Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21199 in Books
• Published on: 2008-11-01
• Released on: 2008-10-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 288 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780061288562
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, October 2008: With its trademark fizz and sparkling taste, champagne has long been the beverage of choice for those in a celebratory mood. From the artillery of popping corks on New Year's Eve to the clinking of newlywed glasses, a bit of the bubbly has locked arms with good cheer for centuries. Yet had it not been for the pioneering Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin, the libation deemed "the wine of civilization" by Winston Churchill might today be available only to the excessively wealthy or extremely lucky. Author Tilar J. Mazzeo toasts the élan of Champagne's Grand Dame with The Widow Clicquot, a fascinating story of the cunning bravery and good fortune that helped build the Veuve Clicquot brand. Widowed at age twenty-seven by the death of her husband François Clicquot, Barbe-Nicole assumed control of her family’s wine business amid the chaos of The Napoleonic Wars. That she became a prominent female leader in a male-dominated industry was one thing; building an empire amid savage political unrest was quite another. With passionate research and true admiration for her subject, Mazzeo pays homage to the beloved Widow from Reims and the remarkable weight her name still carries today. -Dave Callanan

Review
"Mazzeo's tale moves swiftly through Barbe-Nicole's many accomplishments, including her method for storing bottles nose-down--an innovation that allowed the second fermentation detritus to be cleared efficiently, setting her far ahead of her competitors." -- Los Angeles Times

The Widow Clicquot is someone we should all know about....Long a shadowy, legend-obscured figure, in Tilar Mazzeo's agile hands the widow sheds her weeds and takes form before our eyes as a distinctly modern entrepreneur....The result is narrative history that fizzes with life and feeling. --Benjamin Wallace, author of the New York Times bestseller, The Billionaire's Vinegar

Review
Joan of Arc and Madame Clicquot were the two women heroes I knew when growing up in France. What a gift to have this new, well-researched biography of one of the world's first 'legitimate' businesswoman, our contemporary as a global business leader. --Mireille Guiliano, author of the New York Times #1 bestseller, French Women Don't Get Fat

"Told in a light and graceful style that is just right for its subject.... [I]t's a fascinating trip, made even more so by Ms. Mazzeo's charming cameo appearances as a kind of tour guide.... This example of Barbe-Nicole's voice is exceptional...an intoxicating business biography." -- Julia Flynn Siler, The Wall Street Journal

Customer Reviews

A Fascinating Woman in a Turbulent Time
Tilar Mazzeo's The Widow Cliquot tells the story of one of the most interesting of the early champagne tycoons: a woman who, in the turmoil of the Napoleonic Wars, founded a dynasty. Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin, the daughter of a prosperous Reims merchant, married into the Cliquot family, who sold both cloth and wine. After her husband's death, she chose to continue running the family's wine business, concentrating on the fizzy wine we now call champagne.

The Widow Clicquot faced long odds-indeed, she was a true gambler-because travel was hazardous and much of the export market was closed. Still, she clung to her vision with a remarkable tenacity and was ultimately successful-Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin is still one of the best known champagne houses in the world.

The book has a great deal of interesting information on the history and production of champagne-this gives the Widow's life some context. Mazzeo's finest moment is her taut telling of the delivery of the 1811 vintage under the specter of war in 1813. Mazzeo clearly sets the scene and lets the reader know just how high the stakes are. We really get a sense of the menace-and triumph-of the Widow's life.

Much of what happens after that drama, which falls about in the middle of the book, is unfortunately anti-climax. Mazzeo's problem is that there simply aren't any sources to guide her: since the Widow left scanty records of her personal life, we just don't know what was going on there. It's no coincidence that a well-documented episode from the Widow's business career is the best part of the book: clearly, there were solid sources to ground the story here.

There also seems to be a great deal of telling, rather than showing in the narrative. Time and again, the reader is told that Barbe-Nicole was an exceptional woman, and that she couldn't have been successful had she started her career a few years earlier or a few years later. We are also reminded frequently that Barbe-Nicole was middle class-but she came from one of the wealthiest families in Reims and ultimately ran a multi-billion dollar (in today's terms) business empire. True, she was not a titled noble, but today's audiences might not consider a woman born to her privilege and riches "middle class."

Much of the problem is apparent in the title-it's just too wordy for its own good. Why not "The Widow Cliquot: The Woman Who Ruled a Champagne Empire?" The book suffers similarly-though it's less than 200 pages, it still feels repetitious and over-long at points.

It's too bad, because Mazzeo has an great story to tell, and where she's got the benefit of solid sources, she's does a fine job. Perhaps this story would have worked better as one chapter in a book devoted to similar pioneers? It's certainly a good read, and a story that more people should know about.

The Audacity of Widow Clicquot
To her last surviving great-grandchild Madame Clicquot writes, "I am going to tell you a secret... You more than anyone resemble me, you who have such audacity. It is a precious quality that has been very useful to me in the course of my long life... to dare things before others... I am called today the Grand Lady of Champagne!"

Coming from a genteel class, it was unusual in that day to run a business, these women instead, were expected to sit leisurely around drawing rooms in idle chatter but when only twenty-seven years old, Barbe-Nicole Clicquot became a widow. The hurdles of making wine and champagne: unreliable bottle quality, turmoil of war preventing export, unusually wet or hot weather, all became Widow Clicquot's worry.

Wines that sparkled were wines that had gone bad. And beginning in the Middle Ages in the Champagne region of France, it was happening more and more. To turn this seeming catastrophe into a success put Champagne on the map. Second fermentation, a disaster for wine, was coaxed into happening in a bottle of champagne.

The Widow Clicquot became, in the nineteenth century, a premier name in Champagne. This book puts a face on that label.

This book is not only the very interesting story of Barbe-Nicole Clicquot but it is also full of very fascinating details about making wine, making champagne, labeling varietals, labeling quality. Second fermentation, the use of sulfur and wine remaining on the lees all makes sense to me now. If you love wine you will really enjoy the history of this fascinating woman and the process of making wine.

The one detriment to this book is Tilar Mazzeo's overuse of the word "perhaps." It leaves the reader wondering just how much of the biographical information is accurate.

Little History, Lots of Mystery - just a Docudrama
As a lover of history, a career woman who takes pride in other women's achievements in the business world, and an oenophile (whose favorite champagne is Clicquot), I could hardly wait to read this book. In fact, the summary of the book seemed to be written just for me! What I found when I read this book, however, was very different from what I expected.

I feel as if I read a "docudrama" or some similar fictional account based loosely upon a few historical facts. The Widow Clicquot should have been a 50 page thesis for a history grad student (assuming the author was first able to unearth sufficient historical facts). Instead, the author stretched this book to 194 pages in the advance review copy - at least 100 pages past the book's historical-accuracy-breaking-point. The author did her readers a great disservice by attempting to write a biography about Madame Clicquot when the author herself repeatedly admits in the book that she could find almost no recorded history about the lady. Was this book pursued purely for commercial reasons, without regard to the lack of substantive content? Was the author too wrapped up in her intellectual love affair with the concept of Madame Clicquot to recognize that "The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It" fails to tell us much of anything about how Madame created her Champagne Empire, or how she ruled it?

My greatest complaint is that Ms. Mazzeo trys to create historical fact out of thin air throughout The Widow Clicquot. I could provide innumerable examples of the author leaping to conclusions about what Clicquot felt or saw, what Clicquot did and why she did it - all without any sort of reference material to back up her conclusions. For example, the way Ms. Mazzeo writes should provide you with an idea of my problems with this book: "Barbe-Nicole probably also learned..." "Barbe-Nicole certainly learned..." "Barbe-Nicole surely did not miss..." (pages 42-43 of the ARC). Time and again throughout the book, Ms. Mazzeo make leaps of logic regarding what Madame Clicquot knew, did, loved, liked, disliked and how she felt. I understand that some assumptions must be made about a historical figure about whom so little appears to be known, but the casual way the author has managed to spin a tale that is nearly empty of hard fact while being full of gossip, innuendo and guess - well, it didn't sit well with me, and if you are a student of history, I doubt it will sit well with you, either.