The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It (P.S.)

The title of grand cru (“grand growth”) is reserved for the highly select localities (currently only seventeen in the Champagne region) where the very finest grapes are grown, those rating a perfect 100 on a percentage scale. The second category, premier cru (“first growth”), refers to the next forty-three best wine-growing regions in an area and is given only to those rating from 90 to 99 percent excellent.

These roses are nothing more than the winemaker’s canary in the mine shaft, an early signal of impending disease and blight in a vineyard. They are planted because roses get sick with everything and usually before anything else in the garden.

Today, champagne is ranked from driest to sweetest in categories that progress from brut nature (naturally strong), extra brut (extra strong), and brut (strong) on the dry end and then—despite the hopelessly misleading names—on into the categories of sec (dry), extra sec (extra dry), demi sec (half dry), and doux (gentle) on the sweeter end. Essentially, brut is dry and sec is sweet.

Champagne is the only wine that leaves a woman more beautiful after drinking it.

Barbe-Nicole today is credited with three achievements: “internationalizing the Champagne market,” “establishing brand identification,” and developing the process known in French as remuage sur pupitre—literally “moving by desk.”

Strict regulations assure that real champagne can use only three grape varietals—the black pinot meunier and pinot noir grapes and the white chardonnay grape.

The poet Lord Byron famously proclaimed that lobster salad and champagne were the only things a woman should ever be seen eating.

Most wine experts now believe that the British were converting their barrels of imported wine from the region around Reims—wine with a natural tendency to fizz easily—into sparkling champagne by the 1670s, a full decade before the wine was first produced in France.

Even more shocking, champagne wasn’t discovered by the French. It was the British who first learned the secret of making wine sparkle and first launched the commercial trade in champagne wine with bubbles. The legend of Dom Pérignon was manufactured only in the late nineteenth century—and eventually registered by the estates of Moët and Chandon as a trademark.

Without her discovery of remuage—an efficient system for clearing champagne of the yeasty debris trapped in the bottle after secondary fermentation—champagne could never have become the world’s most famous wine.