Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin

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Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin

logo
legal form Company of the luxury goods group Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton SA
founding 1772
Seat Reims , France
Branch Luxury goods industry
Website www.veuveclicquot.com

Portrait (c. 1860) of Madame Clicquot Ponsardin ; current (2015) motif of the cork stoppers
Shelf with champagne bottles in the basement of Veuve Clicquot, Reims
Different bottle formats in comparison, from the left, on the ladder: Magnum , Imperial , Demi , Piccolo ;
standing on the ground: Balthazar , Salmanazar , Methuselah , Jeroboam

Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin [ vœv kli.kɔ pɔ̃saʁdɛ̃ ], or Veuve Clicquot for short , is the name of one of the best-known champagne brands . The company's winery is located in Reims in the French province of Champagne and is part of the LVMH group .

history

In 1772 Philippe Clicquot founded a wine trade under the Clicquot brand. In 1805 François Clicquot, the son of the company founder, died.

His 27-year-old widow (French: Veuve ) Barbe-Nicole Clicquot-Ponsardin (1777–1866) then took over the business of her late husband. While Europe found it difficult to recover from the Napoleonic wars , she managed to export her champagne all over the world thanks to the active support of her employees, who mostly came from Germany. She presented her products at all the ruling courts in Europe and thus contributed to the radiance of French savoir-vivre . After a short time, their wine was no longer just a successful product, but a real myth. Barbe-Nicole Clicquot was a passionate entrepreneur. She corresponded with her traveling salespeople - above all with Ludwig "Louis" Bohne, the closest confidante of her late husband; she even inspected her wine cellar at night to watch over the development of the cuvée . Your cellar master Anton von Müller, French Antoine de Muller (1788-1859), a native of Swabia, invented the vibration process around 1813 .

Their influence on the German sparkling wine industry should not be underestimated either. Georg Christian von Kessler worked for Veuve Clicquot from 1807 to 1825/26 (from 1810 as an authorized signatory , five years later as a partner) and after this engagement founded the first German sparkling wine cellar in Esslingen am Neckar in 1826 . In 1841 the widow Clicquot withdrew from the company, her successor was Eduard Werle , cellar master since 1822 and later a partner in the Clicquot family. Madame Clicquot died in 1866 at the age of 89. In 1884 Eduard Werle's son, Alfred Werlé, took over management of the company.

In 2012, a special edition of the Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label brand was launched in the form of a sardine can. When Nicole Ponsardin's father was appointed baron of the 1st Napoleonic Empire in 1813 , he received a coat of arms as an award, the content of which he could determine himself. He decided to depict a bridge (French: Pont ), below which a sardine was depicted. The resulting play on words Pon (t) Sardin (e) gave its name a satirical meaning. The bottle in the sardine can is supposed to remind of this story.

In Umberto Giordano's opera Fedora , the widow Clicquot's champagne is sung in an aria.

Quote

"How lovely and airy the bubble / The widow Klicko pearls in the glass!"

- Wilhelm Busch , Die pious Helene (1872) - Chapter 9, The honeymoon

literature

  • A biography of the widow Clicquot can be found in the book by Magdalena Köster: Brillante Bilanzen. Five women entrepreneurs and their life stories. Beltz publishing house, Frankfurt / Main, 2005, ISBN 3-407-80957-3 .
  • Ingrid Haslinger: Customer - Kaiser. The story of the former imperial and royal purveyors . Schroll, Vienna 1996, ISBN 3-85202-129-4 .
  • Tilar J. Mazzeo, Andreas Wirthensohn: Veuve Clicquot: The story of a champagne empire and the woman who ruled it . Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-455-50124-7 .
Photography by David Adam Kess Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin.jpg

Web links

Commons : Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. For the dating see: Helmut Arntz, Winfrid Heinen: Sekt. Gesamtwerk deutscher Wein , Trittenheim 1982, p. 96
  2. Fine drops in a sardine can . In: Sabine Walser, Eckhart Thomas (ed.): VR packaging review . Special packaging as a marketing factor. No. 2 . P. Keppler Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, 2012, ISSN  0341-7131 , p. 5 .