'Widow' shows entrepreneur's spirit in Napoleonic France

— -- 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 Vueve Clicquot — 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 a difficult task. 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 plenty of account books but few clues, she writes, about the woman behind the trademark yellow label.

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 resulting 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 a bit repetitive.

But what challenges the Widow faced. Champagne is a fussy product to make, especially in the days before indoor temperature control and modern methods of transportation. Back then, as now, purveyors were at the mercy of the weather. Even a good year in the vineyards did not immediately pay off.

So much could go wrong in the interval between the grape harvest and the actual sale of a bottle of champagne in normal times; the Widow was also contending with the see-sawing of France from royal rule to Napoleon and back, blockades, the Russian occupation of Reims and the perils of sending salesmen throughout war-torn Europe.

In 1806, for example, not long after the Widow took the helm of the company, she defied Napoleon's trade restrictions and arranged a 50,000 bottle shipment. The uninsured $3 million stock made it as far as Amsterdam and was poised to sail on for delivery to Germany, Scandinavia and Russia when the port was ordered closed. The shipment was a total loss, with the added insult of wartime storage costs and port fees to swallow.

That devastating bad luck did not deter the Widow from attempting a similar move in 1814, just as the war was dwindling. Mazzeo writes it was the greatest gamble of her career: another running of the blockades without permission or security in order to ensure her champagne would be the first to arrive in the profitable Russian market. This time, the shipment made it intact, fetching prices as high as 5.5 francs per bottle — equivalent to more than $100 today — and establishing Clicquot as Russia's brand of choice.

This "internationalizing" of the champagne market is one of the Widow Clicquot's three crowning achievements, Mazzeo writes. Establishing brand identification was the second, but it's the development of an efficient system for clearing the yeasty debris trapped in the bottle after the second fermentation that makes Clicquot most famous in winemaking history, says Mazzeo.

This discovery, which Clicquot judiciously guarded for nearly a decade, significantly sped up the production process and earned her company a marked advantage over competitors like Moet.

Ahead of her time, the Widow may have summed herself up best in a personal letter to her great-granddaughter, which Mazzeo includes in her book: "I can be bolder than you realize," Clicquot wrote. "The world is in perpetual motion, and we must invent the things of tomorrow. … Act with audacity. Perhaps you too will be famous."

Michelle Archer is a freelance writer based in Seattle