Chapter 7
Partner and Apprentice
Staring at the ceiling of her bedroom in the early morning hours of February 10, 1806, Barbe-Nicole was perhaps already feeling queasy. The church bells tolled six o’clock, and without turning to look, she knew the horizon was still only a dim wash of early gray.
It was her usual morning hour, yet this was anything but a usual day. Today—after months of hard thinking and secret anxieties, after weeks of persuasion and self-doubt—was the day she would sign over her assets to enter into an arranged partnership with a man she knew only in passing. It was the second time in her life she had done so. But this time, it was not a marriage. It was a business partnership. And if anything, the stakes were even greater. She was risking a family fortune on a commercial venture, and with it she was risking the independence that she had only recently realized was her right as a widow—especially as the widow of a wealthy industrialist.
As her gaze took in the room around her in the growing half-light of dawn—the high, decorative ceilings and airy windows, the luster of the polished furniture in the shadows—perhaps she thought for a moment about the life she could have chosen now that François was gone: summers at a country estate somewhere cool and delicious, winters here in Reims or perhaps even Paris, with her favorite cousins, members of the extended Le Tertre family to which her mother had been born. There would have been no worries about money or the future. No reasons to wake up with her stomach turning somersaults.
Swinging her feet to the floor, she also knew that what she was feeling was excitement. Rarely had she felt so alive or so determined. It had taken the same determination to persuade her father-in-law to let her take over the company. He had been the only obstacle she couldn’t dismiss easily, and his doubts about a woman’s ability to run a struggling commercial enterprise—about her complete lack of any business experience, above all—had sometimes seemed insurmountable. Still, in the end, she thought with a smile, he had agreed to let her try. She was glad that men of his generation could still imagine the possibility of a family businesswoman, even in this new industrialist era. She could never forget how kind he had been in the end; not only had he given her his blessing, but he had promised to be her first investor, to the tune of nearly half a million dollars. Afterward, they had both cried a bit, thinking of François.
Philippe had put his trust in her enthusiasm and persistence, with one condition, a condition that was non-negotiable. He would let her try to make a go of it, but she would need to serve her own kind of apprenticeship. For four years, she would have to work with a partner, someone Philippe would choose. After that, if she still wanted the hard life of a widow entrepreneur—and if she could persuade him that her instincts were sharp—then he wouldn’t stand in her way.
So today, they would sign the financial agreements and legal contracts that would form her new business. Once again, she would enter into an arranged partnership with a man. His name was Alexandre Jérôme Fourneaux, and he was her father’s age. In fact, both Philippe and her father knew him well. He was another of the wealthy textile merchants who made up their small circle in Reims.
But Alexandre was also a winemaker. Like Philippe, Alexandre had been dealing in local wines as a sideline for years. More important, he wasn’t just a distributor. He knew the craft of winemaking. François had taken risks with the family business when he started bottling the company wines. Alexandre had been doing that and more. He had been growing his own grapes and making his own base wines as well, leading the way in the integration of the winemaking process and undoubtedly putting some of the small brokers out of business in the process. Barbe-Nicole had been eagerly learning all she could about winemaking, but she needed to master its secrets. She now had four years—and a hard-nosed teacher.
Her marriage had begun in a damp underground cellar. Today would also end in a cellar, she thought ruefully. But this partnership was a very different kind of marriage, and she would not be wearing the girlish white of a young patriot and bride. She was a widow, and that meant a future of blacks and browns and grays and perhaps someday the deepest purples. Looking at herself in the vanity mirror for the last time that morning, she decided that she didn’t mind. She had never made much of a socialite. She would be perfectly happy to wear the somber widow’s weeds forever. The public reminder of her mourning just might make people more willing to accept her exercising the new freedoms that came with it, as she fully intended to do.
As a widow, Barbe-Nicole was entitled to manage her own affairs. It was a unique situation in French culture at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Widows had all the social freedoms of married women—and most of the financial freedoms of a man. Under the laws of the Napoleonic Code, a married businesswoman had a shadowy legal existence. According to statute, a woman entrepreneur could not defend even a simple contract without her husband’s permission. But as a widow—and especially as a recognized public trader—Barbe-Nicole could make her own decisions. Still, no one had really expected her to take control of the family fortune. Certainly, no one expected her to risk it on a business investment, much less on a company that she proposed to run herself.
While marriage was never an equal partnership in this era, this new business should have been. She and Alexandre had each invested 80,000 francs. This was a vast sum of money—eighty times the annual salary of an entry-level traveling salesman for the company. Exactly how much the investment was worth in modern terms is tricky to estimate. The standard of living was very different then, and the value of money fluctuated wildly during Napoléon’s wars, but consider that thirty years later an unskilled laborer still earned less than 400 francs a year.
A one-to-twenty ratio of francs to modern dollars is probably a conservative calculation. That means an unlucky manual laborer earned something under $8,000 a year, and a young salesman earned closer to $20,000 annually, certainly little enough to persuade him of the value of his commissions. At an average of 3.5 francs at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a bottle of champagne went for something upward of $70. Using these figures, Barbe-Nicole invested over $1.5 million dollars in this new venture. Philippe brought to the table another 30,000 francs, almost $500,000, all in inventory and presumably in wine. It was a total of nearly $4 million in capital gambled on a company led—at least on the face of it—by a young woman with no business experience.
At this point in 1806, the Clicquot family officially went out of the textile business. Trading in bolts of wool like her father was not Barbe-Nicole’s vision of her business future. The new partners were anxious not to lose all the old clients that Philippe and François had nurtured in the cloth trade, however. They were careful to keep their contacts and sent out an announcement to all their old customers. “Renouncing the commerce in textiles,” the loose-leaf circular read, “we reserve only those of wines of our own vintage,” both sparkling and still. While the new partners never made all their own wines, approximately 75 percent of the wines sold by this new company—Veuve Clicquot Fourneaux and Company—were crafted directly by the proprietors, far more than even François had ever been able to make.
Barbe-Nicole was starting this venture in a remarkably uncertain business climate: in the middle of a war that only seemed to get worse with each passing month. Success was not just uncertain, but unlikely. That first year, however, beginner’s luck was with the partners at Veuve Clicquot Fourneaux. In the first flush of success, she and Alexandre negotiated the delivery of over fifty thousand bottles of champagne—an amazing $3 million worth of product—to be taken through the military blockades that constricted trade routes across Europe in 1806, a dazzling feat requiring sharp wits and strong heads.
In making these sales, they were defying Napoléon’s newly established Continental System: a series of trade restrictions intended to create an economic stranglehold on his enemies in Great Britain, Prussia, Germany, and now, once again, Russia. The coalition retaliated by trying to thwart French trad
ers in return, and running the blockades meant that a merchant risked losing everything. No insurers would cover a commodity as tempting as champagne in wartime. Their plan was to get the wines as far as Amsterdam, then a little used seaport on French commercial routes, avoiding the port closures at Dieppe and Brussels. From there, they would ship their wines on to Germany, Scandinavia, and even Russia, moving quietly through the small Prussian port of Memel in modern-day Lithuania. The partners must have chuckled to think of the surprise their competitors would feel. In a war that was ruining everyone’s business, they had found a backdoor trade route.
At first, it looked as if they really had discovered a surefire itinerary. When Alexandre sent word late that spring that he had arrived safely in Amsterdam with the wine, Barbe-Nicole, managing the books back in Reims, was gleeful. The shipment had made it safely out of France and was far enough along the English Channel to avoid the worst wartime hazards.
Then came a crushing blow. As merchant traders stood on the docks, watching as the men loaded their cargo, the terrible news worked its way through the crowded seaport. Slowly, all the hustle and bustle of the docks faded to an uncomfortable and ominous silence. Amsterdam was blockaded. The port was being closed, and the ship that Alexandre and Barbe-Nicole had hired to take the wines the next stage would not be allowed to sail.
There had been only the narrowest of windows, and they had missed it. Determined to intensify the economic isolation of France and its allies, the British had closed dozens of ports, all the way to the North Sea. If their shipment had been only a few days—even a few hours—earlier, they might have avoided catastrophe. In despair, Alexandre sent the news back to Reims. “Sea commerce is totally ruined,” he wrote, “and therefore all commerce on the Continent.” Their only option was to store the wines in Amsterdam and pray that the ports would open soon.
By May, everyone knew it would be a long delay. The British were determined to close the ports indefinitely. But wine could not wait. The storage conditions in Amsterdam were poor, and wine is temperamental. Alexandre returned to France worried and resigned. Barbe-Nicole already knew the worst. It was a disaster.
There was nothing to be done but regroup and reconsider. Veuve Clicquot Fourneaux would have to move on. It was a crippling loss, but there were other sales to make, other orders to fill. There was always the new wine to worry about. Still, as the summer heat turned the fields of the Champagne a luminous gold that year and as the fruit in the vineyard grew dark and heavy on the vines, Barbe-Nicole, her heart still full with all the grief of the previous year, must sometimes have thought of all those other bottles of wine—nearly a third of their annual stock—sitting in sweaty storage in Amsterdam. Champagne exploding in the heat, and clear wine turning murky and muddy with sediment. It was awful.
Wine stored in poor conditions is easily destroyed. This is why serious collectors spend so much time worrying about the temperature and humidity in their cellars. Wine should ideally be stored in cool darkness at around 55°F or 13°C and at 70 percent humidity or higher. Still, even careful storage doesn’t guarantee that a bottle of wine will taste its best when finally opened. The dirty little secret of the wine industry today is that 5 percent of the wine sold to customers is “corked”—ruined by the presence of a chemical known as TCA and its musty aromas. TCA stands for 2,4,6-trichloroanisole. The long scientific name suggests something far more complicated than the reality: TCA is the unfortunate result of fungus munching on corkwood. The cork will not smell, but a whiff of badly corked wine is unmistakable.
At the helm of a well-funded but still fledgling winemaking business in the early nineteenth century, Barbe-Nicole and Alexandre had bigger worries than TCA and cork taint. Changes in temperature could cause an entire shipment of her champagne to turn to a slimy mess that was impossible to sell. Customers wanted above all a wine that was clear and sparkling, and they would sacrifice taste in order to achieve it.
Sometimes it was obvious as soon as a bottle came out of the cellar that something had gone wrong. The wine was murky, with a glossy haze. Inside, greasy filaments floated like oily snakes, or there might be suspiciously colored deposits that would not settle and disgorge properly. Worst of all, the wine might be what Barbe-Nicole called “ropey,” with the gelatinous consistency of loose egg whites.
Likely, the culprit was problems that had begun during the cask stage of production with the process of malolactic fermentation. Like the sugar and yeast fermentation that leads to autolysis, malolactic fermentation is an organic reaction that plays a role in creating the flavors of fine wine. Just as native yeasts are naturally present in grape must, so there are also native bacteria. These bacteria create a second kind of fermentation, in which the tart, fruity malic acid in the wine is slowly transformed into a smooth and buttery lactic acid—once again making more carbon dioxide and more delicious bubbles.
Malolactic fermentation was notoriously hard to get right in the nineteenth century, especially with the less sugary grapes common in a northern climate region like the Champagne. The big problem was figuring out whether the malolactic reaction was complete before bottling. If not, the bacteria had a sneaky tendency to reappear in the finished wine, with far less desirable results. Smoking casks with sulfur, a natural antiseptic, helped some, but compulsive racking—letting the wine repeatedly and slowly settle over time in a cool cellar and then pouring it from container to container to leave behind the dregs—was the only real solution, and they couldn’t be sure it had been done well enough until they saw the finished product.
If the champagne turned out cloudy, they knew they had failed. As long as the wines were still in the cellars, there were some options. One trick was to move the wines to a colder part of the cellar. Sometimes the suspended bacterial debris would settle out naturally. But if the wine turned muddy once it was already on the road, making its way to their clients, it was heartbreaking. A wine that came out of the cellars clear could instantly turn cloudy if the temperature shifted too dramatically. This was part of the problem in the Amsterdam disaster.
Even worse than knowing that so many bottles of fine wine were being ruined in Amsterdam was the bill. The storage costs and port fees were outrageous. Dozens of ships had been caught in the port closure, and warehouse and cellar owners could charge wartime prices. With every passing day, the financial losses were getting worse. Perhaps the wines were already a total loss, and now they were paying richly to store worthless product. If the wine had already started to go off, it would be hard to sell, even if the ports did miraculously open. So in August, they finally had to send one of their salesmen to do something with the wines—even if it was just liquidate them.
When Charles Hartmann arrived in Holland, he confirmed their worst fears. The wine was in terrible shape. “I prayed to the Good Lord,” he wrote to Barbe-Nicole and Alexandre, “to let me find our wines in such a way that I could send you good news, but my prayers were not at all answered. I opened the first case with trembling hands…I took out a bottle, trembling I removed the straw and tissue paper, but rather than the clear and brilliant wine that I had hoped for, I saw nothing but a deposit like a finger that I could not detach without shaking the bottle for a full minute.”
It took him weeks to go through the stock, bottle by bottle, salvaging what he could. Cloudy bottles he gave a hearty shake, hoping that this might cause some of the suspended sediment to precipitate again, clearing the wine to an extent and making it possible to sell. Overall, the news was wrenching. It was not until the end of September that Charles was able to place the handful of wines that could be saved from the shipment. Once again, they would have to risk port closures to move the product. The wines were shipped to the open port of Copenhagen, to be sent from there, on nimble coastal cruisers, to the Prussian market. “I pray to the Good Lord day and night to send some corsair to take them,” he wrote. At least then they would be done with this ill-fated shipment.
The total loss of Amsterdam was quickly
followed by word that the entire market was on the verge of collapse. Louis Bohne had set off in April for Germany and Russia on another of his marathon sales tours. The German market, he now wrote, was hopeless: “This country has lacked even money for the worst vintage this past year and after fifteen years of war has given up on being able to procure our luxury drink…. The result is that it is necessary for all the world to head to the North…. All is war, war and war!” No one had the money—or the inclination—for champagne.
Finally, from Russia, a small bit of unexpected good news: Louis learned that Empress Elizabeth Alexeievna was pregnant. “What a blessing for us,” he wrote to Barbe-Nicole and Alexandre, “if this is a Prince that she is brought to bed of…a tide of champagne will be drunk in this immense country. Do not mention it, all our competitors would come at once.” In over a dozen years of marriage, the empress had given birth only once, to a daughter, and the baby had died as a very young child. The czar would celebrate the birth of a son and heir after all these years with lavish celebrations—celebrations that Louis hoped would include their stealthily exported champagne. By early autumn, he was heading for the Russian border, war or no war. It would turn out to be the most dangerous adventure of his career.
The Widow Clicquot Page 10