Perhaps part of the reason François was so willing to talk with his wife about his business ambitions was that he struggled with his father. All the evidence suggests that they were very different men. Philippe was a cautious and conservative businessman who couldn’t muster much excitement for his son’s plan to travel halfway across the continent, trying to sell luxury wines to people crippled by years of economic crisis. Even if François landed the sales, there was still the problem of how to ship the orders. François, however, had it in his head that this would be a great opportunity, and off he went. He even managed to drum up enough sales that his father couldn’t point to the trip as an obvious failure, and while on the road, he did make—albeit by pure chance—the single most important discovery for the future of his family’s wine business.
This discovery was named Louis Bohne. Louis was a short and portly traveling salesman from Mannheim, Germany, with red hair and a rare talent for closing a deal. François met him in the port town of Basel, where the Rhine runs out to the sea and at the crossroads where modern-day France, Switzerland, and Germany converge. Louis spoke half a dozen languages, had a head for numbers, and—most important—was immediately as enthusiastic about the Clicquot family wine business as François himself.
When François returned to Reims, he had to admit that Germany and Switzerland had been disappointing markets, but new prospects and a glittering future seemed just on the horizon. By the spring of 1802, especially, there was reason to be hopeful. In March, with the Treaty of Amiens, economic relations with even Great Britain were restored, and for the first time in nearly a generation, France was at peace. Now François and Louis came up with a grand plan for selling wines in Great Britain. They were certain there was an untapped market just waiting for French product. On the face of it, they weren’t wrong. With the end of the war, after years in which luxuries like French wine and silk had been contraband, the British people were starved for these pleasures, and François and Louis were determined to capture their share of the sales. So in the first flush of collective enthusiasm, Louis set out for London to sell the high-end company wines, while François came home to run the business.
Although the British were hankering for French wines, champagne was a harder sell. London had been the commercial birthplace of champagne at the end of the seventeenth century, and there had even been a brief fashion for this special sparkling wine again during the 1770s, when François’s father was first beginning his small trade as a wine broker; but the British passion for sparkling wine had cooled since the days of the Revolution. Current demand was only for the most mildly effervescent champagne known as crémant or for the finest still wines of the region. There was even a brief resurgence of interest in the delicate red wines grown on the southernmost slopes of the mountain of Reims.
François’s grandmother owned large vineyards and a farm in the most famous of those villages, Bouzy. A light red wine was often made from the grapes grown on the property, and some of it probably made its way to London in the years to come. Curious wine lovers can try something very like it today, because Bouzy red is still crafted in the Champagne. It is something of a rarity, and in my experience the quality of the wine varies dramatically from one producer to another. But no matter who makes it—and no matter how well or how poorly—Bouzy red commands the same steep prices as a bottle of sparkling champagne. The laws governing winemaking strictly limit the total weight of the grapes that can be harvested in the Champagne. Every grape in a bottle of this still red wine counts against the total harvest for the entire region. Bouzy red is as expensive as champagne because it is made from grapes that would otherwise have found their way into one of the region’s famous sparkling wines.
We can still savor a Bouzy red. An authentic champagne crémant, on the other hand, is now forbidden. The rigid rules for controlling how wines are labeled in France, a system known as the AOC, or appellation d’origine contrôlée, today ensures that prestigious winemaking areas like the Champagne have a geographic monopoly on certain words. The word crémant now belongs to someone else, making the commercial production of champagne crémant impossible despite the local origins of this remarkable sparkling wine with froth like rich cream.
In spite of their hopes and the opening markets abroad during the peace, Louis’s trip to Great Britain was a sales disaster. Plenty of people were buying French wines, but breaking into the market as a newcomer turned out to be impossible. Sales depended on access to aristocratic circles, where people had the money to buy extravagantly expensive wines. An average bottle of champagne was expensive indeed, easily costing 3 to 4 francs—more than half the weekly salary of many of the people who labored to produce it. In today’s figures, this would be as much as $80 a bottle. It would take years to cultivate this clientele, and their competitors had the market locked up until then. Dukes and duchesses did not readily open their doors to traveling salesmen, even those peddling fine wines.
One of the competitors who dominated the champagne sales in Great Britain was the Moët family, headed at the time by Jean-Rémy Moët. If his portraits are any indication, Jean-Rémy was a trim and handsome man in his youth. The Moët family had been distributing the local sparkling wine since the heyday of the 1730s, but like everyone in the industry, they were struggling. In fact, newcomers like François, whose companies had not had to ride out a forty-year slump in the wine market, often had more financial resources than their established rivals.
It may be because of the Moët family contacts in the British market and the fashion for champagne crémant that François and his father ended up selling some of their 1800 vintage stocks to Jean-Rémy not long after Louis had returned with sorry sales figures. French scholar Michel Etienne, who has made an exhaustive study of the Veuve Clicquot company business records, has discovered on the books a deal for the sale of two or three thousand bottles of nearly flat champagne, made from the high-quality grapes of Aÿ, sold to the Moët wine company. Perhaps, recognizing that such wine was marketable only in England, where they had failed to secure orders themselves, François decided to move the product.
All things considered, François must have been discouraged with the results of his first few years in the wine business. Sales were only modest where he had hoped for stunning ones, and there was no way to put a good spin on the trip to London for his watchful father. But with the new peace, things could only get better, and although Philippe must have been reluctant to cede control of the business, it was time for him to step aside. François had his own energy and vision, and he had not actually done badly. Besides, at sixty-two, Philippe was tired. In the summer of 1802, his father retired from the business, leaving François for the first time completely in charge of shaping the direction of the company.
As luck would have it, François’s first year solo at the helm was a disaster. This time the problem was not the lack of sales orders. After the disappointment in London, Louis had returned to central Europe, a territory that he knew far better, and that summer he returned from the extended trip abroad with solid orders for the wines they would harvest that fall.
The problem was now it didn’t look as though they would be able to fill them. The weather conspired against the vintners in the Champagne that year. The final months of the growing season in 1802 were so hot that the vines shriveled in the fields. It was the beginning of a three-year period of exceptionally hot, dry summers that meant disastrous harvests throughout Europe. That summer, the English poet William Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy were in France, and Dorothy’s journals make note of the sweltering weather. The heat in August was oppressive, even in a seaside town like Calais: “The day very hot,” she writes, “the sea was gloomy…overspread with lightning…[and] calm hot nights.”
By the end of August, François knew what the heat wave portended for his business. “In the memory of man,” he wrote to a friend, “no one [can] remember a year this unfortunate.” In nearly three-quarters of the Champagne there was no harv
est at all that year. The Clicquot family found themselves, like all the other distributors in the area, hard-pressed to buy enough wine to fill the orders for which they had struggled and sacrificed. That year, all the profit went to the intermediaries and brokers with the foresight to store significant reserves.
In these early days of the wine industry in the Champagne, only a handful of dealers kept reserves of this sort. Most of the people who traded in wines purchased them—like François—ready-made from local vintners. François usually bought his wines by the bottle, although some enterprising businessmen had started purchasing cask wines to bottle themselves, taking on some extra risk in hopes of making a better return. Nobody wanted to store wines for extended periods unless they had to. Many of the wines from the region, especially those grown along the banks of the river Marne, didn’t have a reputation for aging well. Even today, it is not wise to keep your champagne for too long.
Winemakers had recognized the fleeting qualities of the local wines as early as the seventeenth century. The local pinot meunier grape, grown in the river towns along the Marne, was particularly short-lived, although it made a satisfying, mellow wine. Ironically, the better-quality wines were often the most delicate. Wines that were fine and rich, with the subtlest flavors and made from the very first pressing of the grapes—the cuvée—were delicious but fragile. They rarely lasted in casks more than a year or two in the cellars.
In most cases, it was a much better idea to sell the wines quickly and be done with it. The risk of spoilage and the storage costs didn’t make stockpiling wines an attractive idea to many businessmen. Wines only started to be bottled in the Champagne during the eighteenth century because brokers in the industry slump could extend the life of their product by a few years if the wines were stored in glass. Philippe had built the family business by selling the finest of these stocks.
More daring winemakers sometimes turned those bottled wines into sparkling champagne, hoping to add greater value to the product. The risks were huge, especially in warm weather. During the hot summer of 1747, Allart de Maisonneuve woke up to find that over 80 percent of his bottles—wines worth perhaps as much as $200,000—had simply exploded. During the heat wave that gripped the Champagne in 1802, things weren’t much better.
In the midst of a ruinous summer, when most vignerons had nothing to show for an entire year’s labor, Barbe-Nicole discovered that her husband was now seized with a new idea. Barbe-Nicole would always have a dangerous weakness for men who were gamblers, perhaps because she had married one. His intensity was exhilarating. When the chips were down, François wanted nothing more than to roll the dice—and reinvent the family business. One company insider later described how François “visited the neighboring vineyards, went down into all the cellars, compared, weighed, mediated, and then finally laid the foundation of an entirely different commercial system.” No longer content with the modest commissions of a distributor, he wanted to play for bigger stakes. Despite the risks—and despite what he knew the town’s more experienced businessmen must be thinking—François was determined to start bottling his own wines. As always, his timing would prove disastrous.
Chapter 5
Crafting the Cuvée
The nineteenth-century copy of Jean-Antoine Chaptal’s treatise The Art of Making, Controlling, and Perfecting Wines in the wine collections of the Sonoma County Public Library is a thin and tightly gathered collection of gently yellowed paper, with the cramped and blurry type common of inexpensive books from the beginning of the nineteenth century. It was a book much like this one, however, that inspired François’s decision to stake the family fortunes on a new bottling operation in 1802. The Art of Making, Controlling, and Perfecting Wines has been described as “a decisive turning point in the history of wine technology.” It had been published the year before, and there was no way François and Barbe-Nicole could have missed owning a copy. Just as François was beginning his first experiments with blending and bottling wines in the family cellars, Napoléon ordered departmental prefects throughout France to distribute a copy of the treatise to everyone in the wine business.
Chaptal changed the future of winemaking with his slender scientific treatise. As both François and Barbe-Nicole knew, the greatest obstacle to the commercial integration of the winemaking cycle was the separation between the growers and the distributors. The problem for François’s grand new plan was that the growers had all the skills: They made the wines, and they usually bottled them as well. Since bottling wines added significant value—sometimes making the same wine worth three times what it sold for by the barrel—François was eager to try his hand at it. He and Barbe-Nicole desperately needed the knowledge that came with generations of experience in the vineyards.
There was a rich lore and tradition that governed the production of wine in France, and nowhere was this folk wisdom more revered than in the making of that finicky and mysterious sparkling wine still known locally as vin mousseux. Winemakers watched the stars for portents of a good harvest, and traditionally vintners waited for the first full moon in March to begin bottling champagne. According to popular legend, the springtime moon had the power to raise a tide of bubbles in the bottles. Others put their faith in a higher source. Today, visitors to Reims in January can still witness the solemn and ancient festival of St. Vincent, the patron of winemakers. On a windy afternoon that winter in France, I stumbled upon the celebration unexpectedly and stood shivering on a street corner to watch as a thousand vintners made their silent pilgrimage from the Hôtel de Ville to the Basilica of Saint Rémi in scarlet cloaks and white bonnets, bearing before them the small icon of a harvest saint. It was a moving reminder of the reverence those who live in the Champagne have always felt for the mysteries of winemaking.
The finer details of this lore were not part of the personal experience that François brought to his new enterprise, however, and the secret traditions of generations of winemakers weren’t likely to help him launch his new business plan anyhow. Although he had learned a good deal about the making and selling of wine during his years of business training with his father, trade was not the same thing as craft. What François needed was reliable technical information about the production of wine that would make them less reliant on the experience and knowledge of the rural craftsmen who turned grapes into fine wines.
This was exactly what Chaptal’s treatise provided. The Art of Making, Controlling, and Perfecting Wines was an elegant synthesis of all the scientific and practical knowledge about winemaking available at the time, mass-distributed in a way that no other book on viniculture had been before. Among his most important discoveries, Chaptal is still famous for quantifying the chemical relationship between sugar, fermentation, and alcohol. Although winemakers since the seventeenth century had known that sugar was essential to champagne, the process of adding sugar to the must in order to make a better wine is known today as chaptalization. But Chaptal also advised his readers on everything from cleaning bottles to corking champagne. For anyone new to the business, his treatise was invaluable.
If it seems curious that Napoléon chose to distribute this pamphlet at just the moment when François and Barbe-Nicole were preparing to take new risks in the wine business, it really isn’t. Napoléon had commissioned the book from Chaptal as part of a new government effort to expand the wine industry in France—and the champagne industry in particular. Everyone knew that Napoléon had a soft spot for sparkling wine and for the entrepreneurs who provided him with it. There were already stories about staggeringly expensive dinner parties in Paris where his guests consumed a thousand bottles in a night. Perhaps Napoléon remembered fondly those rolling hills and chalk fields of his own boyhood in the region. Perhaps his old friend Jean-Rémy Moët had his ear. Whatever the reason, champagne was one of Napoléon’s passions, and with the same zeal for reform that led him to modernize the French legal system and improve the nation’s highways, he set in motion a series of initiatives aimed at transforming the
French wine industry into a national economic engine. Chaptal’s book was part of that plan, and the right information—along with some attractive government incentives—undoubtedly played a role in François’s thinking.
Despite François’s eagerness and the recent return of peace in France, this new enterprise was a slow and tedious business. It would take more than a year to prepare their first “house” wines to bring to the market in 1803. Perhaps a bit rattled by his dawning understanding of the fabulous risks and steep learning curve that making their own champagne entailed, in the beginning François decided to limit their production to 25 percent of the annual stocks.
Some restraint was a good idea. As novices to the art of bottling wines, the Clicquots had a lot to learn. Perhaps, in addition to Chaptal’s guide, François turned to books such as Jean Godinot’s Manner of Cultivating the Vine and Making Wine in the Champagne or Nicolas Bidet’s Treatise on the Culture of Wines. In the cellars, they could turn for advice to the company cellar master, Monsieur Protest. All the hard labor of the bottling and blending would fall on his shoulders (and those of the other cellar workers) in the end. And, of course, they relied on Louis Bohne. He was the one who knew what the customers wanted.
Apart from the small batches of wine made from the grapes of the family estates, there was never any plan to start making wines from scratch that summer. François would buy his base wines by the cask from growers, as always. But some of that wine he now planned to blend and bottle, for resale either as luxury still wines or as sparkling champagne. Inevitably, crafting excellent wines in his cellars depended on finding the highest-quality casks possible.
The Widow Clicquot Page 7