The little-known history of Champagne

While women were barred from owning businesses in 19th Century , three widows, who were exempt from the rule, created some of Champagne's most lauded empires.

As we get ready to pop the cork for a brand-new year, we've brought back one of our favourite BBC Travel stories, one that reminds us of how several of 's biggest Champagne innovations came to be: through the ingenuity of a few independent and creative women.

On the outskirts of the north-eastern French city of Reims, winding roads converge near a gated chateau. Cars line a roundabout enclosed by sprawling fields. The air is still, and it's calm. The real action is happening almost 20m underground.

Carving through this underworld are more than 200km of cellars, with millions of Champagne bottles lining chalky rock walls, unlabelled and marked with the words "I was here" by tourists in the dust covering them. Some are upside-down, in chains, glowing in the dim light of the cellars against the backdrop of tunnels that seemingly lead to nowhere. Others are stacked in small caves guarded by wrought iron gates. This is ground zero of the world's Champagne market.

And, historically in the caves, widows ruled.

Some of the biggest innovations of Champagne came down to the ingenuity of several women. In the 19th Century, the Napoleonic Code restricted women from owning businesses in without permission from a husband or father. However, widows were exempt from the rule, creating a loophole for Barbe-Nicole Clicquot-Ponsardin, Louise Pommery and Lily Bollinger – among others – to turn vineyards into empires and ultimately transform the Champagne industry, permanently changing how it's made and marketed.

In 1798, Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin married François Clicquot, who then ran his family's small textile and wine business, originally called Clicquot-Muiron et Fils in Reims. It turned into a financial disaster. When Clicquot died in 1805, leaving her widowed at 27 years old, she made the unconventional choice to take over the company.

"It was a very unusual decision for a woman of her class," said Tilar Mazzeo, cultural historian and author of The Widow Clicquot. "It would have been extremely unusual for her to have a business, because she didn't need to… She could have spent her life in drawing rooms and as a society hostess."

Desperately in need of money for the business, she asked her father-in-law for today's equivalent of about €835,000.

"Amazingly, her father-in-law said yes," Mazzeo explained, "which I always think must say something really important about who he thought she was, and what he thought she was capable of as a woman with no business background."

From the beginning, Barbe-Nicole used her widowed status as a marketing tool, yielding positive results. The Champagne house became Veuve Clicquot-Ponsardin – the French word veuve translates into "widow".

"The 'veuve' suggested a certain kind of respectability to the beverage… some of these beverages had gotten associated with the debauchery and wild parties of the royal courts of old," explained Kolleen M Guy, author of When Champagne Became French: Wine and the Making of a National Identity and chair, Division of Arts and Humanities at Duke Kunshan University in Jiansu, China.

Tagging "veuve" onto a bottle brought clout, and other Champagne producers – such as Veuve Binet and Veuve Loche – soon followed suit.

"The companies that didn't have a widow at the head of the household would create kind of off-brands, like a veuve off-brand, so they could try to capture this trend," Guy said.

Despite Barbe-Nicole completing a four-year apprenticeship with a local winemaker to better learn how to make the business grow, it was once again on the brink of collapse in the early 19th Century. She secured another €835,000 from her father-in-law to salvage it. However, doing this during the Napoleonic Wars in continental Europe wouldn't be easy, as border closures made it difficult to move product around. 

But by 1814, Barbe-Nicole knew that she was running out of options. Faced with bankruptcy, she turned to a new market: Russia. While Russia's border was still closed towards the end of the Napoleonic wars, she decided to run the blockade.

"She made this huge gamble, where she knew that if she could get her product into Russia before Jean-Remy Moët, who was her arch-rival, she would be able to capture some market share," Mazzeo said. "Otherwise, once the border was legally open, Moët's Champagne was going to arrive, and Moët would continue to be the dominant player in that very important Russian export market."

So, Barbe-Nicole smuggled thousands of bottles across the border. The risks were high as it was late in the season and the heat could ruin the Champagne. And if caught, the bottles would be confiscated, contributing to more financial ruin. Fortunately, the Champagne arrived in perfect condition and took the market by storm. 

"In 90 days, she went from being an unknown player [in Russia] to being 'The Widow'," Mazzeo said. 

With the demand came a need to increase production fast. The process of removing dead yeast cells from the bottom of bottles – a necessary step in Champagne-making following the aging and fermentation process – was tedious and damaging to the quality. But Barbe-Nicole had a better idea.

"She basically said to her winemakers, 'take my kitchen table down to the cellar – I want you to poke some holes in it and let's just turn these [bottles] upside-down. Don't you think that would be a better way of getting the yeast out? The yeast would settle in the neck of the bottle, we could pop it out, that would be faster, wouldn't it">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });