Free The Widow Clicquot by Tilar J. Mazzeo Page B

and persuade them to serve his company’s wine. As often as not, this also involved some judicious sampling of the luxury wares—a dégustation, or wine tasting.
    As a young mother and never a renowned beauty, Barbe-Nicole undoubtedly preferred not to dwell too long on this part of her husband’s business. When François took to the road for an extended sales tour that summer, he was gone for months, traveling in Germany and Switzerland. In the days before the harvest, Barbe-Nicole kept an eye on the fields and the crops. She undoubtedly meant to keep an eye on the business as well, if her father-in-law would share news of it with her, because she had inherited her father’s entrepreneurial instincts, even if no one else realized it yet.
    She soon must have learned that there were other women in the wine business—the wives and daughters of those same old-fashioned family businessmen. Vineyards had always been a family undertaking, and even if spinning and weaving had been increasingly taken out of the rural cottages and moved into big factories like the ones her father owned, there was nothing industrialized about winemaking yet. In fact, women had played an essential role in the industry—and in the sales of sparkling champagne especially—since at least the middle of the eighteenth century, when sales had slumped so dramatically.
    Ironically, the fact that champagne didn’t look like a good way to make big money was part of the reason these small-time businesswomen had such an important role in the marketplace. Contracting businesses have always created opportunities for women and other newcomers ready to seize the initiative. In her book Women of Wine: The Rise of Women in the Global Wine Industry, author Ann B. Matasar points out that these periodic collapses in wine sales have created rare “opportunities for women to participate in rebuilding the industry.” At a time when big money was to be made in businesses that could be industrialized and in commodities that could be mass-produced, wine—especially a finicky handcrafted product like champagne—had dim prospects.
    Perhaps it was when François was on the road as a salesman that Barbe-Nicole first heard of working women such as Dame Geoffrey, a widow from the graceful bourgeois town of Épernay, just south of the river Marne, in the heart of some of the best vineyards in all of France. It is still known today as the capital of champagne. Certainly Barbe-Nicole already knew the estates of the Moët family, whose name had Dutch origins and was often spelled in the late eighteenth century just as it is pronounced: Moette. Everyone knew that their sparkling vintages had made them famous at the pleasure-loving court of Louis XV. Like François and his father, the men of the Moët family were distributors, not winemakers, and they bought their wines ready-made from small local craftsmen—or craftswomen. For, many of these vignerons, Barbe-Nicole must have discovered, were women. In fact, throughout the eighteenth century, the Moët family purchased nearly 50 percent of their fine wines from women. Dame Geoffrey, the widow of a local tax collector who managed extensive vineyards and crafted her own wines, was one of their largest suppliers.
    Barbe-Nicole probably also learned before too long the story of the Widow Germon, an important wine broker who sold tens of thousands of bottles of champagne each year throughout the 1770s and 1780s. When Philippe Clicquot was just starting his small wine trade, the Widow Germon was already doing a brisk business and was even bottling her own sparkling wines. And, of course, Barbe-Nicole knew the Widow Robert and the Widow Blanc. The Widow Robert ran an important wine depository in Paris, where distributors could warehouse their wines for easy delivery to new customers in the nation’s capital. The Moët family had used the services of the Widow Robert for more than twenty years, and François had recently considered the