Widow Clicquot Quotes

Esprit de l’escalier. Staircase wit; the brilliant thing you should have said, coming to you only as you leave by the stairs

The anchor symbolizes clarity and courage during chaos and confusion,” my Grand-mere says. “Chaos and Confusion, aren’t those your cats names?” Now I know her story is a delusion.

Life can change in the flash of a shooting star, and the people we love can be out of our reach forever.

Fighting is a soldier’s only religion. But it has proven useful to adopt the religion of the country I wish to conquer.

No snowflake in a blizzard ever feels responsible.

Wars are senseless and cruel, fought for our power hungry emperor, not for the people.

Heard straight from Napoleon’s mouth himself,” I say. “Champagne! In victory we deserve it, and in defeat we need it.

bantams with big puffy chests and exotic head-dresses, bright orange coats with black tails. A couple of roosters sport bright red combs and wattles.

Politics is a moving target with no bullseye of truth, breaking up more families than uniting them.

Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.

From then on, my sense of smell swelled beyond reason. Mostly ordinary odors, but sometimes I imagine I can smell the stink of a lie. Or the perfume of a pure heart. Or the heartbreaking smell of what could have been.

become a widow, men line up to tell you what to do now that your husband is gone. But you must not listen to a single one. Trust your own counsel.” The matagot rubs against my arm, purring softly. His fur is softer than it looks. “His name is Felix.” Veuve Clicquot eyes the tray, looking for her next victim. “Whose name?” My wrists start to itch, and I scratch them discreetly. “The matagot.” She pops a madeleine in her mouth and giggles. “Oh my, that’s good.” By the time Veuve Clicquot leaves, my wrists have swollen with hives. I lure the matagot with a piece of cheese. Snatching him up, I march him to the back door and shoo him into the alleyway. “Bon chance, Felix!” Good luck. Waking before dawn, I reach for Louis, but the hollow in the feather

Of course, the French troops wasted no time in celebrating their victory, either. There is a legend, in fact, that it was during these days that the art of sabrage—opening champagne bottles with military sabers—was invented. According to the story, “Madame Clicquot…in order to have her land protected, gave Napoléon’s officers Champagne and glasses. Being on their horses, they couldn’t hold the glass while opening the bottle.” So they lopped off the necks of the bottles with their swords, and sabrage was born.

Today, Champagne Veuve Clicquot is owned by the luxury conglomerate LVMH (Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, acquired 1987), which also owns Champagne Moët et Chandon.

lobster salad and champagne were the only things a woman should ever be seen eating.

Widowed at the age of twenty-seven, with no formal business training and no firsthand experience, Barbe-Nicole transformed a well-funded but struggling and small-time family wine brokerage into arguably the most important champagne house of the nineteenth century in just over a decade. It

No wine in the world brings to mind so many immediate associations as champagne. The pop of a cork and the bright sparkle of bubbles mean celebration and glamour and, more often than not, the distinct possibility of romance. It is the wine of weddings and New Year’s kisses. It is beautiful and delicate, and above all, it is a wine associated with women.

But one look at the business of champagne tells a very different tale. In the boardrooms and wine cellars, champagne is a man’s world. Today, there are only a handful of women in senior positions in the French wine industry, and only one of the elite and internationally renowned champagne houses known as the grandes marques is run by a woman—the house of Champagne Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin, headed since 2001 by Madame Cécile Bonnefond.

Even more shocking, champagne wasn’t discovered by the French. It was the British who first learned the secret of making wine sparkle and first launched the commercial trade in champagne wine with bubbles. The legend of Dom Pérignon was manufactured only in the late nineteenth

By the dawn of the twentieth century, even before the Jazz Age made champagne the symbol of an era, the world was already buying twenty million bottles of bubbly a year.

Peu à peu, l’oiseau fait son nid.” Little by little, the bird makes his nest.

I am a fallow field waiting for your spring rain to awaken me.