The Widow Who Ruled the Champagne World

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0:35Pushkit. Too quick? No, it was perfect. Pushkit. up. You got it.

0:52Robert Smith, I have in front of me a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne. Green glass, bright orange label. And I know you well enough to know that if we're recording a podcast and there is a bottle of champagne, you want nothing more than to pop the cork on the mic. It's like I'm showing a banana to a monkey, and all you want to do in your monkey brain is peel the banana. Open, open, open, open, open. I'm passing you the champagne, but I want to tell you three things about Veuve Clicquot before you open it. Okay, I'll prepare. Thing number one, and I'm embarrassed to say I didn't know this one until recently, Veuve Clicquot was a person.

1:31Veuve means widow in French. Veuve Clicquot was the widow Clicquot. I did not know this. Over this basically failing winery when her husband died in 1805. And Robert, you're just taking off the cage from the top of the bottle. I think there is a portrait of the widow Clicquot on top of the little metal hat on the court. Oh yeah, stern expression, curly hair. Thing number two, the widow Clicquot made a technological breakthrough that helped turn champagne into the global phenomenon that it became. Thing number three, the story of the widow Clicquot also includes a widow loophole, the Industrial Revolution, and Napoleon.

2:11Oh, I love it. I'm Jacob Goldstein. And I'm Robert Smith. And this is Business History. A show about the history of business. Nice. Prost. The fizz. The fizz is too much. You know, it's funny you should say that because in the time of the Widow Clicquot, most of the wine that came out of the Champagne region of France did not have bubbles. Huh. And there is a twist in our Champagne story. And that is Champagne as we know it arguably was not invented in Champagne. It was not invented in France. It was invented in England. Yes. Did they serve it warm like the beer? Don't know. Good question. Yeah.

2:58And actually, let me say before we get into it, there was a key source, a really excellent source for the show today was a book called The Widow Clicquot. The author's name is Tilar Matzeo. It's really fun, well-written, interesting. And now, as they say, a major motion picture. Really? Yeah. Okay. They always say major motion picture. They never say a movie. Now a kinetoscope. A minor motion picture. They don't say that either. So, we're going to start the story about 100 years before the widow Clicquot comes along. Around 1700. With a monk. A Benedictine monk. All great drinking stories start with a monk.

3:36In the region of northeast France, known as La Champagne. The wine is Le Champagne. Oh, good to know. This monk's name was Dom. Dom Perignon! No way! Yes, he was a guy. He was a guy. And his monastery made wine. And for reasons no one understood at the time, sometimes bubbles would appear in their wine when they opened it. And delightfully, they didn't like it. No, it was terrible. Who put the bubbles in my champagne? You know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of when, like, salsa or hummus has been in the fridge too long. And it tastes just a little fizzy. There's just a little something on your tongue that tells you.

4:23Don't eat this. And I think it was like a little fizz like that. It wasn't like bubbly like bubbly today. And so one of the things Dom wanted to do was get the bubbles out of the wine. They actually called it le vin de diable. Oh, devil's wine. Devil's wine. We understand today actually why it happened. And it's interesting. So, you know, the way winemaking worked was they would take essentially the grape juice and they'd put it in wooden casks after the harvest. and the yeast that occurred naturally on the grapes. Wild yeast, yes. Wild yeast would consume the sugar from the grapes and it would excrete alcohol, delicious, and carbon dioxide, which in the regular wooden cask would just go off into the atmosphere and nobody even knew it was there, right?

5:08They didn't know what carbon dioxide was. And so you'd wind up a few months later with just wine, regular still wine, which you would then put into either sealed casks or bottles, right? You would seal it off. Now, the Champagne region is in the north of France where it's cold. And interestingly, at the time Dom Pérignon lived, around 1700, Europe was in the Little Ice Age. Remember the Little Ice Age? Not personally. I don't know. It was a hundred years or something. A long period when it was extra cold and crops were bad. And so because it's cold and extra cold at this time. It slowed it down.

5:45It slowed fermentation down. Right. So what would happen is at the end of the normal open cask fermentation process, not all of the sugars would have been metabolized by the yeast. So they'd seal it off. And now it's in a sealed container. Fermentation keeps happening. The yeast is metabolizing the sugar, but there's nowhere for the carbon dioxide to go. So you open the cask that has been sealed or you open the bottle, fizz, bubbles. I'm surprised it didn't blow up. Sometimes it did. Sometimes, in fact, it did. And so Dom is working on the bubbles problem, fails at that, but is in fact a genius winemaker, apparently.

6:23And later, later people will actually say Dom Perignon invented champagne. They'll in fact say that when he first tasted sparkling wine, he called out to another monk, come quickly, I am drinking the stars. This will be a lie when they say it'll be some marketing guy who makes it up, but it's a beautiful lie. It is a beautiful lie. And in fact, the champagne company Moët and Chandon much later will register Dom Perignon's name as a trademark, make him famous. And it's why Dom Perignon is a fancy sparkling wine today, even though he thought it was the Delos wine. In fact, the birth of champagne, as we know, it does not come from Dom Perignon.

7:03It comes delightfully from England, from France's arch rival, not known for its taste in rind foods and beverages. It was tough. I know. So the British imported wine in big wooden casks. And then they'd open the cask to drink the wine. But as you know, if you've opened a bottle of wine and you didn't finish it and you left it on the counter. Never happened to me. It goes bad. It goes bad. So the British did a couple things to prevent their wine from going bad after they opened the cask. One, add sugars, basically. It could be kind of like a syrup, a fruity syrup. It could be brandy. Which speeds it up.

7:42It makes it taste better. It makes it taste better. And then after they added the sugar, they would reseal it. They would put it into a bottle and seal it. And business fact, apparently the king of England had banned the use of wood for the fires to make glass because they needed the wood for ships. And so they used coal to make the bottles. And that made them stronger. So they had stronger bottles. Because it burns hotter? In England. I guess because it burns hotter. I guess because it burns hotter. I don't know. But that's what I think. So they had wine with extra sugar, put it in strong bottles, open it, and it's not a little fizzy like old hummus.

8:19It's bubbly, like bubbly. And they tasted it and they thought delicious. They thought the bubbles are fun. They thought you can get it nice for the odor. And rich people around Europe liked it. the regent who is running France when, was it Louis XV was young, the Duke of Orleans. This is early 1700s. He gets a taste for champagne. He throws these like crazy parties, orgies basically, where champagne is key. The Russian czar starts to love it. Is there some reason why it's for rich people or is this just the fad at the time? I think it's expensive to make, right? Because you have to make the wine and then you kind of have to make it again.

9:00And it turns out to be quite complicated to make it again. You have to sort of get it from the first bottle into the second bottle. So it is labor intensive. And it's a rich people fad. In Champagne, in the region in France, they see this happening and they start trying to make it. But it's hard. As you alluded to before, for one thing, the bottles do tend to blow up. And in France, I guess their glass is not as good as the glass in England. And so like half of the bottles blow up. Wow. The people who go into the cellars to work with it apparently start wearing some kind of iron mask. I couldn't find a picture of it, but it was described as something like a modern catcher's mask.

9:38So that if a bottle explodes, the chards are less likely to hit them in the face. And there's this other problem that contributes to the cost, which is during that second fermentation, the schmutz, basically the dead yeast, I guess, accumulates in the bottle. So it's cloudy and they try and get the schmutz out, but that's expensive and slow. They'll like pour it from one bottle into another. And so by the end of the 1700s, you know, now we're getting up to to Barb Nicole Clicquot, the hero of today's show. By the time she comes along, almost all of the wine made in the Champagne region is still normal, still wine.

10:18Because it's easier. It's easier. It's what they know how to do. It's typically red. And frankly, it's not as good as the wine in Bordeaux. And everybody kind of knows that, although in Champagne they're kind of in denial. And Barb Nicole Clicquot is going to be one of the key people who changes that, who turns Champagne into this global, enduring phenomenon. We were talking about this story, and it came up like, who is she? What was she like? Yeah, was she like an inventing genius? Was she a marketer? It's hard to figure out. In part A, because it's a long time ago. It's the early 1800s. She didn't write an autobiography like Henry Ford.

10:56She wasn't a celebrity like Thomas Edison. And so what we know about her comes largely from her business correspondent. She has these people working for her around the continent, and there's these letters. And it seems from those, it's, you know, if I were going to make an inference from what I've read of those, which, to be clear, largely comes from this book, The Widow Clicquot, I feel like she was not like a champagne lover who happened to run a business. I feel like she was a killer entrepreneur and the thing she sold happened to be champagne. So here is here is her life, right? She's born Barb Nicole Ponsardin, a daughter of a rich wool merchant.

11:35And in 1798, when she's 20 years old, she enters into an arranged marriage with the son of another rich wool merchant. So many offspring. I mean, it does remind me of the way the royal families of Europe would all intermarry as like alliances. I mean, this seems like that, but M &A, right? This is like a merger in the 1800s. You do it through marriage. This is, you know, right after the French Revolution. And so they actually they have a Catholic wedding ceremony, but they have to do it in secret because I guess the Catholic Church is banned at this point. Like the revolution was super intense.

12:13Yeah, it really got into people's lives. It wasn't just a political change of power. They were going to have a new era and a new way of living. Yeah, the year zero, right. And then they, you know, have their civil wedding license as citizen, citizen Ponsardin and citizen Clicquot. And one thing about the Clicquot family is besides being mainly in the textile business, they had a sideline as wine merchants, as sellers of wine. And around the time Barb Nicole marries Francois Clicquot, Francois decides he's going to really focus on wine. To this day, if you are rich and successful in something like wool, you're like, you know what?

12:50I'm going to buy a vineyard and I'm going to make wine. And my Playboy son can screw around in the wine business. I don't know if Francois was a Playboy, but he tries to make wine his thing. He travels around Europe trying to, you know, make new sales. And he's not that successful, at least not initially. But it is a really interesting time in the wine business, the wine industry, such as it is in France. because of Napoleon, actually. So Napoleon is running France by this point, you know, getting into the early 1800s. And one thing I've learned from our show, and you talked about this in the Jars show, right?

13:28Like Napoleon was kind of this industrialization figure. Yeah, and I think, you know, it's often said he did this because he wanted to take over Europe and you need industry to support your army. But what you rarely see from a general is somebody who actually is like, well, I'm going to solve the problems of business. I'm going to industrialize this country. In the case of the cans jars episode, he did it by offering a prize if you could come up with a way to store food in jars. And so similarly with wine, he had this guy who I think he had some like position head of the interior or something, but he was, this guy was bringing a kind of more scientific mindset to wine.

14:10And so Napoleon in the early 1800s commissions a book that is called The Art of Making, Controlling, and Perfecting Wines. And the book sets out to turn winemaking from this sort of quasi-mystical thing. Remember, there was a monk, was like the famous wine guy, and the wine of the devil, to turn it from that into this more scientific process, like this much sugar, this much time. It is a very enlightenment vibe. So around the time this book comes out, Francois decides, okay, you know, we're in the wine distributing business, but winemaking is becoming a science. I'm going to learn the science and I'm going to vertically integrate.

14:52Surely he would not have said vertically integrate. He wouldn't even have said it in French. I'm sure nobody said it. He's like, I don't want to pay people for the crepes and the bottles. Yeah, yeah. So Francois decides to get into winemaking And it's not great. It's not killing as a business, in part because the Nepal—I'm going to stop drinking wine now. Not me. In part, it's not his fault because the Napoleonic Wars keep starting and stopping. Yes. You know, kind of tough for business, especially if you're in an export business. And Francois does make one great move that is going to pay off throughout this story, and that is hiring a traveling salesman named Louis Bomme.

15:31Boom. B-O-H-M-E. I'm going with boom. Yeah. Who travels all over Europe. He has great connections in like Prussia and Russia. And he is making some sales. Rich people do still like to drink bubbly wine. And then in 1805, Francois Clicquot dies. He dies because what? Because it's 1805 and people die all the time. And he's young? Yeah. He's youngish. Yeah. They've gotten married a few years before. It's probably typhoid is the guess. Francois' father is despondent, of course, and decides he's going to sell off the wine business. But Barb Nicole suggests something else. She says, what if I take over the wine business?

16:16What if I run it? And this is really interesting in a broader historical way. It fits into this kind of complicated historical dynamic of the role of women in business more broadly around this time. If you go back a little early, you go back to the 1700s, it was actually relatively common for women to be in business. You know, it's the pre-industrial world. Yeah, and they were making textiles and clothing at home, but that was work. Right. That was work for pay. Factories were not a thing yet. They hadn't come along. And this separation of work and business wasn't such a thing in the pre-industrial world.

16:56You farmed with your family. You, as you say, you know, cottage industry, they called it. It was literal cottages. People in their homes did it. So now, by the 1800s, the world's starting to industrialize, modernize, and there is this idea of home and work as separate spheres that is emerging. And home is the sphere for women, and work is the sphere for men. And in fact, just before Francois dies, this is codified in France in the Napoleonic Code. It's put into law. And in this law, women are essentially excluded from the business world. They can't work without their special permission from their husband.

17:41They can't own property without special permission from their husband. And in fact, this is why a lot of the shows we do feature almost exclusively men. Like to this day, through the great age of business, women were at home and men were running the business. Yes. And in France, in many ways, it was illegal for women to work. But, but there was this exception, almost a loophole for widows, for widows. Widows, unlike women who were married or who had never been married, could be out there in the business world under the Napoleonic Code. They could own property. They could run businesses without the consent of a man.

18:24Huh. So, Barb Nicole Clicquot, who is now Veuve Clicquot, now the widow Clicquot, decides, that's what I'm going to do. I'm a widow. I'm going to run the family business. I got to pour a little bit more champagne while we take a break. Give me a clink.

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21:46We're back from the break, and we are going to start the business adventures of Vauve Clicquot. The Widow Clicquot. So because of the way the Clicquot wine business is structured, the Widow Clicquot has to get the buy-in of her father-in-law. And he does agree on one condition. He says, okay, you can do it, but you have to basically serve an apprenticeship. You have to run the business for four years with someone who knows the wine business well. And after that, if you want to go solo, you can. And she agrees. Barb Nicole Clicquot agrees to this. And the partner is yet another textile merchant turned winemaker, a guy named Alexandre Fourneau.

22:37Kind of an arranged corporate marriage at this point. Yeah, yeah. It's purely platonic, just business. And so in 1806, Clicquot and Fourneau enter into a four-year partnership, and they call their wine business Vauve Clicquot Fourneau, Widow Clicquot Fourneau. And pretty quickly, they do get a bunch of big orders from Prussia and Russia. They got that good salesman up there. But France is at war with England again. The British are blockading French ports again. And so now, Veuve Clicquot Fourneau has wine, bubbly wine. They have the orders for the wine, but they have no way of getting the wine to the customers who are ordering the wine.

23:24Supply chain logistics. Yes, yes, they have a logistics problem. And so Clicquot and Fourneau decide they're going to try and go around the British blockade. Run the blockade. Well, so people did run the blockade, you know, they just would send ships out. They're going to do something a little different. They're going to take the wine overland to Amsterdam and go from there. Because when they make this decision, it's just the French ports getting blockaded. And Forno actually goes along with the wine overland to Amsterdam. But around this time, Napoleon has made his brother the King of Holland.

24:05and it's become a sort of, I guess, a vassal state. And so just as the wine is about to get shipped out to the Baltic, the British show up and blockade Amsterdam. They're never going to get over the fact that they invented champagne and now it's taking off without them. Forno writes back to Clicquot, sea commerce is totally ruined and therefore all commerce on the continent. It's the only thing they had. They put the wine into storage in Amsterdam, but it's not cold storage. There is no cold storage. And they send a salesman there to try and liquidate the wine, if you will. But the wine basically goes bad by the time he gets there.

24:47It's a loss. And meanwhile, war is spreading, and that demand that they had before is collapsing. Their salesman in Prussia writes to Clicquot about the situation in Prussia. Give it a read. It's here in the script, what he writes. Prussia has lacked even money for the worst vintage this past year, and after 15 years of war, has given up on being able to procure our luxury drink. All is war, war, and war. Poet. It's a lot of war. War is bad for the champagne business. I know. Victory is great for the champagne business, but the act of war, terrible. They're trying to sell more wine domestically in France.

25:28But by 1810, things are still quite grim. And their salesman, Louis Baum, writes another letter to give the latest sales update. And you can sum it up in three words from that letter, Robert. Business totally dead. So now the four-year partnership, Clicquot-Fourneau, comes to its end. And unsurprisingly, Fourneau decides he wants out. But Barb Nicole wants to stay in. she drops Fourneau's name from the business, and Veuve Clicquot Fourneau becomes Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin. She adds her maiden name, which is still the full name today of the winery. So that's 1810. And the next year, in 1811, there is a portent.

26:16A portent in the sky? A literal portent in the sky. A comet. A big, beautiful comet. Famous comet, yeah. And apparently for Champagne, it portended an incredible harvest. Sure there's a connection? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe it was the sunspots. Big, beautiful grapes, sugary, just perfect. Amazing harvest. Veuve Clicquot start burning a star, a shooting star, a comet logo into their corks to mark the year. In fact, actually, interestingly, at the time, wine bottles didn't typically have labels. They weren't branded with labels. So there was like a literal brand, right? They would burn into the cork an image.