Champagne - Practice
The Widow Who Changed Champagne
Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin was twenty seven when her husband François Clicquot died in 1805 and left her a struggling wine house in Reims. A widow in Napoleonic France could own and run a business; a wife could not. So she stayed a widow, put her title on the label, Veuve Clicquot, and spent the next six decades proving that the bankers who refused her credit had backed the wrong horse.
Champagne then was a murky drink, clouded with dead yeast from its second fermentation in the bottle. Her answer was the riddling table, a desk drilled with angled holes where bottles were turned a fraction each day, neck down, until the sediment gathered at the cork and could be shot out in one cold gesture. The wine that remained was clear as glass. Every house in the region copied her within a generation.
In 1814, while the blockades of the Napoleonic wars still held, she smuggled ten thousand bottles of her 1811 comet vintage to Russia ahead of every competitor. The court of the Tsar drank nothing else for years. The chalk cellars under Reims still hold her wine. She never remarried.
