During the revolutionary period itself the major beneficiaries were two totally dissimilar personalities, Jean-Remy Moët and Mme Veuve Clicquot, the widow of Philippe. They never lost the initiative they gained during the Napoleonic era, even after peace brought an inevitable flood of new entrants.
JEAN-REMY MOËT
As a merchant Jean-Remy Moët had the contacts required to ride successive revolutionary tides; as a grower he greatly improved the technical process of champagne-making. Moët took over as Mayor of Epernay in 1792 at the height of revolutionary fervour. But the tensions relaxed within a few years and in the mid-1790s, during the Directoire, a period as louche as the Regency eighty years earlier, the relief was marked by an upsurge of interest in food and drink – including and especially champagne. This was drunk with the dessert in the numerous restaurants which sprang up to serve the new Parisian cafe society.
As a young salesman Moët is supposed to have met the future emperor when he was selling wines to the artillery school at Brienne, 80 kilometres east of Epernay where Napoleon was passing a lonely adolescence – an unlikely story even though the favours he later showed Moët could have sprung from some extraordinary earlier act of kindness. Napoleon was no lover of champagne as a wine, but Epernay, as always, benefited from its strategic position. So he stayed several times with Moët on his way to his wars, and at Napoleon’s suggestion Moët built the delightful Orangerie still used for entertaining distinguished guests (it was inaugurated by Empress Josephine).
He was not the only merchant to be thus honoured. Irenée19 Ruinart received Empress Marie-Louise and Napoleon spent the night at his house, Chateau Grand-Sillery. He also visited the caves of Jacquesson, a house founded in 1798 which was to become one of the most important merchants in the early nineteenth century. But Moët was loyal to the end. Napoleon bestowed on him his own insignia as Chevalier of the Legion d’honneur during his last campaign in March 1814.
But this loyalty did not stop Moët from supplying the emperor’s enemies. He simply rerouted his wines via Guernsey and thus to Britain through Rouen and Dunkirk. Of course the war had caused prices to shoot up. By 1794 red or white champagne, at 90s. a dozen, cost twice as much as any other wine – and more than the price a century later. Not that this deterred the buyers. Overall, in fact, the Champenois did well out of Napoleon’s incessant wars. By following the revolutionary armies throughout Europe, Champagne’s salesmen first acquired the habit of regularly travelling to visit their clients.
NEW CUSTOMERS, NEW FIRMS
Champagne’s ever-present geographical exposure emerged only at the end of the war when the region was occupied by Prussian and Russian troops. The locals were, naturally, scared witless at the prospect of occupation by the Cossacks (who in 1815 had destroyed all the stocks of Sillery they could not consume on the premises). So thousands of them took refuge in the giant caves within Mont Aimé, a huge mound at the very south of the Côte des Blancs. The slopes were later used by the tsar to parade nearly 300,000 of his troops in a display intended to overawe his allies as much as the French.
In retrospect the locals claimed that the occupation was a blessing in disguise, that it taught the occupiers the joys of drinking champagne. In fact, both occupying forces already knew about the wine. Patrick Forbes quotes a German poem which explains how ‘Champagne was best drunk where it was made.’ The Russians, too, had already acquired a taste for sparkling champagne during the eighteenth century and more than one merchant had penetrated into the ‘Northland’.
Madame Clicquot’s greatest rival, Moët, was not permanently affected by the restoration of the Bourbons. He naturally resigned as Mayor of Epernay, but ten years later was back in public life welcoming King Charles X. He had benefited from the break-up of the Brulart estates, and handed over a flourishing business to his son Victor and his son-in-law Pierre-Gabriel Chandon de Briailles. The latter added his name to the family firm and was responsible for buying Hautvillers and its accompanying legends (see Chapter 3).
After 1815 the Champenois badly needed foreign markets for their sparkling wines because sales of their still wines had totally collapsed. Internal free trade and reduced transport costs (which fell even further with the arrival of the railways in mid-century) gave a decisive and permanent advantage to the stronger, darker and more reliable wines from Bordeaux and the Midi. In the 1840s the author and merchant Max Sutaine regretted how ‘the excellent red wines of our great growths, so prized by our ancestors, no longer enjoy the sales they deserve, despite their well-deserved reputation. Northern France, Belgium and Holland, which formerly supplied themselves from our vineyards, have now little by little become used to the wines of Bordeaux, perhaps because they are easier to keep in the shallow cellars of these dank regions... for the past thirty years trade in sparkling champagne has received a considerable boost.’ In the 1870s Vizetelly found that ‘the still red wine of St Thierry, which recalls the growths of the Medoc by its tannin, and those of the Côte d’Or by its vinosity, is today almost a thing of the past.’ Only Sillery held out for a time, thanks to the English market, but Vizetelly found that the little wine that was being made there was reserved by the growers for their own consumption. It was too expensive – some kept it ten years in wood, others eight years in bottle – it was fragile and did not travel well, it tended to throw a deposit. One grower told Vizetelly, ‘the old reputation of the wine had exploded, and that better white Bordeaux and Burgundy wines were to be obtained for less money.’
The Burgundians were also affected by the competition, and their sparkling wine, Crémant de Bourgogne, found a ready market in France itself. In Germany the foundations were being laid for the production of Sekt their own type of – inferior – sparkling wine. But the Champenois were already well-established in most of the important foreign markets and their efforts were being boosted by an increasing number of newcomers. Indeed, more of today’s best-known firms were founded in the twenty-five years after Napoleon’s final defeat than at any other time in Champagne’s history. Some, like Jacquesson, who had founded his firm in 1798, took full advantage of the availability of land. Madame Veuve Henriot, from a well-known local landowning family, even bought the customs house at Reims and founded a firm of her own. Billecart was also a local landowner;20 Boizel married a Mlle Martin who brought a vineyard as her dowry; Goulet followed Clicquot from the wool to the wine trade; Joseph Perrier was a former cork merchant. And then there were the outsiders. The most prestigious was the Duke of Montebello, the son of one of Napoleon’s most famous generals, Marshal Lannes. A distinguished statesman in his own right, Montebello bought an estate at Mareuil and used its wines to launch a business.21
Many newcomers came from abroad: Henri-Marc de Venoge from Switzerland, and a flood of immigrants from Germany, or rather from the mass of small German states on the Rhine which, in pre-railway days, had easier access to Champagne than most of France itself. As we shall see in Chapter 5, these immigrants were to have a profound influence on Champagne in later years, but many of them – like Mumm and Roederer – actually arrived before 1830. There were, for the first time, a host of smaller merchants living in the interstices of the trade, often as mere wholesalers, or as buyers of wines which had already undergone their second fermentation. They crowded into Reims and Epernay, where in 1821 there were twenty-five firms, ten along what had been the Rue de Chalons and was being transformed into the Avenue de Champagne.
The road to success, as de Maizère emphasized, had been a long one. It involved ‘years of daring endeavour, of inevitable disasters, lengthy capital investment, deep and sustained thinking; based on a body of knowledge which didn’t yet exist.’ But even he omitted the economic revolution which accelerated the technical changes. The French would express the transformation as being from a small-scale artisanale into an industrielle business, as the méthode rurale was superseded. If made in any quantity, sparkling champagne was necessarily a capitalist product because of the costs involved i
n the storage and manipulation. Hitherto, Champagne had resembled other winegrowing regions where the wealth was only in the land, the market was controlled by major landowners, and the only costs had been a cellar and casks. The pressure to provide more and better sparkling wines produced not only technical changes, but also accelerated the existing transformation of the business into a truly capitalist affair.
TAMING THE FIZZ
The British writer and merchant Cyrus Redding spelt out the problems caused by the unreliability of the second fermentation.
If the casse was a mere ten per cent, the merchant did not worry, but if, on the other hand, the gas becomes furious, the pile is taken down, and the bottles are set on their bottom for a time ... The difference of growths; the treatment in wood, the glass of the bottles, the aspect of the cellars, with the number and disposition of their air holes, their greater or lesser depth; the soil in which they are excavated, have all been observed to possess an inexplicable effect in promoting or retarding the effervescence.
When Jullien divided Champagne’s vineyards into categories in his Topographie de tous les vignobles connus, the best consisted exclusively of the historic vineyards from the montagne and the valley which had originally been famous for their still wines. These however included the northern end of what we now call the Côte des Blancs, but which he called the Côte d’Epernay. White grapes, historically a second-rate product – Jullien had counted Avize and Mesnil as second-rank growths – rose to their present eminence only gradually.
The contributors to the technical revolution included most of the great scientists of the day, as well as a host of practical men on the ground. The first step came in 1776 with the discovery of the true nature of carbonic gas. A few years later a handful of merchants – notably the de Maizieres and the Moëts – started to work on the long chain of problems. First they began by blending wines more systematically. They already knew that the wines from Avize fermented so slowly that a great deal of residual sugar needed to be transformed once they were in bottle, making them particularly liable to explode, whereas the wines from Aÿ were likely to produce little or no fizz. Cadet de Vaux, writing at the turn of the nineteenth century, noted that they had started to mix the two. De Maizière pinpoints the moment more precisely. Mixing the two wines ‘had the double result of reducing the casse and ensuring a regular development of the mousse. From this time, about 1780, they could tackle that monster, the casse ... it is from that moment that one ought to date the origin of the trade in sparkling wines, which, until that moment, had enjoyed an existence which was secret, ephemeral and irregular.’
THE FIRST WIDOW
Throughout the history of Champagne there have been thousands of anonymous women who have worked in the industry, if only by helping their husbands in the vineyard. But a handful have become famous as successful merchants in their own right, and the first, and in many ways the most important, was the widow of Philippe Clicquot. Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin had married him in 1798 in a civil ceremony, the only type permitted at the time, but apparently they also had a religious ceremony in the firm’s caves.
She took over the business on his death in 1805 and over the following half century emerged as a crucial figure, not only as the first of the many such widows who have made a success of their husbands’ business but because she was the first merchant in Champagne who was able to employ – and to be succeeded by – able people. It was her chef de caves, Antoine Muller, who pioneered the idea of the specially tilted tables which became the pupitres for remueurs, though she, like many other bosses before and since, claimed credit for her employee’s innovation. She had the good sense not to hand over the company to her daughter – whom she had married to an aristocratic man of letters, Comte Louis de Chevigné and for whom she built Chateau de Boursault, modelled after the enormous royal Chateau Chambord on the Loire. She preferred to rely on Edmund Werlé, born in Hesse who saved her when the firm’s bankers collapsed in 1828 and who took over running the firm in 1866. He was so well-integrated into local society that he became Mayor of Reims, and a deputy during the reign of Napoleon III. Her insistence on managerial competence ensured that Werlé’s successors, who included two sons-in-law, Bertrand de Mun and Alain de Vogüé maintained ‘the Widow’s’ success until the late 1980s.
But her most famous – indeed notorious – employee was her faithful salesman, Bohn, who had taken the greatest advantage of the Russian thirst, frustrated by years of war. Clicquot’s wine was not unknown, indeed Bohn claimed, with pardonable exaggeration, that ‘it has the same renown here as Maille has in Paris with his mustards and his vinegars.’ Even before the war Bohn had hoped to take advantage of a suitable occasion for celebration: ‘I am reliably informed that the Czarina is with child. What a blessing it will be if it is a prince. Oceans of champagne will be drunk in this immense country. Please do not say a word, otherwise our competitors will arrive here in droves.’ Charles-Henri Heidsieck, one of Florens-Louis’ nephews, had visited Russia in 1811 but was comprehensively beaten out by Madame Clicquot and Bohn. Almost before Napoleon’s armies had left Moscow on their ill-fated retreat, he was planning to arrive with a couple of shipments before the cessation of hostilities and ‘before the great crowd of sheep have arrived to lower the price.’
He had a monopoly and thoroughly enjoyed his position. When he arrived in Konigsberg in East Prussia he sold enough wine to pay his expenses; and while waiting for an entry visa for Russia itself wrote how ‘I shall make it known that the whole consignment has already been sold and is destined elsewhere and that only if I am offered an enormous price will I consider obliging anybody – Oh! How cruel and severe I am going to be! All their tongues are hanging out to taste it and if it is as good as it is beautiful they will all finish by loving me.’ Given that the Russians had been deprived of champagne for some years it was not surprising that Bohn’s consignment was pre-sold before he even reached St Petersburg: ‘I ask nobody for an order. I just write down my hotel and room number and I have visitors I would never have believed possible. All I am doing is educating people.’
His boasts provide us with a clear idea of the relatively small quantities involved. Bohn described Madame Clicquot as ‘the terror of all your competitors by the very size of your shipments and all for foreign account.’ Yet the first consignment was a mere 10,000 bottles, the second, prudently despatched by Bohn’s boss without waiting for news from him, 20,000. He reckoned he could have sold double the quantity. But selling even 30,000 bottles in a major market deprived of champagne for several years clearly represented a major coup. The coup had long-term results. For a century Madame Clicquot’s successors – and those of a German immigrant, Louis Roederer – dominated a market which was second only to the British in size.
Until the early nineteenth century the wines from the Montagne de Reims had not been used to make sparkling wine. Max Sutaine remarked how ‘for a long time they believed that sparkling wine could be made only from the slopes behind Aÿ and the two banks of the Marne valley.’ As the wines from the montagne became less saleable as still wines, they had to be included in the blends. Local legend dates the blends much later. At the end of the century the local author-editor-publisher Raphael Bonnedame attributed the breakthrough to Robert le Diable, a local merchant, eccentric and gambler: ‘In 1820 Robert the Devil was the first to buy wine from Cramant to blend it with wine from Epernay, to the great astonishment of the locals and the other merchants round about.’ He was soon followed, most notably by Chanoine, descendant of one of Epernay’s earliest merchants, who bought the ‘Devil’s’ premises.
The locals were also improving the other end of the chain, producing a wine which was both clear and sparkling. Andre Simon noted how ‘degorgement, the gathering of the sediment upon the inside face of the cork before letting it fly out with the released cork, was not known until the opening years of the nineteenth century.’ It was first described by Jullien in 1813. After being decantées or degorgées – and
sometimes they were both decanted and ‘disgorged’ – the bottles had to be filled up; no easy task, indeed, to pour sparkling wine into new bottles! Jullien gave pages to describing the gadgets used to try and accomplish this difficult task.
One J. MacCulloch, who had visited Champagne after 1815, noted the change from the old method, by which wines were simply decanted from bottle to bottle when they were between fifteen and eighteen months old. By the time of his visit, sometimes (and the word is italicized, emphasizing that the change was not yet universally adopted) the wines were disgorged in the manner familiar to us today. The walls of wine were being built more scientifically, using thin strips of wood to ensure a bottle could be removed without the whole wall crumbling. These strips were called lattes, hence the phrase ‘buying wine sur lattes’ meant buying after it had undergone its second fermentation.
Originally the remuage, the regular and repeated twist to dislodge the deposit and induce it to move towards the cork, was terribly slow because the remueur had to take the bottle out of the rack every time to twist it. Antoine Muller, who worked for Madame Clicquot, set up pupitres (literally desks), racks that held the bottles in an angled position so that they could be twisted without being removed. Clicquot tried to keep the process secret, because clearer wine was better and more profitable – Bohn had rejoiced that ‘spring water is not as clear’ as his samples – but Muller’s methods were soon copied by her rivals.
The Story of Champagne Page 7