transforming itself, in her cellars for at least a year, and she could buy herself some time. An intelligent plan—but it did nothing to help cash flow.

Once bottled, the champagne of 1811—a vintage year, if ever there was one—would continue to improve for many months. Putting the wine down in bottles was not the catastrophe, least of all for the wines themselves. The problem was the time it would take to realize any money from the sales, at a moment when little ready cash was finding its way to the account books. Normally, Barbe-Nicole would age her champagne for a year or a year and a half, putting it down into the cool cellars before summer and not shipping it until the following autumn. This meant that sparkling wines generally went to market two years after harvest, and the winemaker could then expect to sell it at luxury prices. During these two years, champagne houses had a great deal of their money tied up in stocks; add to this the technical problems in producing a clear champagne and the risks of breakage, and it is easy to understand the attraction of barrel wines, which were ready for sale within months.

If barrel wines could not be sold quickly, their advantages disappeared. Wine in wooden casks might last a few years in ideal cellar conditions, but some slow exposure to oxygen was inevitable, and the wines deteriorated if held too long. The same wine in hermetically sealed glass bottles might age well for a decade or more. Champagne was more delicate. Before disgorgement—the process of removing the spent yeast cells from the bottle after the second fermentation—sparkling wines continue to improve, resting on the lees, for several years. Under French law, vintage champagnes today are aged for a minimum of three years. Some of the finest are aged as long as seven or eight years. After disgorgement, it is a different matter. Champagne rarely improves with additional cellaring, and there is cause to celebrate the expert advice: Drink it promptly.

Nothing improved during the winter of 1812. If anything, the political and economic situation grew worse. Napoléon was preparing for his invasion of Russia, and struggling family businesses were ordered to surrender their property to the army, as requisition orders to fit out the soldiers. Young men were once again forcibly recruited into the military. There were rumors that, soon, older men would be conscripted as well. None of this was good for the champagne business.

Louis spent the spring of 1812 hunting orders in northern France. His wife was expecting the birth of their first child that year. Barbe-Nicole was to be the baby’s godmother, and the impending arrival of the new addition to his small family may have played a role in his desire to stay close to home. The collapse of the international markets also made Louis’s attention to the domestic market a sensible decision.