Women in the History of Champagne - Veuve Clicquot

March is #womenshistorymonth so for the next few weeks I will highlight the contributions of women in the history of #Champagne. Barbe Nicole-Ponsardin, also known as Madame Clicquot, is one of the famous widows (veuves) who made Champagne what it is today. She was only 27 years old when she took over the family business in 1805, after her husband Philippe Clicquot died prematurely. By doing so, she became one of the first businesswomen of modern times. And she was fearless! Women were not even allowed to open their own bank account back then! No wonder she was nicknamed "La Grande Dame”. Here are 4 of her accomplishments:

1 - RIDDLING TABLE: The méthode champenoise or traditionelle (second fermentation in the bottle) requires that the champagne bottles spend time ageing in contact with the lees (yeast) to develop complex aromas. The bottles are stored horizontally to maximise the area of contact between the wine and the lees. In the 17th century, the yeast was not eliminated from the bottles, so the champagne was cloudy. At the beginning of the 18th century, some clever monks invented riddling to eliminate the dead yeast. They used boxes of sand in which they bedded their bottles, starting horizontally then raising them gradually towards the vertical. That way, the dead yeast could be trapped in the neck, then manually disgorged to obtain a clear wine. At the beginning of the 19th century, the bottles were lodged in a rack with angled holes. The bottles were held at an angle, but they were not systematically turned. 

It was 1818 before the story of riddling really started. Madame Clicquot was desperately trying to find a way to speed production up. Legend has it that Madame Clicquot, prompted by an employee called Antoine Muller, took a kitchen table and had "holes drilled in it at an angle, so that the bottles might be set at different angles and be turned while remaining in their places." The riddling table, forerunner of the triangular pupitre, was born! It considerably decreased the time required to eliminate the yeast and Madame Clicquot was able to produce and sell more bottles. The pupitre is still used today to riddle special cuvées.

2 - VINTAGE CHAMPAGNE: up until Mme Clicquot, all champagnes were a blend of wines produced from different harvest years. Today, they are referred to as non-vintage champagne and represent 85% of sales. In 1810, Mme Clicquot produced the first vintage champagne using only grapes harvested that year. In 1811, the Flaugergues comet lit up the sky during most of the growing season in Champagne. Throughout the history of wine, winemakers have attributed successful vintages and ideal weather conditions to the unexplained effects caused by comets. Mme Clicquot took advantage of this belief, and the exceptional quality of grapes harvested that year, to produce her second vintage and brand it as a "comet wine". That is when she started using the comet as a symbol. Today many other producers still use the comet symbol on their corks as an hommage to the exceptional year, and they continue to produce vintage champagne during exceptional years.

3 - ROSé D'ASSEMBLAGE: the first mention of pink champagne in the history of champagne dates back to the 18th century. In those days it was called "Oeil de Perdrix" (eye of the partridge), which is a French term that refers to the pale copper colour of a recently-shot bird's eye. This term is still used today by a handful of producers in Champagne, as well as for some still rosés in other regions in France. Until just a few years ago, it was thought that Veuve Clicquot was the first to produce and sell "Oeil de Perdrix" in 1775, but a historian at LVMH (who owns both Veuve Clicquot and Ruinart) recently dug up some archives that show that Ruinart sold some in 1764, 11 years before Veuve Clicquot.

The pale pink colour of "Oeil de Perdrix" was obtained by either: 1) leaving the grape juice in contact with the skins of black grapes for a bit longer than they would for white champagne (maceration), or 2) adding a concoction called “teinte de Fismes” which was made from elderberries. The latter method was used by producers of “dubious reputation”. According to Frédéric Pana?otis, chef de cave for Ruinart, the former method was probably discovered by mistake: "Maybe some guy didn't wake up in the morning, or they were short-staffed, so there was extra skin contact.” The maceration method was not well-mastered in the 18th century so the quality of the pink champagne was unreliable. 

Madame Clicquot was unsatisfied with the results and wanted to improve the colour, aromas and flavours of her pink champagne. She experimented with various methods, and in 1818, almost 200 years ago, she invented rosé d’assemblage (blended rosé). In order to achieve the desired results for her pink champagne, at the blending stage, Veuve Clicquot innovated by adding a small proportion of the still red wine that she made from her plots in Bouzy to her still white wines. To this day, Champagne is the only Appellation d’Origine Contr?lée (AOC) that allows winemakers to blend red and white wines together to make rosé. All other AOCs use the maceration method (skin contact) to obtain their rosé wine. The rosé d’assemblage method is now also the most commonly used method to make pink sparkling wine all over the world.

3 - BRANDING: When Madame Clicquot took over the business, she changed the name of the company to Veuve Clicquot-Ponsardin. She understood the importance of using a name - her name. She also understood the importance of symbols. She kept the anchor, which symbolised hope, that her husband had chosen to use as a distinguishing feature on the cork, before the era of labels. In 1811, a comet shot across the sky and many believed this was a sign predicting an exceptionally good harvest. Veuve Clicquot used the grapes from that harvest to produce and sell her exceptional "Vins de la Comète". In 1877, when she was trying to conquer the British palates who preferred drier champagnes, she started using the famous yellow label for her new dry champagnes, to distinguish them from her sweet champagne, which had white labels.

If you would like to find out more about Veuve Clcquot’s life, listen to the podcast series “The Veuve Clicquot Tales”