The Widow Clicquot (7 page)

T
he nineteenth-century copy of Jean-Antoine Chaptal’s treatise
The Art of Making, Controlling, and Perfecting Wines
in the wine collections of the Sonoma County Public Library is a thin and tightly gathered collection of gently yellowed paper, with the cramped and blurry type common of inexpensive books from the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was a book much like this one, however, that inspired François’s decision to stake the family fortunes on a new bottling operation in 1802.
The Art of Making, Controlling, and Perfecting Wines
has been described as “a decisive turning point in the history of wine technology.” It had been published the year before, and there was no way François and Barbe-Nicole could have missed owning a copy. Just as François was beginning his first experiments with blending and bottling wines in the family cellars, Napoléon ordered departmental prefects throughout France to distribute a copy of the treatise to everyone in the wine business.

Chaptal changed the future of winemaking with his slender scientific treatise. As both François and Barbe-Nicole knew, the greatest obstacle to the commercial integration of the winemaking cycle was the separation between the growers and the distributors. The problem for François’s grand new plan was that the growers had all the skills: They made the wines, and they usually bottled them as well. Since bottling wines added significant value—sometimes making the same wine worth three times what it sold for by the barrel—François was eager to try his hand at it. He and Barbe-Nicole desperately needed the knowledge that came with generations of experience in the vineyards.

There was a rich lore and tradition that governed the production of wine in France, and nowhere was this folk wisdom more revered than in the making of that finicky and mysterious sparkling wine still known locally as
vin mousseux
. Winemakers watched the stars for portents of a good harvest, and traditionally vintners waited for the first full moon in March to begin bottling champagne. According to popular legend, the springtime moon had the power to raise a tide of bubbles in the bottles. Others put their faith in a higher source. Today, visitors to Reims in January can still witness the solemn and ancient festival of St. Vincent, the patron of winemakers. On a windy afternoon that winter in France, I stumbled upon the celebration unexpectedly and stood shivering on a street corner to watch as a thousand vintners made their silent pilgrimage from the Hôtel de Ville to the Basilica of Saint Rémi in scarlet cloaks and white bonnets, bearing before them the small icon of a harvest saint. It was a moving reminder of the reverence those who live in the Champagne have always felt for the mysteries of winemaking.

The finer details of this lore were not part of the personal experience that François brought to his new enterprise, however, and the secret traditions of generations of winemakers weren’t likely to help him launch his new business plan anyhow. Although he had learned a good deal about the making and selling of wine during his years of business training with his father, trade was not the same thing as craft. What François needed was reliable technical information about the production of wine that would make them less reliant on the experience and knowledge of the rural craftsmen who turned grapes into fine wines.

This was exactly what Chaptal’s treatise provided.
The Art of Making, Controlling, and Perfecting Wines
was an elegant synthesis of all the scientific and practical knowledge about winemaking available at the time, mass-distributed in a way that no other book on viniculture had been before. Among his most important discoveries, Chaptal is still famous for quantifying the chemical relationship between sugar, fermentation, and alcohol. Although winemakers since the seventeenth century had known that sugar was essential to champagne, the process of adding sugar to the must in order to make a better wine is known today as
chaptalization
. But Chaptal also advised his readers on everything from cleaning bottles to corking champagne. For anyone new to the business, his treatise was invaluable.

If it seems curious that Napoléon chose to distribute this pamphlet at just the moment when François and Barbe-Nicole were preparing to take new risks in the wine business, it really isn’t. Napoléon had commissioned the book from Chaptal as part of a new government effort to expand the wine industry in France—and the champagne industry in particular. Everyone knew that Napoléon had a soft spot for sparkling wine and for the entrepreneurs who provided him with it. There were already stories about staggeringly expensive dinner parties in Paris where his guests consumed a thousand bottles in a night. Perhaps Napoléon remembered fondly those rolling hills and chalk fields of his own boyhood in the region. Perhaps his old friend Jean-Rémy Moët had his ear. Whatever the reason, champagne was one of Napoléon’s passions, and with the same zeal for reform that led him to modernize the French legal system and improve the nation’s highways, he set in motion a series of initiatives aimed at transforming the French wine industry into a national economic engine. Chaptal’s book was part of that plan, and the right information—along with some attractive government incentives—undoubtedly played a role in François’s thinking.

Despite François’s eagerness and the recent return of peace in France, this new enterprise was a slow and tedious business. It would take more than a year to prepare their first “house” wines to bring to the market in 1803. Perhaps a bit rattled by his dawning understanding of the fabulous risks and steep learning curve that making their own champagne entailed, in the beginning François decided to limit their production to 25 percent of the annual stocks.

Some restraint was a good idea. As novices to the art of bottling wines, the Clicquots had a lot to learn. Perhaps, in addition to Chaptal’s guide, François turned to books such as Jean Godinot’s
Manner of Cultivating the Vine and Making Wine in the Champagne
or Nicolas Bidet’s
Treatise on the Culture of Wines
. In the cellars, they could turn for advice to the company cellar master, Monsieur Protest. All the hard labor of the bottling and blending would fall on his shoulders (and those of the other cellar workers) in the end. And, of course, they relied on Louis Bohne. He was the one who knew what the customers wanted.

Apart from the small batches of wine made from the grapes of the family estates, there was never any plan to start making wines from scratch that summer. François would buy his base wines by the cask from growers, as always. But some of that wine he now planned to blend and bottle, for resale either as luxury still wines or as sparkling champagne. Inevitably, crafting excellent wines in his cellars depended on finding the highest-quality casks possible.

And what Barbe-Nicole learned about winemaking in the first years of her marriage sparked a passion that would last a lifetime. Although she had to sit on the sidelines while François made the financial decisions, she was determined not to be excluded from the vineyards. In the early mornings of those hot, dry summers, family legend tells how Barbe-Nicole accompanied François as he drove through the fields of the Champagne, anxious about the fate of the harvest. They would stop to check the progress of the grapes or to talk with those who knew the land and the craft of winemaking best: the weathered vignerons and the peasantry. In the fall there was the harvest—the
vendange
in French. According to local custom, it lasted for twelve days, and the harvest began at dawn. The grapes were best when harvested on cool, foggy mornings, while the moisture of the dew left the fruit plump and full of juice. The early hours were critical for the production of champagne, because this
vin gris
—a white wine made with red grape varietals—depended on the immediate and gentle pressing of grapes unstained by the color of the skins.

Barbe-Nicole was there at sunrise. Her favorite haunt at harvest-time was in the village of Bouzy, where she could watch as the field-workers gathered in the grapes grown on the family vineyards. François’s grandmother Muiron owned the vineyards, and the storeroom on the estate had a modern winepress, built in 1780 and now one of the oldest surviving presses in the Champagne. Here, Barbe-Nicole would sit for hours, watching as the grapes were slowly and gently crushed.

She was never happier than when studying wine. As the baskets were trundled in from the nearby fields, the grapes were spread carefully across the floor of the press, and, with the slow creak of heavy wood and the mixed scents of rope and warm fruit, she could anticipate the gentle aroma of the first pressing. The juice of this initial crush—the cuvée—was light, with little body but great delicacy, and it would make an excellent component of the final wine. Known as
vin de goût
, this was the wine made from the juice that flowed freely from the grapes when the heavy wood of the press was left to settle gently on the fruit, and it could not be exported alone. It made a delicious vintage, but without enough body to age or transport reliably unblended. It is in part because of the fragile nature of the finest must that it is said the French never export their best wines.

After the must from the cuvée was drained away into barrels, roughly filtered through plaited baskets, the
première taille,
or the first cutting, began. The man working the press would gently crank, adding enough pressure to break or “cut” the grapes, coaxing from them more of their ripe juices. Perhaps Barbe-Nicole tried her hand at the press, to the wry amusement of the farmworkers. The
première taille
gave what some considered to be the most valuable juice from the grapes—a fine and full-flavored must, rich with promise and strong enough to age deliciously.

With each successive cutting, the pressure exerted on the grapes would have to be increased, with consequences for the quality. The next pressing was the
deuxième taille,
or second cutting, and it gave full-bodied and clean juice, often with the tawny hue known as “partridge eye.” For a superior wine, Barbe-Nicole knew that the winemakers would use only the juice from the first three pressings. By the time of the fourth and fifth cuttings, the must was ruddy and sharp. Most common cask wines were a blend of the third, fourth, and fifth cuttings, and they were sold inexpensively and as quickly as possible.

There were also family estates at Verzenay and Chigny-la-Montagne, where Barbe-Nicole could have learned the essentials of fermenting and clarifying cask wines as well. Although François would still depend on others to make the raw wines that he would blend and bottle, as wine merchant and speculator he had learned early in his career how to judge a well-made vintage. Perhaps as their carriage rolled along mile after mile through the fields of the Champagne, this was part of what François talked about during those summers.

After the harvest, fermentation began as a natural process. First, the must was racked and the bits of organic debris were allowed to settle. It was then moved to a new cask. Because making the best wines took considerable skill and some luck, winemakers had all sorts of tricks of the trade. One of those tricks can be a real headache even today. Winemakers would smoke their casks with “brimstone,” gently lowering into the barrel a burning rag dipped in sulfur, in hopes of producing a bright, clear wine. Without knowing the reason, these early winemakers were on to something. Winemakers today still rely on sulfur’s antiseptic qualities to prevent the natural bacteria at work in fermentation from taking over and ruining the wine, and sulfur is widely used as a preservative in many wines on the market. But some unlucky people find that it gives them a pounding headache, and for a small percentage of people it is even a life-threatening allergy.

Over the course of the next three months, the must would be allowed to ferment naturally in the barrels, slowly becoming a sharp young wine. With the dead yeast cells and other organic debris floating in it, however, this raw wine did not make for elegant drinking. Sometimes, clearing the wine was relatively simple. Racking was a straightforward business, relying on gravity. The wine was poured from one barrel to another, leaving the gunk behind. If the cellars were cool enough, all the sediment would fall to the bottom, leaving the wine clear and appetizing.

More often than not, however, the wines were still cloudy, and clarifying the wine from here was a hit-or-miss proposition, involving considerable ingenuity. When a wine wouldn’t clear easily, winemakers had to turn to a
colle
—the French term for the secret concoction used to separate the particles from the wine. Usually in cloudy wines the problem was suspended tannins or yeast cells, and here the solution was a
colle
made of egg whites or bone-marrow gelatin. Sometimes winemakers used milk, cream, or blood. Or they could substitute a commercial mixture, probably quite unsavory in its origins, known as “powder number three” and thought to be particularly suited to the production of champagne.

Essentially, a
colle
acts as a positively charged chemical magnet, attracting the negative wayward particles and gathering them in a big mass that will settle to the bottom of the barrel when chilled. Anyone who has mastered the skill in French cooking of clarifying a consommé knows that a mixture of beef marrow and egg whites can be used to produce a perfectly clear broth with an exquisite flavor, because the coagulants trap the smallest impurities in an unappealing mass. The principle is exactly the same in winemaking.

Now that François was planning to bottle his own champagnes, getting the wines to stay crystal clear would be one of his biggest frustrations. There was no easy solution to the problem. A second fermentation in the bottle—when the sugar and yeast added in the
liqueur de tirage
are slowly transformed into alcohol and trapped carbon dioxide—is necessary to create the ebullient sparkle of champagne. But the process also created more dead yeast cells, which no one found any more attractive in the nineteenth century than we would now.