Madame Clicquot: History’s Champagne Pioneer

TRANSCRIPT

Camille Moreno: She was doing marketing before marketing existed. In fact, or the words marketing existed. It’s true that the key of Madame Clicquot was really to do the opposite all the others were doing. She said it, she put it plainly, “I will do the opposite of my competitors and that will mark my difference.”

Dan Rubinstein: Hi, I’m Dan Rubinstein and this is The Grand Tourist. I’ve been a design journalist for more than 20 years, and this is my personalized guided tour for the worlds of fashion, art, architecture, food, and travel, all the elements of a well lived life. Let’s talk about that well-lived life for a second. There are so many icons of style in the history books we look up to, fashion designers that raised hemlines, authors that challenged the status quo, and artists that transformed our perceptions of reality and beauty. But there’s one person who was often overlooked, who we can thank literally every time we open a bottle of champagne. A woman who turned a personal tragedy into a legacy that lives on to this very day. On this very special episode, sponsored by my dear supporters at Veuve Clicquot, we explore a true grandam who made history, Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Clicquot, or as is remembered today, simply Madame Clicquot. If your French is rusty, Barbe-Nicole’s name is literally on the bottle. Veuve means widow in French.

Madame Clicquot married Francois Clicquot in the late 18th century, the son of a founder of a vineyard in the champagne region of France. The two fell passionately in love. But when Francois died suddenly at the age of 27, Barb Nicole found herself a young widow and in charge of a vineyard. At a time when women’s rights were almost theoretical, especially in France during the Napoleonic era, this was practically unheard of. But her bravado and steadfastness isn’t the only reason she’s so admired today. She literally invented the modern idea of champagne through a series of innovations from a wine making point of view, but also from a marketing one. More on that later. Madame Clicquot’s life will also be top of mind this July in the new film, Widow Clicquot, starring Haley Bennett and Tom Sturridge, while the house is not associated in its production. On today’s episode, we’ll speak with the cellar master of Veuve Clicquot, Didier Mariotti, who’s in charge of the ever-evolving task of creating the wines, often with ancient notes from 19th century France as a guide.

And we’ll speak with Camille Morineau, a curator and art historian who founded the organization called AWARE, who will speak about the challenges women faced in the 19th century. We’ll also get a history lesson from Isabelle Pierre, the heritage manager of Clicquot, who can give us all of the details on Madame Clicquot’s remarkable life. But first of course, a glass of Clicquot isn’t something you drink all by yourself. So I’m going on this little journey with a fantastic designer, innovator and friend, the New York based impresario, Stephanie Goto. Goto herself is a longtime collaborator with the house Clicquot having designed the La Grande Dame Pavilion for last year’s Polo Classic. And she’s created dining spaces for the likes of Jean-Georges Vongerichten, and many others. So we sat down for a chat in her light-filled rooftop studio near Manhattan’s Union Square over bottles of La Grande Dame 2015 and the new La Grande Dame Rosé 2015 to discuss her own design background, how Madame Clicquot’s life inspires her, and so much more.

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Thank you so much, Stephanie, for having me. What an amazing experience. For people, of course, who are listening in, tell us a little bit about this incredible space that we’re in right now.

Stephanie Goto: Yes. Well, we’re in the heart of Union Square in New York City on a rooftop where I have my Jewel-Box studio, and we’ve welcomed Dan in today for a very special moment with Madame Clicquot.

And so what was your first interaction with the world of Madame Clicquot and the House?

To be honest, when I was still very young, I think Veuve Clicquot was one of the first iconic brands that you identify with drinking champagne. And so the yellow label was something that was very present in my young drinking life. But now having met Madame Clicquot or La Grand Dame, I think that the complexity and the elevated nature of the cuvée really, really resonates with who I am and the more evolved person that I’ve become, especially in practicing as an architect and also traveling the world. So the beauty of Clicquot, I think, is that there’s an incredibly iconic presence of the brand, globally, that you can identify with. But then there are these jewels, that I think is LA Grand Dame, that really elevates you to a whole other perspective on what Clicquot can do.

And before we dive into some of these interviews, one of the things that Madame Clicquot is known for, obviously, is being a very tough business woman in a world that didn’t always welcome women in that role, especially in that time. But she was also an innovator, and I see you as kind of an innovator as well. And tell me about some of the things that maybe you’ve done recently that maybe your own special point of view, that you brought to a project possibly, that required some innovation.

I think what makes me unique is the experience that I’ve had, the background that I have. But most unique, I think, is that I was raised in the United States, but I’m of Japanese heritage. And so I look at Japan from an insider’s perspective, but also from a distance. And I have the ability to really look at the very, very simple, beautiful things about Japan and possibly elevate them, from my own sort of modern perspective. And so in my recent projects in Kyoto, I’ve been able to bring my own sort of Japan-ness to my designs and my realization of projects, giving, I think, a whole new dimension to what it is to be Japanese. And so I don’t necessarily use that word, Japanese, but I think that it’s really a sensation about Japan, it’s a Japan-ness, and it’s the qualities about Japan that make something extraordinary.

And so my innovation or my invention, I think in a way, that makes me unique, such as Madame Clicquot, is sort of that perspective and really diving into my point of view and bringing a modern perspective to Japan, still respecting the heritage and the culture, but allowing people to then see deeper in things that they might’ve taken for granted. In speaking about parallels between Japan and France, I love what Madame Clicquot said in terms of the search for perfection, and that the search for perfection takes two steps at a time, not just to be content with one. And I think that’s a very Japanese perspective.

That’s a very Japanese perspective. Yeah, for sure.

And I think that perhaps Madame Clicquot had this underlying Japan-ness about her in really her search for not taking no for an answer. Is that how you say it?

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

And I really admire her in that sense that she really stuck with her instincts. And a lot of times, from what I understand, she just went with her gut. And that, I really feel like sometimes in design you can’t prescribe something, you have to go with your gut a little bit. And that led her in this incredible path of creating this champagne. I get that, as a creative, how you have to trust your instincts. But you have to really lean in and be persistent and insist on some of those details or else it could just be like any other.

And just on a personal level, are you a champagne fan? Obviously, aside from special occasions, what is your personal relationship with champagne?

Yes, champagne is like water for me, so that might classify me as a champagne lover.

Okay. All right. Well, why don’t we open up a bottle here and pour some out before we get started.

I hate to listen to it.

(MUSICAL BREAK)

I’ll return to Stephanie later on to wrap things up. But first I speak with Isabelle Pierre, the heritage manager for the house of Clicquot. As the keeper of such a rich legacy, she’s the perfect person to quiz about Madame Clicquot’s life and innovations, from how she invented the riddling table to her groundbreaking innovations in rosé, and more. From what I’ve read about her life, I’m not totally surprised, but it sounds like she came from a very wealthy family originally. What do we know about her family’s background in France?

Isabelle Pierre: The father of Madame Clicquot, her father was Nicolas Ponsardin, was at the head of the largest textile factory of the city. And they were a very wealthy family in the city. He became later the mayor of the city, and he got involved in many structures, associations, societies of the city, and he was a very prominent man in the city.

And what was she like as a young woman? Do we know anything about her youth or kind of how she was as a young lady?

Well, we’ve got very few informations, but what we know, because there is still the passport which has been given during the French Revolution when she was still about 20 years old, we know that she was very, very small. She was really a short lady.

Oh, okay.

She had gray eyes and we know that she had, let’s say, strawberry hair.

Oh, okay. Wow.

And that’s all about Madame Clicquot that we know for her appearance at the time when she was a young lady.

And when it comes to, she was married, I think around 21 years old. Right?

That’s right.

Which, when I hear stories that my grandmother used to tell me, even just from the early 20th century, 21 was already getting older for someone to be married off. Was that an issue at the time? I mean, now it seems so young, but of course back then, maybe not too much.

Well, at the time, yeah, when you were 21, it was rather late for a wedding. So we don’t know exactly how she met with Francois. Well, probably there was a kind of arrangement between the two families. Because the Ponsardin family, so the family of the future Madame Clicquot, they were in the production of textile, of fabrics, and the Clicquot family, they were in the trade, they did business. They sold and purchased textile all over Europe.

And so where does the wine making start to come into play here?

Well, it started with a wedding in fact, but not Barbe-Nicole wedding, but the wedding of her father-in-law, Philippe Clicquot, he married a young woman from a wine business family. And as he owned a few acres of vineyards near Reims, he decided to start a champagne company with the ambition of exporting. He really announced it in the French press at the time. He said that he wanted to cross the borders of the French kingdom to bring the finest of champagne to the foreigners, in fact. And that’s immediately what he did, because in the first few months of existence of the company, he shipped to Italy, and the year next, he shipped to the UK, to Germany and many other countries. And only 10 years after the founding of the company, he shipped for the first time to the United States, to Philadelphia.

Oh, wow. And what was the market like for champagne at the time? How were people sort of consuming it? Today, in France, it’s more of an everyday sort of wine, in the US it’s more seen as more of a celebratory drink for special occasions. How was it sort of consumed at the time? What was that market like?

Well, at the time, it was the wine for exceptional occasions, for parties especially. So of course you didn’t drink champagne every day except if you had parties every day. But yeah, it was a wine that was very difficult to product because the effervescence was very unpredictable. And of course, as it was difficult to product, you had few bottles. And of course the cost was a bit higher than classic wines, which made it immediately, let’s say, a luxury product. And all the kings and queens and all the high aristocracy, or wealthy bourgeoisie, as we say in French, they of course purchased champagne and they had it for special occasions. But then, depending on the country, some enjoyed it, let’s say, as a starter, as an aperitif. But other countries, like in the UK, for example, they paired their champagne with the main plat during the meal.

And before Madame Clicquot took over her husband’s business, do we know anything about her life as a young bride? Or what that home life was like? Because she did have children.

Yeah, we know that probably they shared a lot. They had a lot of conversation together, and that’s probably how she started to learn tidbits about champagne, about vine, about grapes, et cetera. But it’s true that we have very few informations about her life as a young bride. We know that they had a very tiny house in the village of Bouzy, surrounded by vineyards. And we know that they shared a lot of moments there. So probably that’s how an interest in the vine and in wine making, and probably that’s why later she decided to take over the company.

And before her husband’s death, she wasn’t involved with any wine making at the time, we believe?

No, no, because at the time, it was really a man’s world, let’s say. So all the elaboration of the wine, the vinification, all that, and of course commerce and business, they were really the fields of the men and only the men. And even in the vineyard, of course, in the vineyards, the vine growers, the women worked in the vines. But in wealthy family, it was not the rule. In wealthy family, women didn’t work. They took care of the children of the house, they organized parties, and that was it.

And when it comes to the death of her husband, I read somewhere where it was supposed to be typhoid, but maybe it was suicide. But what do we know and what do you believe about the death of her husband?

He got a fever. We know it because we have in the archives of the company some bills and invoice from chemists and doctors. So he got sick, he got a fever, probably like typhoid, and he was gone in a couple of weeks. So it was of course, very, very sudden for Madame Clicquot to become a widow at 27 with a 6-year-old girl. But no, Francois didn’t kill himself. It was really that he got sick, and unfortunately he passed away too early.

Yeah, it sounds like she got married… How much older was he than her?

He was three years older than she was.

Okay. So he was also very young to die, I guess, at the age of 30 or something.

Yes, he was 30.

Yeah, and so it sounds like they got married and they had a lovely life together. She had a baby almost immediately, right?

Yes.

And he passes away. Are there people at that moment that tried to take over the business or the estate from her? And what was that moment like? What do we know?

Well, what we know about that moment is that first of all, Philippe Clicquot, the founder and father of Francois, he’s so devastated by the loss of his beloved son that he wants to retire and he wants to sell the business. And we do not know exactly why Madame Clicquot took that decision of taking over the business. But anyway, she’s been able, we don’t know how, to convince her father-in-law, and also her father, that she would be able to take over the business. But there was a condition, the condition was that she would have a financial partner who would bring, of course, the experience of business, of wine making. So that’s why for the first four years, she had a financial partner whose name was Alexandre Fourneaux,. But after four years, they splitted the partnership, and then she remained at the head of the company.

And so what were those couple of years like at…? You know, what kind of impact did she have?

Well, the first years have been very difficult. First of all, because she was a woman. It was her major handicap, if we can say so. It was the vision of the time. It was like that, women were the charge of men at the time. And the only moment in their life when it was considered that they could take decisions on their own and that they could have their own money, and make decisions about their money, was unfortunately when they’d been widowed. So the story of Madame Clicquot happened, fortunately or unfortunately, because she lost her husband too early. And it’s with this tragedy that, in fact, appeared a fantastic businesswoman.

Why was she good at business? What made her so good at it?

Probably because she was very, very clever, first of all. And from the very beginning, of course, she knew that she was unexperienced in the matter, so she learned with the people who had the knowledge. And also probably because she was looked as unexperienced and probably not the major character in the story, she was not afraid to try things. So sometimes she succeeded, sometimes she failed. But anyway, she was not afraid of trying, of experiencing new things. And that’s how, progressively, she became this fantastic business woman. And it’s true that at the very beginning, it has been very, very hard for her. I say it because she was a woman, but also because the geopolitics were not at all favorable for business, because we were at war in Europe, in general. The Napoleonic wars, with the blockade of the continent, with the embargo of the coasts of Europe made by the United Kingdom.

So you have to figure out that when she took over the company at the end of the year, 1805, she had wines that were waiting to be shipped, and they were in French ports, like Dunkirk, Calais, Le Havre, et cetera. But a few weeks later, no ships to take them away. So this has been the first problem. Second problem, Madame Clicquot’s ambitions to create only one quality, the finest for her champagnes. And unfortunately, for the first four years, modern nature was not very kind at all, and the quality of the harvest was really poor, sometimes very bad. So she really had to fight against all the odds possible, until 1810 when there was eventually a good vintage, a good year. And that’s how she created the first known vintage in champagne. Because with that spirit of seeking for excellence, she decided to try to blend together, only once, from that 1810 harvest, and she created the first known vintage by doing this experience, in fact.

And of course part of her legend is that she invented rosé champagne.

It’s not rosé champagne that she invented. In fact, no, she created a new recipe to create rosé champagne. Because rosé champagne exists since effervescence champagne exists. But at the time, the rosé was made by coloration, and always with that vision of style. In fact, when you added this coloration to your white champagne, it didn’t change that much, the taste or the style of your champagne. And for Madame Clicquot, creating a rosé was to create a very distinctive rosé versus her white champagne. So that’s why she explored new methods. So she did a few experiments, and in 1818, she decided to use some red wine from her vineyards in Bouzy to mix them with the white wine and then guessing the secondary fermentation. And that’s how she invented a new process of creation of rosé champagne.

And I’ve read about riddling, that she had some advances in riddling. And I don’t know, can you explain what riddling is and what she did that was different or radical at the time?

Yes. The riddling is a process that enables clarifying the wine. Because in fact, to get the effervescence into the champagne, we need to do a secondary fermentation with the help of yeast and sugar. So once the yeast has consumed the sugar, we have some sediment left in the wine. This sediment, of course, is very good for the aging of the wine because that’s how the wine will develop aromas and all the characteristics of that wine. But of course, this sediment, we must get rid of it. And the riddling is a process that helps gathering all the sediment behind the cork so that we can pull it out of the bottle. And Madame Clicquot improved that process because she invented a tool from which you could improve the quality of the riddling. And this tool was a table de remuage, riddling table, which is the ancestor of the wooden racks, the pupitres, that you still can see today in the cellars.

Did she travel at all during her life?

Oh, that’s the most fascinating about Madame Clicquot is that she wanted her champagne really to travel overseas, and she never traveled. She remained in Reims, in the champagne region. Sometimes she went to Paris because she had a house in Paris. She went twice to Germany to visit Louis Bohne, who was the major representative of the company and who had supported her when she took over the company at the beginning of the 19th century. And that was it. So that’s really the most fascinating about her, because she was probably reading books and books about countries. She asked her agents to feed her information about the countries, about the taste of customers, about everything. But she never traveled to see how her champagne was enjoyed, I don’t know, in New York or in London or anywhere else.

And she lived a long life. She lived until her late 80s. So how long did she wind up working herself, or did she work to the end? Or what was her later life like?

She worked almost until the end. Even if in 1841 she introduced her future successor, she went on working with him. And it’s only probably the last year of her life that she started to really get retired. Even though she was telling people she got retired, in fact, she didn’t really retire. She always kept an eye on things, on business, on grapes, on harvest, on everything.

When she passed, did the business sort of thrive after her passing? What were that next sort of generation like, with the…?

Well, in fact, nothing happened to the business, there was no failure, nothing. Because, well, she had prepared people to that. And at a point that even at the beginning of the 20th century, there were still people thinking that she was still alive. And we have in the archives letters addressed to Madame Clicquot. Because that’s also what is very incredible about what she achieved, is that she turned her name into a brand of excellence when she was still living, and this name survived to her. So this is also the amazing achievement of Madame Clicquot, because Edouard Werlé, when he took over the company, he didn’t change the name of the company. And on the labels, peoples still read, Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin. So that’s why some people who were not very knowledgeable about business, heard, even in the 1900s, that the widow Clicquot was still managing the company.

And if you could go back in time in a time machine and visit Madame Clicquot at the height of her life, and you could ask her one question before the machine brought you back to 2024, what would you ask her, that you maybe don’t know or that we don’t have an understanding of?

The question I would ask her would be, “Why did you take that decision to take over the company?” Because today we can’t explain it exactly. We have, of course, many hypothesis, but no explanation from her. And I would be very curious to know why she took that decision of taking over the company, because she probably knew that it would be very hard, very tough, that nobody would even support her for that. And probably she heard criticism about the fact that she was a woman who was working. So yeah, my main question would be around that. “Why did you choose probably the toughest road to, well, continue to live after the loss of your husband?” Yeah, because I would be very curious to hear her explanation.

Do you have a theory as to why? Your own theory?

My theory is, probably there are several parameters in her decision. Probably the fact that she didn’t want all the efforts of her husband, all the dreams of her husband to be wasted, in a way.

So it was love, basically. She loved her husband so much that…?

Probably there is this, and also probably because Francois had shared with her his passion for wine, for wine making, she had started to discover that she liked this, the wine making, and maybe also the business, why not? And we were in a period also, the French Revolution. It was a moment when there were also women starting to say, but well, women are as intelligent as men and they can do things in life. So maybe she said, “Well, why not me?”

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Up next, I speak with Camille Morineau, a curator and historian who could shed some light on the struggles of women in the worlds of art and culture, especially in 18th and 19th century France, when the role of women was practically in the dark ages. Her organization AWARE, which is quite active in France, is expanding to the USA to archive and create a nexus of research for women in the arts. So you’re the co-founder of the organization AWARE. That started in 2014, I believe.

Absolutely.

Tell me a little bit about the organization and why it was founded.

Yes. It’s a digital encyclopedia about woman artists that I co-founded 10 years ago, so that the history of woman artists can be visible, accessible to everybody. The encyclopedia was founded 10 years ago, a few years after I created a big show in San Pompidou called Elles at Center Pompidou. Elles, like E-L-L-E-S, which was the first time that a museum, which show only woman artist in the permanent collection. So I showed 300 woman artists, 1,000 works, for about two years and a half, and we had about two millions and a half visitors. And that created some kind of a step in my professional life. I had created a first archive within the museum, but I wanted to create a tool that will enable people like me, either art historians, curator, or just anybody, to have access to this hidden history of women artists, or history of women in general, that is hidden.

And you obviously felt that there was a need. So at the time you were looking for information and it was difficult to find?

Absolutely. And it’s hard to imagine that in 2009 when the show opened, there was very little information available. I mean, there were books, a lot of them written in English, but not in French. But not so many solo exhibition and women artists, very few collective shows. There was not a lot going on. And it was not fashionable, I would say, in France, to be called a feminist. Because in France there is no gender studies. So the history of women in general, in France, tends to be social, political, but it was not about art. It is now really, it has changed, but I think it has changed a lot because of the website, AWARE.

Yes. And can you paint a picture for me of what life was like for women at that time, sort of late 1700s, early 1800s, during and after the revolution, essentially? What was that life typically like for women?

Well, depending on what kind of woman we talk about. I mean, there’s women working in the fields and aristocrats having access to culture, so there’s different kinds of women. So it’s hard to respond to your questions. But clearly there were no women rights, so to speak. Women were not autonomous really, although they were more when they worked in the farm, for example, they had equal rights to men. But then when it comes to culture, we have different moments. Right before the revolution, women were extremely famous, successful, they were writing novels, they were philosophers, they were holding salon in Paris, but also in Germany.

Why do you think that was accepted? The writing part of it?

Well, history of women, it’s not a flat progress. I call it [foreign language 00:38:09]. I’m not sure about the word in English. It’s going up and down and up and down. So there is interesting moments where they’re really visible. And before the revolution, one of these moments, then we are going down after the revolution because 19th century clearly sends women back into their house, except the farmers, who keep working outside and equal to men. So we have a little down, but Madame Clicquot is an exception that doesn’t really conform to the rule. I think we don’t have a clear vision of the 19th century. We tend to think it’s a conservative century, I tend to think that it’s not.

Because the more I work about woman artists from that century, the more I think that they were extremely free to travel, to paint, to [inaudible 00:39:00]. They had access to academies, private ones, of course, not the public ones, but they did get a very good education. They were shown in salon. Some of them were recognized, some of them had markets. So the idea we have of the 19th century is not quite right yet, I think.

Was there a moment in French history, after Madame Clicquot’s time, where things did start to change in terms of women’s rights? And is there a flashpoint between that 18th and 19th century, was there a bookmark of time, if you would say, in terms of where that age that Madame Clicquot was part of ended for women’s rights, and something else began?

19th century, in terms of law and legal moments, it’s not a good century. So it’s more like, again, we tend to think that exceptional woman like Madame Clicquot confirm the rule of invisibility. What I’m saying, is that it’s untrue. There’s not really a moment where things, in terms of law, do change. But in the cultural history, there were already a lot of women artists, again, whether in literature, art, champagne, enough of these important figures to be already role models for young women so that, I think, they could feel that they were not completely alone. Which is something that we tend to think, that’s not true. It was difficult and it was better to be a widow than to be married to a horrible guy.

But there were also nice husbands around. And for example, Anna Ancher, which I mentioned, this Danish painter lived with a Danish man called, Michael Ancher. And you can see both of them represented on their own painting, and you can feel that Michael consider Anna as his equal. And you can feel that really looking at the paintings. So some of these guys in the 19th century were nice guys. Not all of them, but a few of them.

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Finally, I wanted to get an idea about how all of this history finds its way into the bottles of Clicquot we enjoy today. So I spoke with Didier Mariotti, the house’s cellar master, to explain to this amateur oenophile how their champagnes have evolved over time, how they keep Madame Clicquot’s spirit of innovation alive, and just what does a cellar master even do.

So tell me a little bit about yourself. How long have you been with Clicquot?

Didier Mariotti: So I’ve been with Veuve Clicquot as a cellar master for almost five years now. So it will be five years this summer, as chief winemaker. But I’ve been working in the wine industry and I’ve been working in champagne for almost 30 years now.

And tell me what a cellar master does. When you apply for the job, it has a list of responsibilities, what are the responsibilities of a cellar master?

Okay, number one is of course to make wine. My main job is to make all the different [inaudible 00:42:47] Clicquot. So means focusing a lot on Yellow Label, of course, [inaudible 00:42:52], but also the rosé, La Grande Dame, the vintages. So all the cuvée we produce are under my supervision, I will say. So I have to be sure that the quality is always there. And every year I’m working on the different blends I have to make. That’s my role, I would say, number one role. But then you have also to manage all the teams. So I have almost 50 people, so 60 people working for me in the winery, laboratory, quality, fruit supply also. So it’s everything from the vine until we do the bottling, and the market finally.

And you mentioned you’ve always had a love of champagne. Do you remember the first time you ever tasted champagne in your life?

I will say in France, we love to drink champagne to celebrate. And this is the first idea about champagne, is really to celebrate birthday, wedding. Any good moment in life, you like to open a bottle of champagne. So I don’t remember the first time I’ve tasted the champagne. But I remember that when I arrived in champagne in 1995, I had this idea in my mind that champagne was just to celebrate. And when I started to work with Moët & Chandon and Dom Pérignon, and by tasting all vintages, I realized that champagne was not just for celebration, champagne was a wine. And when you start to discover champagne is really a wine, maybe it’s a sparkling wine, but it’s a wine, then you have a different vision of how to enjoy it, when to enjoy champagne finally. And you have so many.

If you look at champagne and if you compare champagne to other wine and spirit, it’s the only wine and spirit you can almost drink 24 hours a day. You can have a glass of champagne for breakfast, you can have a glass of champagne to celebrate a good moment of life. You can have a glass of champagne pairing with food, or in a bar or in a nightclub, for example. So that’s the beauty also of champagne, you have so many different champagne you can drink at any moment of the day or of the night. I really love champagne for that. It’s not just bubbles. The diversity of champagne in the market are very interesting. And for me, just if you start to look at champagne as a wine, you will see it very differently.

And when you talk about the complexity of La Grande Dame, can you explain that a little bit?

The idea is, it’s like a painting, I will say, in a way. And if I want to compare, I would say maybe Yellow Label, you use maybe 5 to 10 different colors to create a piece of art. With La Grande Dame, it’s more about 20, 30, 40 different colors, and you have different nuances of colors. And it’s why it can be a bit more difficult to understand, because are you able to see all the different nuances of colors, in a way? If you go to a museum, if you go to the MoMA, for example, some painting are very amazing, like very simple painting, blue painting, just blue. Simplicity doesn’t mean it’s not something… It is not because it’s simple that it’s not good. But to understand, maybe it’s easier to start with something simple and then you move forward and you look at different other piece of art, a bit more complex. It’s just when you feel ready to move forward, just move forward.

But from a technical point of view, what are the differences between those two in terms of the grape and…?

There are big differences. Yellow Label is for me, the wine which is the most difficult to create every year, because I have to create it every year. And even the vintage is not very good in terms of quality, I have to be sure that it’s exactly the same. It has to be an exact copy of the previous blend, in a way. But every vintage, every harvest are different, so the recipe of the blend is changing. For Yellow Label, I’m using about 700 different wine in the blend. So it’s quite huge. I’m using wine from the the current vintage, but I’m also using wine from previous older vintages to be able to be very consistent every year.

For Yellow, it’s about 45, 50% Pinot Noir, 30% chardonnay, and the rest would be Pinot Meunier. Where for La Grande Dame, instead of 700 different wine, like for Yellow, La Grande Dame is about 20, 25 different wines, but mostly Pinot Noir because it’s 90% Pinot Noir in the blend. And we are really looking for very exclusive, very, very precise wine for La Grande Dame. Also, the big difference is aging time in the cellar. Yellow Label is about three years aging time where La Grande Dame is more 7, 8, 9 years aging in the cellar. And when you create a blend also, you have to anticipate this time in the cellar, the aging in the cellar. And you don’t make the same blend if it’s going to age 3 years or 10 years. Because with the aging in the cellar also, you start to create more complexity and more layers. And when you do the blend, the idea is, we know that the blend we are doing right now will be released in 3 years time or in 10 years time, and we have to anticipate that when we make the blend.

And if I were to go back in time to Madame Clicquot’s day and I shared a glass of champagne with her, of Clicquot, what would it taste like compared to today?

It will, in terms of flavor, I would say, would taste quite similar, but in the mouth it would be much more sweeter as Madame Clicquot’s time. They were drinking champagne with much more sugar in the champagne than today, means we are producing much drier champagne today than during Madame Clicquot’s time. And it’s very interesting, because to understand the Yellow Label color, at the beginning with Madame Clicquot, the label was white for the non-vintage, but the non-vintage at that time was very sweet. It was about 80 grams, maybe 120 grams sugar per liter.

And at the end of Madame Clicquot’s time, some consumers, especially France and UK, started to ask for much drier champagne. And she created a new champagne, which was drier, much drier. And to make a difference, especially in the cellar, because in cellar it’s quite dark, she decided that she will change the color of the label to recognize much more easily sweet champagne than compared to a dry champagne. And for the dry champagne, she decided to create a yellow label, and that’s beginning of the story with Yellow Label. Yellow was just a way to say this champagne is much drier than the champagne you are used to.

Okay, well, branding.

No, she was doing a lot of marketing before marketing existed. But it’s for very simple reason, to be able to recognize and to make the difference between a dry champagne and a sweet champagne.

And in terms of her technical innovations, because in speaking to other people for this episode, talking about the techniques that she pioneered and different things like that, what would you say is her greatest contribution to the craft?

She had three major contribution to the craft and to the champagne process. First, she invented the vintage, because champagne was, at that time, was a non-vintage blend. All the champagne were non-vintage. So they were blending different [inaudible 00:52:04] together, but also different vintages together. So I don’t like to say it was non-vintage, for me, I much prefer to say it was a multiple vintage. It’s still what we are doing today with Yellow Label. Then she invented the riddling table. Because you have to understand that after the alcoholic fermentation in the bowl, the yeast are dead, but nobody really know at that time how to extract the dead yeast from the bowl. And champagne was served in a very specific glass with a very long leg, and they were just pouring the champagne and waiting for the dead yeast to sediment into the leg of the glass. And it would take maybe half an hour to sediment in the leg, to be sure that you will not drink the dead yeast.

So it wasn’t just a stem, it was actually like a hollow stem essentially, so that the yeast would settle to the bottom.

Settled to the bottom of the glasses, into the leg. And because they had to wait for this settlement before drinking champagne, they say that champagne would be the best drink for dessert. And it’s why also they were adding sugar because dessert were very sweet at that time. And then Madame Clicquot invented the riddling table. So instead of waiting for the yeast to sediment in the glass, they were just riddling the bottle on a specific table, and to collect all the dead yeast in the top of the bottle. And just by opening the bottle, with the pressure, it will push out all the dead yeast. And then you just had to add the closure, so the cork, to be ready. So it was a bigger innovation in champagne, the riddling table. And the last innovation is the rosé blend. She was the first family to invent the rosé blend, which is blending white and red wine together to create rosé.

Like before, when I asked you what the wine of Madame Clicquot’s time would taste like, and you were able to sit down with her and share a glass of champagne for an afternoon, let’s say, and you had a chance to spend time with her and ask her a question, what would you ask her?

What can we do to be sure that you will be proud of our work?

Is that something you worry about?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. She was very bold and it’s very difficult for us to imagine how difficult that time was, especially for a woman. But she was really bold and she was really pushing all the boundaries all the time. And I think right now we are a bit more afraid or scared about what’s happening, we don’t want to make mistakes. And for me, the most important is to be sure that I will do the right thing, like she did, to develop the House and to be a pioneer in a way. So maybe how I can do things in a different way to be sure that she will be proud of what we are doing right now. And are we still understanding her spirit, her vision about what we have to do?

(MUSICAL BREAK)

After a few glasses of champagne and after we listened to all of these incredible tales about Madame Clicquot and the house today, I wanted to ask Stephanie what struck her the most about this woman’s incredible life.

Okay, well, we’re back. Thank you, Stephanie, for sitting here and enjoying a beautiful glass of 2015 with me, of La Grande Dame. And what did you think after listening to all of these interviews, what kind of stuck out to you, that you did-?

Stephanie Goto: Well, first of all, the champagne is tasting even more fine and delicious and vibrant.

Yes, actually at this point it is, for sure.

But it’s so amazing to actually have the different voices recounting the tenacity of Madame Clicquot, and from different perspectives. And it’s all starting to take shape in terms of who Madame Clicquot was, because I imagine there’s a Madame Clicquot in all of us. But I think that I love how Didier talks about how champagne is almost like a painting and that you’re bringing in all sorts of colors that then make what the champagne is about. And I really feel maybe Madame Clicquot was also thinking about, in her work as the head of the maison, how you can bring all these strengths together to be kind of a leader. And so I think the beauty of La Grande Dame, I think, resonates through to perhaps her energy and her solarity in the sense that she was really thinking about not only the legacy of champagne and how you bring champagne to the lives of people for pleasure, for celebration, but also how you can establish it as a major force in France as an iconic innovation.

To me, one of the things that always sticks out to me is this idea of her as a marketing genius, ahead of her time a little bit. And she really understood how to build a brand before really anybody even knew what the word was. And also just to kind of place her in this, also from, I guess Camille, to place her in this context as an artist too, and as a creative, also really inspired me.

She must have known, again, going back to this idea of having an instinct about what would be successful. I think a lot of leaders in the world, a lot of creative people have an idea, and when they repeat this mantra that slowly, slowly that becomes solidified and actualized. And I think it’s true in architecture as well, is that the more that you dive into the details, and Madame Clicquot certainly was about all about the details, and you sort of repeat that constantly, and not only by teaching, but by doing, I think that those practices then become more and more developed and part of the actual fabric of what you’re doing. And so it feels like there’s so much to learn from her, from in the 18th century. Is that right?

Yeah, early 19th century, late 18th.

Early 19th, late 18th, okay. To be able to be thinking in that way, as a leader, I think is still, I think, what we do today, I guess is my big lesson from learning about Madame Clicquot through these conversations.

Yeah, and especially when you think about that time in France also, it was such a tumultuous one. Not only did she have all of these personal issues, obviously surrounding of taking over this business and dealing with a family, and really sticking to her guns in terms of running the family and not taking any kind of cop out, but also this is the time of right after the revolution, and such a tumultuous time in France. So she was really kind of going against so many headwinds. It makes for quite the story, but also makes her own story so much more impressive, I think.

Well, the fact that she was a widow allowed her to have a more prominent role as a business woman, but the fact that she was a widow was really sort of by accident. And then to have that anointment be something that then you take it and run with it is absolutely just so admirable. And to think about the context that she was working in, it’s something that it’s hard to imagine when you’re drinking this beautiful glass of champagne. It’s all for something that really ultimately brings pleasure to all of us. It was a business, and perhaps the business side of her family, coming from the textile business, had this underlying push of giving her the possibility of what she wanted to do in terms of bringing champagne to the world. But certainly today, it’s proof that whatever she did, and continues to do-

It literally is the gift that keeps on giving.

It’s phenomenal. And I think that it’s our responsibility, maybe starting with the cellar master, to be able to uphold this light that she’s created and to continue to really honor her energy and her vision of creating something that’s truly unique.

I think that’s a lovely way to end this little adventure. But why don’t we say a little toast to Madame Clicquot? Madam, wherever you are, thank you so much, and cheers to your legacy.

Cheers!

Cheers.

(MUSICAL BREAK)

Thank you to all of my guests, especially Stephanie Goto for her incredible hospitality and insights, as well as to our amazing sponsor, Veuve Clicquot, for making this episode happen. For more information about Camille’s organization AWARE, visit awarewomenartists.com. The editor of The Grand Tourist is Stan Hall. To keep this going, don’t forget to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter, the Grand Tourist Curator, at thegrandtourist.net, and follow me on Instagram @danrubinstein. And don’t forget to follow The Grand Tourist on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. And leave us a rating or comment, every little bit helps. Til next time!

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