Tilar Mazzeo: She's very, very clever in thinking about how she communicated what we would talk about as a brand narrative, right? I mean, she told a good story about her brand and who she was and how it fit into the market. So, you know, if you look at the cork, for example, one of the things you'll notice is that the star that's on the cork, and that is, you know, homage to the 1811 Year of the Comet, right?
So it becomes this way of communicating that very story, that story of a spunky entrepreneur who gambles everything and it is written in the stars, right? I mean, there is this kind of incredible romance of the idea that there was a kind of destiny in it and that there's a kind of love story behind it.
Lise McLeod: Napoleon Bonaparte is quoted as saying: "In victory, you deserve champagne. In defeat, you need it." Either way today it is a luxury wine for which over 325 million bottles were shipped globally in 2022. That resulted in some 6.3 billion euros in revenue. The upcoming conversation is about one of the best known champagne brands, Veuve Clicquot, and the woman behind the name and who revolutionized the champagne industry.
Hello, Page Points listeners, today I'm joined by Tilar Mazzeo, who is the author of the book, ‘The Widow Clicquot, The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It’. I have a print copy here in my hand. And its cover is the most glorious yellow, the same yellow as that of the champagne label, which we will talk about at some point in our conversation.
So I will say, welcome to the podcast Tilar.
Tilar Mazzeo: Thanks very much.
Lise McLeod: The book was an informative and fun read, and I got the impression that it was a fun story to research and to write. My first very important question is, do you like champagne?
Tilar Mazzeo: I definitely like champagne. That was in fact where the book began. I mean, I wish I could say it began out of an academic interest, but it began out of a passion for champagne.
Lise McLeod: I'm totally in agreement with you there. Is it safe to say that that's how you chose the theme? What led you to investigate the life of this incredible woman of her time?
Tilar Mazzeo: Yeah, I mean, I was trained as an academic and I worked in 19th century women's biography. That was my academic research field, but I had an academic job in Oshkosh, Wisconsin at one point, which was not really where I had hoped to end up as an assistant professor. Lovely people, but not a very happy job. And so two of my colleagues and I agreed that Veuve Clicquot was our favorite champagne. So we used to have what we called Veuve Clicquot Nights, and we would each bring a bottle of Veuve Clicquot, and then our husbands would have to drive us home.
And it started really actually as a joke among those girlfriends where I said one day, "oh, Veuve means widow in French. I wonder if there was a widow Clicquot." And so as a kind of running joke, every time we had a Veuve Clicquot night, I would bring in this information about the woman behind this label, and one of my girlfriends said, you know, you should write that book.
Sort of was one of those conversations where I said, oh, well, someday I'm going to write that book. And then really just at some point on a pre-tenure impulse, you know, those pre-tenure years are stressful years. On an impulse I wrote a book proposal and sent it to an agent and got a big five book contract.
Then I found myself really having to learn how to write for a different kind of larger audience.
Lise McLeod: I'm familiar with the champagne brand, but it never clicked in my mind that there'd be a story behind it. I never questioned why the champagne is called Veuve Clicquot. Can you talk us through what is so special about the whole widow aspect of her life?
Tilar Mazzeo: Well, she was the woman who... I mean she wasn't the woman who founded the company. Her husband originally founded the company that she then took over after his death, but she really built that company and it was named after her. So I mean, it really is a brand that is fundamentally associated with the woman who founded it.
And you know, in terms of business history, it is really an amazing story. I mean, she's arguably the first woman in history to be the head of an international corporation. And she was an amazing businesswoman at a moment where being a businesswoman was really only possible in some ways for a very brief window of time in France at that moment in history.
And she was amazing. I mean, people later considered her, and Angela Coutts was the only other person, in the 19th century as a woman who sort of had the same reputation of Coutts Bank in London, and she's the other great entrepreneur... entrepreneuse of the 19th century as a woman.
Lise McLeod: We just finished celebrating our 2023 World IP Day with the theme Women in IP, Accelerating Innovation and Creativity. Barbe-Nicole sounds like she's a perfect woman to highlight as an inspiring case study of a woman's career connected to intellectual property.
Tilar Mazzeo: Right. So I mean, maybe the best way to... because she did, I mean, her story is very deeply connected with, you know, with brand identity and with marketing, and therefore inevitably with trademark and intellectual property law.
And she was hugely innovative, both on the technical side of champagne production, but also on the marketing side. I mean, maybe the best way to explain it is to say... okay, so here's her story in a nutshell, right? She's born at the end of the 18th century. She's born in Reims in France, in the Champagne region, and her father is this great textile industrialist.
And so she's married to the son of another textile industrialist in a essentially an arranged marriage. Well, that son who is the Clicquot right? Francois Clicquot. They're both in their twenties. He has decided that he really, really wants to run a wine business. He doesn't really want to go into the textile business, and of course, they're there in the Champagne.
And his father says, you know, this is a really bad idea son. This is not really a good idea. But he insists. And so he sets himself just in the beginning of their marriage to learning about the champagne business, which at this point really he's not making champagne. He's simply a negociant and because he doesn't know anything about this business and because they've just been married, she goes along with him.
And in the course of this, they genuinely fall in love, spending their days riding around in a wagon, visiting the vigneron of the Champagne region. And inevitably, his business does fail because his father is right, that it is not a good moment or a good idea to try to run this very difficult business.
So Francois Clicquot dies. She's a widow, very young, and she goes at that point to her father-in-law and says, look, I really want to try to run this business, to build a champagne house that my husband failed at, and the kind of amazing part of her story is that the father-in-law looks at her, and she's asking for the equivalent of about a million dollars, the father looks at her and says, "yes". And then, you know, it's partly I think that he recognized something in her exceptional as a businesswoman and as an intellect, but I think partly it's also that it was his son's dream.
Lise McLeod: Can you also highlight how exceptional this was for a woman at that time?
Tilar Mazzeo: Yeah, it would've been very unusual. I mean, there was a history, so if we go back and look at something like the account books of Jean-Rémy Moët, who was already well established as an early entrant into that market and who had market dominance and was a good friend of Napoleon, so you know, was doing quite well. If we go back and look at the account books of Moët what we see is that there were lots of widows on the account books.
In fact, about 50% of the champagne wine that was being produced was being produced by women who were widows. But those women were not running a business. They were farmers effectively, right? They were growing grapes and they were making the wine and then selling it on to negociants and they were all of a much different class position. They were what we would then call 'the peasantry', as it were.
So she came from a very upper class background, and that would've been exceptional for a woman of a haute-bourgeois background to engage in business. Women didn't do that, and it was a period legally in French law and also in British law when women were under what, under British law would be called couverture, they didn't have legal independence.
So only a woman who was a widow could run a business independently under her own name because widows were considered in law to be people. So very unusual for a woman.
Lise McLeod: And then you tell the tale of her remarkable journey, I mean, she sounded quite courageous and a risk taker. Tell about how she was able to get a hold into the market.
Tilar Mazzeo: So her father-in-law says, yes, let's her try to run the business. He says, you'll have to do a business apprenticeship with a man named Alexandre Fourneaux who owned the company that is today Taittinger. And so they've spent four years where she does this business training with him as a partner, and they fail. At the end of those four years, Fourneaux says, "I'm out. This is not working."
And she goes back to her father-in-law again and asks for another million bucks. And again, her father-in-law says yes, but at this point, she knows that this is the end of the road. If she can't make it go this time, she's jeopardized her own financial security. But 1811 is one of the two great vintages in the Champagne in the 19th century, and it was known as the Year of the Comet.
So when we come to talk about the cork, right, and the branding of the cork, 1811 and the Comet, that year is an incredibly important part of her brand identity. So this amazing vintage, she knows that she's made this great wine, it's the final days of the Napoleonic Wars, there's a blockade in Europe. Jean Rémy Moët has captured the champagne market, which is largely a Russian export market, and she decides that she has about 10,000 bottles of this amazing wine, and she knows that if she can't get this to market, she's going to go bankrupt. And that if she can't get it to Russia before Jean-Rémy Moët then he will capture the market share.
So she comes up with this plan to essentially smuggle her wine out of France much too late in the season. So there's quite a lot of risk of the product being damaged because of the heat. And she puts it at the border, so that it's waiting in the port for the moment that the border is open, and that peace is declared so that she will have beat Jean-Rémy Moët to Russia.
And she does. This amazing gamble that she takes. She sends her salesman off, you know, it's always a charming story. His name is Louis Bohne. She sends him off with, you know, a couple of bottles of brandy and a copy of Cervante's Don Quixote, right? Because that was how she thought of it at that moment, they were tilting at windmills at this point.
And they do. And so what happens is they're there, peace is declared. And Bohne writes these letters back to her. He says, "you won't believe it. I'm being mobbed at the docks. Everybody wants your champagne. They say, it's the best champagne. Don't worry, I've doubled the price" is what he says. So within 30 days, she becomes this kind of phenomenon.
The Tsar declares he won't drink anything except the champagne of the Veuve Clicquot and now she has a problem because she sold out the wine that she had. Champagne takes a number of years, right? I mean, a vintage champagne is at least three years before you release it.
Lise McLeod: This is such a great story. Now, the good, innovative part. Sorry. Please continue.
Tilar Mazzeo: So now she doesn't have any product to sell. She has this huge market demand. She knows that if she loses the moment, she will lose that market share, that she's just managed to get. So she realizes that technically the bottleneck, as it were, in her cellars is with how you get the yeast out of the bottle.
So, you know, you think about how champagne is made. You take a still wine, you put it in a bottle, you put some yeast and some sugar in that bottle, you close it, and you do a secondary fermentation in the bottle. And that is what's known as the 'Méthode Champenoise' right? So the champagne method is that, that's the traditional method.
The problem is that at the end, the yeast runs out of sugar. It dies, and it falls to the bottom of your bottle in a bit of sludge. And so what the problem was is that technically the champagne industry didn't know how to get that sludge out in any way at that moment, except what was known as ‘transversage’, which was just decanting it effectively.
And that was very slow, and it also destroyed the quality of the wine. So she came up with the insight and the technical innovation that is now known as remuage or riddling, which is: she said to her cellar maker, "Take my kitchen table down to the cellars and I want you to drill holes in it. And what if we just turn those champagne bottles upside down? What if the yeast were just in the neck of the bottle? Wouldn't that be easier?"
And everybody said, "You know, Madame, that is not how we have done it for hundreds of years. That is not how champagne is made." And she said, "Take the table downstairs and drill the holes in it." And that is effectively to this day the process known as riddling.
So now you'll see in the French champagne cellars, you'll see the table and it just has a hinge in the middle. And that's just to save floor space. So it's like a table with a bunch of holes drilled into it, that is an A frame, like a sandwich board. You put the champagne bottles in with the yeast. You turn them every day, a quarter turn until the yeast ends up in the neck of the bottle, and then you just pop it out very quickly. You needed a good fast thumb to put it over and you had expedited it, you had solved this bottleneck.
So her technical innovation is... that was not something that she was able to trademark or patent at the time, at that moment in history. She did keep it a secret from Jean-Rémy Moët for almost a decade, and I always think that that was a real testament to who she was because in a relatively small rural community, her employees kept that secret for quite a long time, and she must have been a pretty amazing woman to have inspired that kind of loyalty among those employees.
But to this day, that is technically the innovation that she made and that innovation largely accounts for how it has been that you can still have champagne as an artisanal, handmade product, but you can produce it quickly enough for it to reach a middle class mass market.
Lise McLeod: So she really, in that respect, revolutionized the whole champagne making process and then was able to produce more, correct? The riddling, sped up the process so that she could continue to supply bottles to all of those champagne drinkers who were hungry for Veuve Clicquot.
Tilar Mazzeo: Exactly. So she was able to sustain that market share that she'd captured, and she expanded that business into a huge business. I mean, it went from being a business she and her husband founded to being... at the end of her life she was one of the great tourist attractions of France. I mean, as late as the 1920s, if you were in Britain and you wanted a bottle of champagne, you would simply call for a bottle of The Widow. The Widow meant champagne for many generations of people.
And you know, she exported to the United States as to Lapland. I mean, she was exporting all around the world by the end of her life. And that technical innovation, that riddling invention is still used today. I mean, nobody has come up with a better way, ultimately to do that. So, you know, for non vintage champagnes now, they use something called gyropallets or they'll freeze things. But for vintage champagnes, it is still Madame Clicquot's technique that is used in the production of that product.
Lise McLeod: And then what about her influence in the idea of identifying her brand of champagne?
Tilar Mazzeo: She was very, very clever in thinking about how she communicated what we would talk about as a brand narrative, right? I mean, she told a good story about her brand and who she was and how it fit into the market. So, you know, if you look at the cork, for example. One of the things you'll notice is the star that's on the cork, and that is, you know, homage to the 1811 Year of the Comet, right? So it becomes this way of communicating that very story, that story of a spunky entrepreneur who gambles everything and it is written in the stars, right?
I mean, there is this kind of incredible romance of the idea that there was a kind of destiny in it and that there's a kind of love story behind it. So I think, you know, that was part of it. The anchor that you'll see was a nod to the fact that that's the symbol of St. Petersburg, which was the market that she was really trying to capture.
Everyone always asks about the yellow label. The yellow label comes really quite a lot later in the story and really at the very end of her life, you know, she's a very, very good business woman. But at the end of her life, there's another very, very talented other young business woman in the champagne trade, and that is Louise Pommery. And Louise Pommery had grown up and been educated at boarding schools in Britain, and at this time, Madame Clicquot, so Veuve Clicquot champagne, all champagnes at this point, were incredibly sweet.
I mean, you know, I once had a friend who was a winemaker make me a bottle of champagne in the style of the 1820s, 1830s, and it is sweeter than a Sauterne, so it's incredibly sweet. And they were served ice cold, like sometimes almost like a slushy. So, ice cold in these small glasses, incredibly sweet and Madame Clicquot made two big mistakes in her business career.
One was opening a bank, which had a run on it, and she very nearly lost everything by trying to move away from her core business identity. And then the other one was that she thought that the English would not drink French champagne. So she did not have a lot of market share in Britain, and Louise Pommery had the insight that it wasn't that the English weren't interested in champagne, it was just that they didn't like sweet wines.
And so Louise Pommery comes up with the idea of exporting what we would now call a brut champagne wine with low residual sugar, and she starts exporting that to the UK market and is immediately successful in doing that. And Madame Clicquot to her credit, had the grace to realize that she had been wrong. That in fact there was a market, but you needed to make it without sugar.
So she began, this is at the very end of her life when she's effectively retired and the company is being run by her successors, but she's still alive and involved. Says, "Okay well we do need to produce then a brut" and that yellow label, Clicquot yellow. That is trademarked, and that was trademarked about the decade after she died.
She died in the 1860s and by the 1870s that had been trademarked as a color, but it was being used earlier than that, and it was being used to demarcate the brut champagne. So you'll notice that when you look at the Clicquot yellow, you'll notice that it appears on the yellow brut non vintage, which is their largest product.
And of course, you know, since then, yeah, I mean, your listeners will be, you know, much more knowledgeable about the legal side of trademark history than I am. But of course, in the last 20 or 30 years, there have been a number of challenges that LVMH, which now owns Veuve Clicquot and has for maybe 20 years or so, has been very, very aggressive about protecting that trademark and that has been upheld, finding that that had been used long enough and is famous enough that nobody else has the right to use that color on a sparkling wine.
Lise McLeod: It's certainly very visible on a shelf amongst other champagne products, so very well chosen on their part. Champagne is arguably one of the most well-known geographical indications. From the way you described it in the book, it's a very strict system when it comes to growing the grapes etc. Can you expand on that for us?
Tilar Mazzeo: Yeah, I mean, it is an incredibly strict system, the AOC, the Controlled Appellation System in France, and it, you know, there's the same in Italy and in Spain. I mean, at this point it's become globalized.
That really dates back to the beginning of the 20th century. I mean, so at the end of the 19th century in Bordeaux, a number of the vineyards were classified, right? So you had in the 19th century, the beginning of this effort to designate which vineyards were which classes of grapes. But really the AOC in terms of champagne starts in the second decade of the 20th century where a series of laws are ultimately passed in France, national laws saying that champagne wine can only be made in certain designated villages. It can only be made with three different grape varietals. There's a committee in the 1920s that was developed that standardized that product.
So the concern was that by the beginning of the 20th century, champagne had become champagne. It symbolized not just a quality wine, but you know, love and glamor and celebration. I mean, it came to stand in luxury. It was already a kind of a term that was associated with a whole series of other characteristics, market brand characteristics, and what they found is that the word champagne was being used to describe inferior products made outside France. In particular there were a number of Soviet brands that were of concern. And so in an effort to make sure that the brand identity of champagne itself was kept to a standard, there are a whole series of regulations.
I mean, it's things like what font sizes you can use on labels to designate the quality of vineyards. And I mean, it's extremely complicated unless you are very, very knowledgeable about the wine industry, you would not know how to necessarily decode the minutia of some of the label laws, they can be quite challenging, and that has been very effective.
So, I mean, you know, under trademark, under AOC designation, there is no such thing as Californian champagne right? There's sparkling wine from California made in the traditional method or the, you know, the champagne method, can say Méthode Champenoise on your label, but you can't say that it's champagne unless it comes from that very particular area.
And that is also something that is quite aggressively enforced and that ultimately people who know more about the legal side would know more about it, but my understanding is it ultimately goes back to the Madrid Protocols, which was the international agreement about respecting national trademarks. And the European Union has also extended all of that legislation.
Lise McLeod: The way you wrote the book and did your research. It's a historical account of Barbe-Nicole's life, but you also interjected some of your own personal reflections. That's what I found added warmth to the facts of her story. An example of what comes to mind, there was a portrait that you had acquired, and you passed on your reflections in looking at how she sat and how she smiled. Do you have anything you'd like to share in that regard with what you discovered or felt during your research?
Tilar Mazzeo: Yeah, it was quite a personal story. I mean, the book is non-fiction, so I write narrative non-fiction. So that means that none of the facts are invented. You know, if I say what the weather is one day, it means that I looked up what the historical weather was for that day in the Champagne. But I remember the day that I went in, cause I did get access at Veuve Clicquot and I remember the day I went into the archives and I thought, well, you know, here's this whole building full of records and the thing that was disappointing and shocking, in fact, as a researcher at that moment, was to understand that what Barbe-Nicole thought was important about her own life to save was not anything about herself as a person.
She saved every receipt for every grape she bought, every bottle, how much she paid for them, where she got them, the land that she acquired, the business communications... it was the things about the business that she saved and either she or, you know, whoever came after her, nobody thought that it was important to save the story of Barbe-Nicole, the person, right? Of the woman who made huge sacrifices and gambles in order to develop this business. So, you know, there were just one or two letters written in her own voice.
But what I wanted was... because women's history is really hard to write, right? Because women's materials often were not preserved in the archives in the same way that, you know, the princes and kings and queens, you know, their records tend to be preserved. But people who lived kind of average lives but did extraordinary things, those records tend not to have survived in many cases.
So I was really at that point hunting for ways to sort of understand who she might have been as a person. And one of them, as you say, was this portrait in one of the early books about her. There's a little tiny portrait that's reproduced at the beginning. And at that point, I needed to get permissions to reproduce this image. And it turned out that the British Library wanted some phenomenal sum of money to reproduce this little tiny portrait. And I ended up finding a book seller. This is, you know, the very early days of eBay when it was still... or Amazon when they were still bookstores, right.?
And I found that in Paris there was a book seller who had a lithograph of the widow Clicquot. So I went to Paris and I purchased the lithograph for a couple of hundred euros, and it's this huge 19th century lithograph that was framed in its original frame and I still have in my office.
And what was really interesting, because then you suddenly see her larger than life as it were, right, you know? And you understand that the end of her life, because it was done when she was an old woman, she was considered somebody. In that moment in time, important enough that you might do a large lithograph of, and that people might buy these portraits of her to hang in their homes or in their offices, right?
I mean, it really does sort of say something about the cultural status that she had at the end of her lifetime and that, you know, those materials just don't tend to have survived. But one of the things that struck me about it is there's also a portrait of her as a younger woman. She was not a beautiful woman.
And it's sort of an unkind thing to say perhaps, but I think it's incredibly important for her story. You know, she was widowed in her twenties and had had a child, and if she had been beautiful, I suspect that the pressure for her to remarry would have been great. And I suspect that the freedom for her to run a business as a widow probably would not have been offered to her.
It was one of those cases where being a plain, stout... not a beauty, ended up cutting the other way for her. It allowed her some freedom. The other place that I found a lot of information about her is I remember at one point just desperate thinking, okay, who is this person? And I decided to just go, it was January and they were doing the pruning in the Champagne, to just drive through the vineyards of the Champagne. And I would pull over at the working mens’ cafes, or I would chat to the vigneron on the side of the road and I would say, you know, "what do you know about the widow Clicquot?" And the thing is that in France, she has the status of a kind of folk hero, and everybody could tell you the story of the widow Clicquot.
And what as a historian was interesting to me is it's not just the story of who she was at the time, but it's also the story of how somebody's reputation and legend exists. Whether those vigneron had the right facts or not, is not as important in some ways as the fact that she has taken on this status as a folk heroine.
But I felt like because of that I did need to use a first person voice, right? Because I can't represent those facts as anything other than the kinds of history that they are, which is to say a kind of oral history.
Lise McLeod: Is there any more insight that you might share?
Tilar Mazzeo: I mean, I think the other thing that is really interesting about her that I might add in terms of thinking about brand identity, and I didn't say this in the book because I didn't realize it until a number of years later.
But I think in the end, she is also the person who pioneers what we now think of as wine tourism. Because late in her life, she buys this little chateau in a place called Boursault and it happens to have the train, runs at the bottom of it. At the period where the trains are really, you know, beginning to connect France and you know, connect tourists in Paris to Reims in particular.
And so she has the insight that since the train stops at the bottom of her chateau, maybe she should open a tasting room. And most of the primary material that I found about her life, I ended up finding in 19th century American travel logs. Where Americans who were visiting France talk about what they went to see as tourist sites, and consistently what starts showing up at the end of her life is that they are going to Reims to see the queen of champagne and that they're going to pay homage by visiting her at the chateau.
And this along with Louise Pommery, because Louise Pommery immediately sees what's happening. And Louise Pommery's insight is to move her chateau not into the country, where chateaus belong, but to move her chateau into the middle of downtown Épernay right by the train station.
And then she names the different cellars of her chateau, of her tasting room after the different major markets that she sells to. So that if you're coming from Manchester, England, you can go to the Manchester cellar and feel as though your geographical location has a special value and importance to this brand's story.
And really those two women and then the people who began following that, because if you go to Épernay now, you'll see that there's, you know, the Avenue of Champagne right? And on that are all of these kind of faux chateaux, which are these grand tasting rooms. For the Champagne region and that has really become the center of wine tourism.
And then when you look at what happened, and I lived in Napa and Sonoma and wrote on Napa and Sonoma wines for quite a long time, and sometimes still do. And you know, when you look at what happened somewhere like Napa and Sonoma, which is what? After Disney, the second largest tourist attraction in California, the eighth largest economy in the world, right? You look at what happened, and you can see that it's the champagne, it's the development of wine tourism by these women at the end of the 19th century that ultimately is reimagined in the California wine country.
Lise McLeod: So clever and so long lasting, isn't it? Thank you, Tilar. I really appreciate your time and I absolutely recommend this read. It was an enlightening background to one of my favorite things in life. So cheers everyone!
Tilar Mazzeo: Thanks for the invitation to join you all. Yes, cheers!
Lise McLeod: I hope that you enjoyed my conversation with Tilar about Barbe-Nicole, the widow Clicquot and her champagne empire. A copy of her book can be found in our knowledge repository at the WIPO Knowledge Center. Tilar didn't mention it during our talk, but the book is being made into a movie. I can't wait to see it.
Until the next time, and the next Page Points. Bye for now.