The Widow Who Created the Champagne Industry

(Smithsonianmag) - Highlighted by its distinctive gold-yellow label, a bottle of Veuve Clicquot champagne is hard to ignore. In 2012, it was the second highest selling brand of champagne in the world, with 1,474,000 nine-liter cases sold worldwide. But Veuve Clicquot wasn’t always so successful: if it weren’t for the efforts of a cunning 19th-century business mind, the champagne might never have existed. That remarkable mind belonged to the eponymous Widow (veuve in French0) Clicquot, one of the world’s first international businesswomen, who brought her wine business back from the brink of destruction and created the modern champagne market in the process.

The Widow Clicquot was born Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin, daughter of an affluent textile industrialist in Reims, France. Born in the years leading up to the French Revolution, Barbe-Nicole’s childhood was heavily influenced by the political leanings of her father, Ponce Jean Nicolas Philippe Ponsardin, which switched from monarchist to Jacobin as the tide of the Revolution turned against the monarchy. Through his shrewd politics, Barbe-Nicole’s family was able to escape the Revolution relatively unscathed, a rarity for an affluent bourgeoisie family.

Next door to Hôtel Ponsardin, the large family estate that Barbe-Nicole grew up on, lived the Clicquot family, under the patriarch Philippe. Philippe Clicquot also ran a successful textile business, making him the chief competitor to Barbe-Nicole’s father. In an attempt to consolidate the power of their two businesses, Mr. Ponsardin and Mr. Clicquot did what any shrewd business owner in the 18th century would have done: married their children. In 1798, when she was 21 years old, Barbe-Nicole married Francois Clicquot, Philippe Clicquot’s only son–the marriage was akin to an arranged marriage, a business deal devised by two industrial leaders in the small town of Reims.