The Widow Clicquot by Tilar J. Mazzeo: book review

The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It (2008) is an oeonbiography (wine biography) about Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot of the Reims and the Champagne region of France. A champagne empire developed in times of war, Napoleon Bonaparte, and the French Revolution. The Champagne region was (and still is) limited to 323 villages with a close-knit but competitive community.

Ponsardin (1777-1866) was a 16-year-old when her father, a textile merchant, prospered during the peasant revolt that led to the French Revolution. She married Francois Clicquot at 20, who was a small-time wine broker distributing the wines made by local growers. He had an idea to make champagne for the international market. It was a time when wines were sold in wooden casks – not bottles – and champagne was sweet and unpopular – in fact, Dom Perignon, a local wine maker, worked at eliminating the bubbles from wine because no-one wanted ‘wine gone wrong.’

The early life of Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin is unclear, and Mazzeo’s text is therefore at its weakest. In the first chapters she uses the term ‘perhaps’ excessively because facts are limited and the author is speculating what Ponsardin did or felt. Mazzeo also uses the terms ‘surely’ and ‘certainly’ as if she knew exactly what happened, but there is limited evidence.

In 1805, when she was 27, Clicquot’s husband died, leaving her to raise her daughter, Clementine, as a single mother. She was known as Le Veuve Clicquot – the widow Clicquot. Alexandre Jerome Fourneaux partnered with her for four years, but withdrew his investment to establish his own company – Champagne Taitinger – although it was Jean Remy Moet who was their greatest competitor.

Except for the author’s brief intrusion in chapter 11 when she talks about herself, by chapter 8 the narration improves due to the availability of letters and company documents, which show the progress and challenges of Clicquot’s company as she partners with Louis Bohne, her international marketer and salesman.

Success, after much hard work, starts from about 1814. Bohne writes from Russia, ‘your judicious manner of operating, your excellent wine, and the marvelous similarities of our ideas, which produced  the most splendid unity and action and executio – we did it …’ when at last they achieved a measure of success.

By 1819-1820 the story is interesting. In a few years all the men who have influenced Clicquot’s career are dead – her husband, her brother, her father, and her father-in-law – it was the end of the Ponsardin family line. Louis Bohne died too. But Clementine married – but not to a likeable man. At the age of 64 (when the average age for a woman in France at that time was 45) Clicquot had to make decisions about her legacy.

While the personal history of the Widow Clicquot is scant, Mazzeo’s best writing appears throughout the text – when she writes of the history of champagne and how it is made: the explosions of glass bottles, the corks that don’t fit, the boats that don’t arrive, the bad weather that spoils the harvest, the lack of sales, the sediment that won’t disgorge, the changing palettes for less sugary wine, the complaints about the size of the bubbles – the yeux de crapard (toad’s eyes), the financial difficulties, and the many times she was ‘alone and on the brink of ruin.’

What the French Revolution taught Clicquot was that ‘peasants could become politicians. Kings – once esteemed gods – could face the executioner’ and therefore anyone could be anything. This is the story of her determination, persistence, experimentation, forward thinking, inventive marketing, and ingenuity.

The distinctive yellow label came much later. Throughout her life the Widow Clicquot lived and dreamed champagne – Le vin, c’est moi – the wine, it’s me! She lived a long active life, dying at the age of 89 – outliving her daughter and two great grandchildren.

The hard-cover book is well presented with the iconic colours of Le Veuve Clicquot. It can’t be called a true non-fiction biography because the facts are sparse and there is much speculation, and it can’t be called fiction in the style of Tracy Chevalier’s The Lady and the Unicorn, but there is enough about the birth of a champagne empire to be interesting, entertaining, and  fascinating.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).