The story of the visionary young widow who built a champagne empire, showed the world how to live with style, and emerged a legend

Veuve Clicquot champagne epitomizes glamour, style, and luxury. But who was this young widow — the Veuve Clicquot — whose champagne sparkled at the courts of France, Britain, and Russia, and how did she rise to celebrity and fortune?

In The Widow Clicquot, Tilar J. Mazzeo brings to life — for the first time — the fascinating woman behind the iconic yellow label: Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin. A young witness to the dramatic events of the French Revolution and a new widow during the chaotic years of the Napoleonic Wars, Barbe-Nicole defied convention by assuming — after her husband's death — the reins of the fledgling wine business they had nurtured. Steering the company through dizzying political and financial reversals, she became one of the world's first great businesswomen and one of the richest women of her time.

Although the Widow Clicquot is still a legend in her native France, her story has never been told in all its richness — until now. Painstakingly researched and elegantly written, The Widow Clicquot provides a glimpse into the life of a woman who arranged clandestine and perilous champagne deliveries to Russia one day and entertained Napoléon and Joséphine Bonaparte on another. She was a daring and determined entrepreneur, a bold risk taker, and an audacious and intelligent woman who took control of her own destiny when fate left her on the brink of financial ruin. Her legacy lives on today, not simply through the famous product that still bears her name, but now through Mazzeo's finely crafted book. As much a fascinating journey through the process of making this temperamental wine as a biography of a uniquely tempered woman, The Widow Clicquot is utterly intoxicating.

Chapter One...

Child of the Revolution, Child of the Champagne

What people in the Champagne remembered later about the summer of 1789 were the cobbled streets of Reims resounding with the chanting, angry mobs calling for liberty and equality. The French Revolution had begun, although no one would use those words yet to describe one of the most monumental events in the history of modern civilization. Democracy had taken root in the colonies of America only a decade before, and a new nation had emerged, aided in its war for independence from Great Britain by the military and financial might of France, one of the world's most powerful and ancient kingdoms. Now, democracy had also come to France. It was a bloody and brutal beginning.

The young girls in the royal convent of Saint-Pierre-les-Dames, just beyond the old city center of Reims—a bustling commercial town of perhaps thirty thousand inhabitants, at the heart of the French textile industry and only ninety miles to the east of Paris—had little to do with this larger world of war and politics. Two centuries before, Mary, Queen of Scots had been a student in the abbey from the tender age of five, under the care of her aunt, the noble abbess Renée de Lorraine. The other girls at this Catholic convent school often came, like Mary Stuart and her noble aunt, from the ranks of the aristocracy, and they spent their days learning the graceful arts expected of the wealthy daughters of the social elite: embroidery, music, dance steps, and their prayers. The cloistered courtyard echoed with the light steps and rustling habits of nuns moving silently in the shadows, and the garden was shady and welcoming even in the summer heat.

Their parents had sent them to Saint-Pierre-les-Dames to be educated in safety and privilege. But in July 1789, a royal abbey was just possibly the most dangerous place of all for these girls. The nobility and the church had crushed the peasantry with crippling taxes for centuries, and suddenly that summer, long-simmering resentments finally broke out into an open class war that changed the history of France. Old scores were being settled in horrifying ways. It was only a matter of time before the nuns and these young girls—the daughters of the city's social elite—became the targets of public abuse. Already, there were stories from Paris of nuns being raped and the rich being murdered in the streets. Now, wine flowed from the public fountains, and the laughs and cheers of the crowd in Reims had become more and more feverish.

Behind the shuttered windows, cloistered within the royal walls of Saint-Pierre-les-Dames, one of those girls may not have known that the world and her future were being transformed until the mob was nearly at their doorstep. Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin was eleven years old when the Revolution began. She was a small and serious girl, with golden blond hair and large gray eyes, the eldest daughter of one of the city's wealthiest and most important businessmen—an affluent and cultured man who dreamed of moving his family into the aristocracy and had sent his child, accordingly, to this prestigious royal convent to be educated with the daughters of feudal lords and princes.

Now, the streets of Reims were alive with angry crowds, and it seemed that Barbe-Nicole would share the fate of her aristocratic classmates. The shops everywhere were closed, and the fields were empty. In the center of the city, in the grand family mansion on rue Cérès, just beyond the shadow of the great cathedral, her parents—Ponce Jean Nicolas Philippe and Marie Jeanne Josèphe Clémentine Ponsardin, or more simply Nicolas and Jeanne-Clémentine—were frantic...

Tilar J. Mazzeo is a cultural historian, biographer, and passionate student of wine and food culture. She divides her time between the California wine country and Maine, where she is an assistant professor at Colby College.