The Widow Clicquot by Tilar Mazzeo

The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman who Ruled It

Tilar J. Mazzeo

Harper Collins, 2008

It’s become a symbolic moment recognized identically all over the world: the pop of the champagne cork and the giddy rush of effervescence that is virtually synonymous with laughter. But in 1815, Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin, the Veuve (widow) Clicquot, was hardly celebrating. She was faced with more orders for her celebrated sparkling wines than she could fill, largely because the traditional methods of creating those wines were slowing her down. Tilar Mazzeo, in her playful and entirely enjoyable new biography of the Veuve Clicquot, draws the scene:

In the cellars, she tried to urge her workers to speed the process, but they told her it couldn’t be done.

“You have only fifty thousand bottles ready,” she told them. “I asked for double!”

“Madame,” they replied, “you can’t ship muddy wines.”

“No, I want to ship very clear wines and in sufficient quantity.”

“You will never get it,” the workers assured her. “No one knows any other method besides the one we are using.”

“I will find one,” she promised.

The method, of course, was to store the bottles neck-down, which causes all the various sediments and residues to collect at the top of the bottle – and come jetting out when the cork is pulled correctly. It’s amazing, throughout Mazzeo’s book, to encounter scenes like this one and try to imagine a world where “popping the cork” has no particular meaning. Everywhere in this book are equally fascinating tidbits, like the ideal conditions for the harvest:

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.

The rare and minor slip (for instance, the widow’s freedom to run her own business affairs was hardly “unique” to revolutionary France; widows had enjoyed that freedom in many countries, since at least the time of Chaucer, if not Julius Caesar) can be happily ignored in light of the book’s many joys. Oenophiles are only the most obvious part of its audience: everyone who’s ever celebrated anything should read this book, and then hoist one to the Widow.