Cheers to 'The Widow Clicquot' by Tilar Mazzeo

— -- The epic life of Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin could be a movie.

Picture this: The French heroine, widowed at 27 in 1805, improbably takes over her late husband's wine business in the wake of the French Revolution. She fearlessly guides it through the turbulent times of the Napoleonic Wars, pioneers efficiencies in champagne production and becomes obscenely wealthy and famous in the process.

It's great fodder for a book, too, a fact seized upon by Tilar Mazzeo, a cultural historian and professor. Mazzeo first encountered the widow's story printed on a card enclosed in a box of Veuve Clicquot — which translates literally to Widow Clicquot — 1996 vintage Grande Dame. The purchase, Mazzeo writes in the introduction of The Widow Clicquot, was a splurge to brighten a sorrowful Wisconsin winter.

Intrigued, Mazzeo set out to capture how the widow not only ducked the domestic role society dictated for women at the time but also boldly built a family business into an international champagne empire.

Fleshing out the widow's life story turned out to be difficult. Few personal records were kept from the 18th- and 19th-century lives of entrepreneurs and commercial innovators, Mazzeo writes, especially female ones. A visit to the Veuve Clicquot company archives in Reims, France, was fruitful for a business perspective but not a personal one. There, Mazzeo found few clues, she writes, about the woman behind the trademark yellow label.

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Further research — in a California wine library, of French travel narratives from the era and through oral folk legends from France's Champagne region — filled in the gaps.

Mazzeo's book is an enticing stew of biography and history. Such an amalgam does have a downside: Many sentences bear signs of conjecture, beginning with phrases such as "It is easy to imagine" or "The widow must surely have thought." Scarcely a page passes without eloquent reference to the widow Clicquot's audacity or spectacular success. It's difficult to argue — in today's economy, the widow would be worth billions — but the effusiveness gets repetitive.