I have been listening to the audio version of this book. I am about to tear out my hair because it is so poorly written and narrated. The author's method of "imagining" what her characters "must have" seen, thought, and felt is very distracting and certainly undermines her credibility. Similarly, she goes over the same information many times...WHY?? The narrator of the audio version, Susan Erickson, makes the experience of listening to the book even more painful by coming to a full stop before each French name or word and then s l o w l y pronouncing it phonetically. AWFUL! TERRIBLE!

Tilar Mazzeo assembles fragments of an incomplete historical record, and creates an entertaining and insightful profile of one of the most successful business leaders, Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin, in a book titled The Widow Clicquot. After the death of her husband, Barbe-Nicole ran the business as an audacious risk taker for much of the 19th century, during wars, financial crises and technological innovations. However much you may enjoy drinking Veuve Clicquot or other champagnes, reading about the woman who revolutionized the wine business in the 19th century brings a buzz of its own. This Grande Dame was a remarkable woman, and Mazzeo brings her to life and engages readers in imagining the ways in which Barbe-Nicole faced challenges and made business decisions that led to great success.

Rating: Three-star (Recommended)

As much as I enjoy drinking Veuve Clicquot, I never knew anything about the story behind the brand. Learning how a young, French widow built this champagne house from a family side business into an international empire is inspiring, fascinating and cause to pop another bottle. If you are a fan of champagne this is a must-read.

This biography of the Widow Cliquot was an interesting mix of supposition and fact. The supposition revolves around details of Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin Cliquot's early life, about which there is little documentary evidence. After a while this became somewhat irritating. However, it was offset by the fascinating details of champagne manufacture and the later wheeling and dealing Mme Cliquot engaged in to promote her product.

I'll happily recommend this book to anyone who brings their own Veuve. I won't share mine.

Naturally, the _Oxford English Dictionary_ contains the word "widow", but if you look down the definition list, you will come across one that might surprise you: "champagne". The entry clarifies (a little) that a "colloquial or slang" use of the word comes from "Veuve Clicquot", French for "Widow Clicquot", the name of a firm of wine merchants, and at its helm was indeed the widow Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin. Further clarification, and much more, can be found in _The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It_ (Collins) by Tilar J. Mazzeo. Mazzeo is an assistant professor, a cultural historian, and a wine enthusiast. In her acknowledgements, she thanks all the "many friends who joined me so enthusiastically in the extensive `primary' research, with a bottle of the Widow in hand." It is clear that Mazzeo enjoyed the research, and that she admires the Widow and the widow, of whom she writes that she was no queen, duchess, or mother of some great man, and she wasn't even a widow of a great man: "She was simply a formidable and independent woman, making her own name in the humdrum, dog-eat-dog world of business." There were a few other women of her time who were successful in big business, but Barbe-Nicole was something extraordinary in her determination to make a product that everyone knows and values two centuries later. This is a good biography, along with descriptions of the science, art, and history of winemaking.

When Barbe-Nicole came onto the wine scene, champagne was a niche market. She was born in 1777 to a wealthy family in Reims. She formed a good marriage with François Clicquot, whose family had become wealthy in the cloth trades, but who had a sideline in wines. They learned the craft of winemaking together, but he died when she was only 27, possibly of typhoid (which people thought might be treated by giving the patient champagne) and maybe from suicide because his business was going badly. With considerable pluck, his widow held onto the company. Contemporary traditions and then the Napoleonic code dictated that the woman's place was in the home, but there were other widows preceding her in the wine business, and though they may have lost their husbands, they were the only women granted the freedom of running their own affairs. She had picked a good time to jump into the champagne market. Much of Mazzeo's book has to do with the effects of history on the wine markets, including events like the Russian occupation of Reims. The widow was able at times to exploit current events and make sales, for instance, to Czar Alexander, who proclaimed that he would drink nothing else. There are also accounts of how the widow worked with her cellar master to make champagne clearer and with tiny, not gassy, bubbles.

Mazzeo's book traces the widow's business and her decisions which were sometimes disastrous but were more often judicious and lucrative. It was her business skill and capacity to exploit new markets at just the right time that elevated champagne to the customary drink for celebrations. Although much of the making of champagne remained a hand-crafted process, she did institute techniques that, in tune with her time, allowed its increasing industrialization. Her wines are still made; the finest made at Veuve Clicquot is called "La Grande Dame", and bears a rich yellow color on the label. (The history of wine labeling is one of the small points covered here. Originally, the wine houses made do with merely branding their corks, and although the widow had used labels by 1814, it was only the advent of train transportation leading to easy international commerce that got every bottle labeled.) Mazzeo, in an entertaining book that covers a great deal of wine history, has had to evaluate vast amounts of business records, but because the widow herself did not keep a journal or write many personal notes that have been preserved, Mazzeo uses a lot of judicious "perhaps" introductions to tell us what the widow might have been thinking or doing. There is one wonderful quotation from Mme. Clicquot in a letter to her granddaughter, which nicely sums up what the widow thought was important: "The world is in perpetual motion, and we invent the things of tomorrow. One must go before others, be determined and exacting, and let your intelligence direct your life. Act with audacity." It was advice to which she had been faithful all her career.