(upbeat music)
Every bottle has a front label.
That's the story they want you to know.
“The back label is the story they didn't.”
This is the back label. A story that gives you the full poor. Let's begin. The years 1805, Napoleon Bonaparte is rewriting the map of Europe.
Armies are moving, borders are dissolving. And in the champagne region of France, in a stone house in the city of Rends, a 27-year-old woman is standing over her husband's body. His name was Francois Clico.
He was supposed to build a wine empire. However, he left behind a small struggling business, a mountain of debt and a widow. (upbeat music) Now in 1805, women in France could not open bank accounts,
could not sign contracts, could not under Napoleon's own legal code, run a business.
“Her father-in-law told her to walk away.”
She did not walk away. Barbie Nicole, Clico, and grown up around commerce around ambition, around people who bent the rules when the rules were wrong. She took over the company.
And then she got to work. Champagne in the early 1800s was not what you know today. It was cloudy, unpredictable, full of sediment that floated through your glass like a slow-brown snowstorm.
Every champagne bottle was a gamble. Guess what finished their wine, then flipped their glasses upside down just to drain the dregs. Barbie Nicole thought that was unacceptable.
So in 1816, 11 years after burying her husband, she invented the riddling table. A board pierced with holes to cradle bottles while they were carefully rotated,
“forcing all the sediment down to the bottleneck”
during the aging process. It worked.
For the first time, Champagne ran crystal clear.
Are we clear? Crystal. Every champagne producer in the world eventually adopted her method. The process continues to be used today.
But that, that is not the full poor. Napoleon's wars had shut down European trade. Borders were closed. Shipping lanes blockaded. And Russia, one of the biggest markets for Champagne in the world,
was completely off limits. Barbie Nicole had a plan. While the wars naval blockades paralyzed commercial shipping, a damn click-o at her agent, Lewis Bone, secretly planned to sneak a boat through the blockade to Russia.
She loaded over 10,000 bottles of refined as vintage onto a ship. The moment Napoleon was sent into exile. She chartered a Dutch vessel, and sailed at straight to a Russian port on the Baltic coast, arriving just in time to celebrate the end of hostilities.
Her competitors, they were still packing their crates, her entire shipment sold immediately. And Zarr Alexander declared that Vové Clico was the only champagne he would drink. And when the Zarr of Russia says that's the only champagne he'll touch,
the rest of the world listens. But here's the full poor. In June of 2010, nearly 200 years later, a group of Finnish scuba divers were exploring the floor of the Baltic Sea near the Olin Islands.
They found a ship rep, an inside that shipwreck. 168 bottles of champagne, resting, undisturbed on the ocean floor for over 170 years. 47 of them, Vové Clico, they brought them to the surface, sent them to France for analysis.
And when the experts opened them, despite having spent almost two centuries at the bottom of the sea, the contents were extremely well preserved. The widow's champagne sealed in 1840, bound for the Russian Imperial Court,
lost its sea, found 200 years later, still good. A 27-year-old woman with no legal rights to run a business, invented the riddling table, cracked the Russian market, and built one of the most recognized champagne houses
in the history of the world. And somewhere at the bottom of the Baltic Sea, she's still making her point.
The front label never tells you that.
You're now to hold the back label story.
