THE WIDOW WHO CLEARLY CARED ABOUT CHAMPAGNE

It’s because of Madame Clicquot that the effervescent stuff we love today is clear.  It wasn’t always like that.  The early champagne developed under her management, ensured that the cloudiness was removed through the process of riddling.  Imagine how our perception of champagne would be if the stuff came out looking cloudy?

So often little old ladies, especially widows like the ‘veuve’, are passed off as unimportant, or, quite simply, ignored.  We ignore these ladies at our peril. They have not always been:

1.   old
2.   without a history
3.   uninteresting

In fact, some of the stories are so important that they just have to be told.

The idea of fulfilling the dream she had shared with her husband about growing a successful wine business, was out of the question for women like Barbe-Nicole Clicquot.  And yet, the ‘Widow Clicquot’, as she came to be known, was not someone who was prepared to accept the status quo.  Those of us who know about women’s history, are aware of women like Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot and others.  Women who refused to accept the rules assigned to them. We also know that it sometimes takes a bit of digging around in company archives and dusty libraries to unearth the stories of these remarkable women.  That’s exactly what the New York Times bestselling author, Tilar J. Mazzeo did for her excellent biography of The Widow Clicquot. 

We all need to do more of this digging into the archives.

Barbe-Nicole was no stranger to conflict.  She was born into a well-connected merchant family during turbulent times in Reims, just 80 miles northeast of Paris. By the time she was 11 years old, her family was fleeing from the revolutionaries.  Having made a narrow escape, she soon learned how to navigate her way through choppy waters and it was this ability to observe, act and analyse that makes her story one that all of us should be inspired by.  In her widowhood, she made things happen when the odds were most certainly against her.

As the Widow Clicquot’s story so poignantly illustrates, widowhood does not mark the end of the road for women. 

Widows are not a homogeneous group who act and react exactly the same.  Widows are as varied as their fellow human beings. Some women find an independence and a freedom all but forgotten when they were wives; others push against the discomfort of grief and loss.

There are many routes to widowhood and not all take the predictable death path brought about by the most common killers of men in industrialised countries: cardiovascular disease, cancer and Alzheimer’s. Some causes of death are hushed up.  Like the ones that occur as a result of HIV/AIDS, accidental overdose, cirrhosis of the liver and asphyxia.  Women become widows after their husbands are assassinated, die in unspeakable accidents or kill themselves after an argument.  Regardless of the circumstances, in each situation where the wife has outlived the husband, she faces the unchartered territory of widowhood.

In The Prospect Before Her, Professor Olwen Hufton  includes an informative chapter on widows and points out that all women, when contemplating the idea of marriage, will know that they may one day face widowhood.  This was undoubtedly the case in situations where the only prospect before a woman like Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin was to find a suitable marriage partner.

For those women who moved from the patriarchal control of the father to the patriarchal control of the husband, widowhood provided one of the only acceptable ways for nineteenth-century women to make their own choices about all aspects of their lives. And the Widow Clicquot spotted an opportunity to call the shots in a wine business that eventually became her empire.

Barbe-Nicole Clicquot knew she was living in uncertain times and that the political situation was in a constant state of flux.  She was aware of widows who had gone before her who had somehow managed to run a business.  In fact, les veuves in France are so closely associated with the wine industry that they became synonymous with the stuff. There was the Widow Blanc and the Widow Robert, both of whom were entrepreneurs of family businesses.

Gerard Hoffnung used the association between French widows and the wine business in a comedy sketch about France.  Supposedly quoting from a letter sent by a Tyrolean landlord regarding the accommodation that was available to tourists, the hilarity is not lost on Hoffnung’s audience as you can hear from the laughter in this audio clip:

‘Standing among savage scenery, the hotel offers stupendous revelations.  There is a French widow in every bedroom, affording delightful prospects.’

All humour aside, the Widow Clicquot’s story is one of dogged determination to maintain her independence through widowhood.   Despite having to battle against the blockades imposed on exports during the Napoleonic Wars and almost facing bankruptcy, the veuve’s vision meant that she got the champagne from the house of Clicquot to her customers.  By the time she was forty, she was fabulously wealthy and was name-checked in many European circles for the quality of the product that featured her name.

Afterword

Veuve Clicquot was product-placed in Sex and the City.  Watch the box set to spot the moment when the girls pour themselves a glass of this delicious bubbly.