The Widow Clicquot

If you have any interest in champagne—and who doesn’t?—this meticulously researched book about the woman who built Veuve Clicquot into the powerhouse luxury brand it still is today is essential reading. It is almost hard to fathom: in 1805, when her husband dies, Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin inherits his struggling family champagne house. Plagued with debts and self-doubt, the twenty-seven-year-old widow, or “veuve”, puts her innate entrepreneurial acumen to work. Considering that women at the time had no role besides tending to their families, she defied countless odds of the day, rescued the company, and became a business legend. Swirling around… show more.

Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin (1777- 1866) became an unlikely but very gutsy entrepreneur. Widowed at age 27, she took over the small family wine business and turned it into an enormously profitable and ultimately world-famous commercial enterprise. Defying Napoleon’s naval barricades in the 1800s, she daringly smuggled her champagne out by ship to St. Petersburg - and made a financial killing in the Russian market. In the space of ten years, she became possibly the richest woman in France. “For nearly a century,” the author writes, “the champagne business was a woman’s world.” Today, we still sip her champagne to celebrate… show more.