The Champagne Queen

An Irish businesswoman, Rosaleen Blair, has recently won the prestigious Veuve Clicquot award in London: this is a prestigeous award for being outstandingly successful in business. Ms Blair is 41 and married with one son. Significantly, her husband, Nick, works at home to look after the boy. Women who run London businesses with a £300 million (€500 million) turnover are sensible enough to choose a husband who will stay at home and do the childcare.

Rosaleen came to London at the age of 29 and founded her own firm, Alexander Mann Solutions, which is a recruitment agency specialising in outsourcing. Her particular gifts lie in the art of persuasion: she persuaded Hewlett-Packard, Vodafone, Prudential insurance, Credit Suisse and Deloitte advisors to become her clients. Although Rosaleen doesn’t see herself as a businesswoman, but as a “people person”. But that’s what successful business is all about – working with people.

You will know Veuve Clicquot by its packaging. It’s the champagne that comes in the mustard-colour livery, and which is increasingly associated with women. And appropriately: Madame Cliquot put the product on the market, and she virtually put champagne itself on the map.

Veuve Clicquot presided over my misspent youth in London’s Fleet Street. There was a well-known watering-hole called El Vino - it still exists but is now mainly patronised by lawyers – to which young journos used to repair, where they would hear from the veterans the cordial words “a glass of the Widow, please”: or perhaps, more cordially, “a bottle of the Widow”. “Veuve” is the French for Widow, and the Widow Cliquot’s portrait hung over the proceedings – a serious-looking matriarch in 19th century costume.

She was originally called Nicole-Barbe Ponsardin, and she was born in Rheims in 1798. Her father was a local notable who must have taught her many “people skills” for he managed to support the Revolution when it was at full throttle: Napoleon when he was on the rise: and the King when the Monarchy was restored.

At 21, Nicole-Barbe married a young wine merchant, Francois Cliquot, and they had a daughter, Clementine. Then, of a sudden, the young husband caught a fever and died. The wine business was about to be closed by the family when Nicole-Barbe said – “No, don’t close it – I’ll run it.” Impossible, they cried. Women don’t manage great wine enterprises. This one will, she insisted. Four months later she had branded the company “The Widow Cliquot-Ponsardin” – and she was on her way.

She learned the wine and champagne export business in difficult times – when the British were blocading French goods to battle with Napoleon. She opened up the champagne business in Russia. She despatched her commercial travellers around Europe and directed them by letter. After Waterloo, she flooded England with her product, so that Veuve Cliquot became the most prestigious champagne in Victorian and Edwardian times. Tennyson called it “the sparkling wine of Eastern France.”

Veuve Cliquot invented a special method of “remuage” – which involves the constant turning of the raw champagne during its fermentation – on her own kitchen table. She also launched pink champagne, the ultimate celebratory drink. She lived to a great age and saw her daughter married off to a young aristocrat, Comte Louis de Chevigné. The present Duc d’Uzes is her direct descendent.

It was Madame de Pompadour who said that “champagne is the only drink which improves a woman’s looks”. I’m not sure any drink ultimately improves appearance, but it certainly is a smart selling-point and la Veuve Clicquot made the best of it.

One year, back in the 1970s, there was a feminist “invasion” of El Vino (protesting at the fact, rather idiotically, that women couldn’t buy drinks at the bar, but had to sit down and be waited upon). One of the old veterans pointed to the portrait of the Widow and said: “She did more for feminism than all the protesters put together.” The Irishwoman who has now taken over the mantle of Veuve Clicquot might well agree.

Irish Independent Magazine. 28 April 2007.