Champagne Part 3: History - When Champagne Became Bubbly (the Contributions of the Veuve Clicquot)

In Champagne Part 3: History - When Champagne Became Bubbly (the Contributions of Dom Pérignon), we left Champagne in a state of being a 'still wine', at the time of Dom Pérignon's death in 1715. However, Dom Pérignon's immense contributions to the making of quality wine set the stage for the rise of sparkling Champagne.
Twenty years later, in 1735, the First Art Featuring Champagne, called Le Déjeunier d'Huitres or The Oyster Lunch was painted by Jean-Francois de Troy at the request of King Louis XV. The painting showed that the sparking Champagne was in bottles stoppered by a cork tied with string. The Champagne at this time had a significant amount of sediment and had to be drunk in one gulp.
Champagne during this time albeit sparkling, was very sweet, often containing 200 grams of residual sugar, which is much more than today's sauternes such as Chateau d'Yquem. Champagne was typically drunk at dinner, at the end of the meal. There was a market for this style of Champagne, especially in Russia.¹
Skipping forward in time some 42 years brings us to the birth of Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin in 1777, born to Marie Jean Josèphe Clémentine (Jeanne Josephe Marie-Clementine Letertre Huart) and Ponce Jean Nicolas Ponsardin. Ponce Jean Nicolas Ponsardin was a wealthy textile owner in the town of Reims.
In 1798, when she was 21 years old, Barbe-Nicole married François Clicquot, the only son of Philippe and Catherine Françoise Clicquot, thereby consolidating the two huge textile manufacturing houses in Reims of Ponsardin and Clicquot. ²
François' father, Philippe Clicquot, owned vineyards in Bouzy and Verzenay. In order to obtain the maximum profit from those vineyards, Philippe Clicquot founded the Clicquot maison de vins de Champagne in 1772. After his marriage to Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin, François, became his father's partner and took on the production of sparkling wine.³
Here is something I did not know: Nicole-Barbe Ponsardin was named after her maternal grandmother, Marie-Barbe-Nicole-Huarte Le Tertre, the daughter of Nicholas Ruinart, the nephew of Dom Thierry Ruinart, the friend of Dom Pierre Pérignon.^1,4 So, she had Champagne making in her blood!
It appears that both Nicole-Barbe and François embraced their new enological adventures until François died in 1805 leaving Nicole-Barbe, a widow, a Veuve. Nicole-Barbe appealed to her father-in-law for the finances to continue the Champagne venture that she had undertaken with François. Nicole-Barbe had to make two such monetary appeals before the tide began to turn to profitability.

In 1818, the big leap forward in making sparkling Champagne that is attributed to the Veuve Clicquot and her employee, a man named Müller, was the invention of riddling.
Prior to this invention, sparkling Champagne came with the deposits that remained in the bottle after fermentation was over, leaving the sparkling wine cloudy. Initially, decanting of the sparkling wine into another bottle was practiced, but with limited success in retaining the bubbles and with a lot of waste of wine. Sparkling wine was also kept in bottles on their sides, leaving the deposits to collect on the sides of the bottle.
The revolution in retrospect sounds very simple. Instead of leaving the bottle on it's side, the idea was to put the bottle sur pointe or upright on their necks. These bottles where put into a "table" where holes for the bottles were obliquely cut so that the bottles could be gradually turned at varying angles. The act of riddling was to get all of the dead yeast and lees to the neck of the bottle and once this was accomplished, to get the plug of deposit out of the bottle without risking injury to the bubbles. This invention lead to Champagne being free of the deposits of fermentation, leaving it clear and bubbly!
In a short period of time, the Veuve Clicquot's Champagne became renown throughout the Muscovite Empire, where they called it Klikoskaya. The fortune of the Ponsardin-Cliquot house was made. Madame Clicquot, amassed enormous wealth. One of the paintings that we have of the Veuve Clicquot is this one painted by Léon Cogniet.⁵

The painting shows a portrait of Madame Clicquot and her great-granddaughter Anne de Mortemart-Rochechouart, the future Duchesse d'Uzès. The Château de Boursault is in the background. The Château de Boursault is a neo-Renaissance château in Marne, France, built between 1843 and 1850 by Madame Clicquot Ponsardin.
There is so much to know about the Veuve Cliquot and if you are interested in reading an excellently researched biography of the Grande Dame, you must read Tilar J. Mazzeo's The Widow Clicquot.
Referene:
1. Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Widow Clicquot, HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.
2. Natasha Geiling, The Widow Who Created the Champagne Industry, Smithsonian.com, November 13, 2015.
3. Henry Vizetelly, CHAMPAGNE: with Notes on the Other Sparkling Wines of France, 1882, pg. 173.
4. Tilar J. Mazzeo, The Widow Clicquot, HarperCollins Publishers, 2008, pg. 16 and Barbe Nicole RUINART de BRIMONT Family Tree.
5. Painting of the Veuve Cliquot in the public domain.