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“This woman is a great man,” declared a Veuve Clicquot advertisement more than half a century ago. Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin suddenly lost her husband, François Clicquot, in 1805. He was the sole heir to the eponymous négociant house founded by his father in 1772. That terrible tragedy—coupled with one last, very mediocre vintage—marked the anxious beginning of the astonishing destiny of the first in a long line of famous Champagne widows.
Mademoiselle Ponsardin was the daughter of Nicolas Ponsardin, a bourgeois industrialist who was also the city’s chief magistrate in Reims. Widowhood was the only status that, at the time, allowed a young woman to free herself from the Napoleonic Civil Code which would otherwise have placed her under paternal or fraternal authority. Supported by her father—who knew her to be anything but sentimental, ambitious and determined—she threw herself into the enterprise with tremendous energy. After settling the financial arrangements in a family council, she partnered with him and with a Reims wine merchant, before taking the reins alone a few years later.
Legend has it that a comet heralded the good omen of an extraordinary 1811 vintage—the very one she sent to Russia in 1814, skirting the British naval blockade shortly before Napoleon’s abdication. Having studied the movement of armies, convinced she could seize the moment to supply the victorious camp, she chartered two ships carrying 10,550 bottles of Champagne, entrusted to her loyal salesman Louis Bohne. Although her Champagne sold far better in peacetime—prompting her to nickname the emperor “the Great Satan”—when Russia lifted its prohibitive import taxes after its victory, her instinct paid off. Russians fought over bottles of klikovskoé, “Clicquot wine” in Russian, which for a time became a generic term for Champagne. The affection was mutual—perhaps also necessary, as the house exported two-thirds of its production there.
From her native Reims, the Widow contemplated this lush culture through the narrow window of a sustained epistolary relationship with her commercial director. “She is a woman who stays put. She travels very little and yet she runs an international business,” explains Fabienne Moreau, head of heritage at Veuve Clicquot. She governed her house from the tip of her pen. Aware that her brand had to radiate across the world, her strategy did not rely solely on a dense network of motivated salesmen; “she was very methodical and cared deeply about quality, at a time when Champagne was still highly experimental,” Moreau adds. This philosophy inspired the house motto: “one quality only: the finest.” And first she would be, in many domains.
In 1810, she pioneered the launch of a vintage-dated cuvée. Later, confronted with success driven by international demand she struggled to meet for lack of sufficient pace, she grew impatient—and began thinking of a way to speed up the operation that cost her the most time: riddling, the process of gradually coaxing the dead yeasts from the second fermentation in bottle down towards the neck so they can be expelled. It kept her awake; she spent a sleepless night alone in her cellar, turning the problem over in every possible way—quite literally. Eureka. She gathered her staff, summoned a carpenter, and showed them the sketch she had drawn. The great dining-room table, topped with a thick walnut board, was sacrificed on the altar of its owner’s ingenuity. The carpenter drilled holes according to Barbe-Nicole’s design. The riddling table was born. It accelerated riddling a hundredfold, allowing bottles to be kept upside down and handled collectively rather than one by one. It also stabilised the descent of dead yeasts towards the neck, clarifying the wines and reducing the amount of juice lost at disgorgement. The innovation was quickly adopted by other houses.
She then turned her attention to the shape of the glass bottle—both a tool of production (where the wine undergoes its second fermentation and develops its mousse) and the image of the house. There was no longer any need to decant Champagne: the riddling table made it possible to keep it in bottle, since unsightly lees no longer lingered there. Working with a team of glassmakers, she helped devise what she considered an elegant, resistant “Champagne bottle,” which remains the principal form today.
Then the contents were rethought. Before 1818, rosé Champagne was tinted with a decoction of elderberries. She is credited with inventing rosé d’assemblage—blending red wine with white wine—a technique that is still dominant for rosé Champagne, the only French appellation where such blending is permitted.
Her long, clear-sighted reign inspired the remarkable line of widows who followed her, and many women across the centuries—beginning with her great-granddaughter, the Duchesse d’Uzès, to whom she is said to have offered this advice shortly before her death in 1866: “The world is in perpetual motion and we must invent the things of tomorrow. We must arrive before others. Be determined, demanding, and let your intelligence steer your life. Act boldly.” Words that proved meaningful for the heiress. A worldly, unconventional feminist, she was the first woman to master chasse à courre—and the first to obtain a driving licence. There is no doubt about it: these women are great ladies.
GV
