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1798—on 22 Pairial, in the sixth year of the new French republic.
    Although this secret wedding may have seemed an inauspicious beginning, no place could have been more fitting than a cellar to celebrate a marriage that would change the history of wine. It would be in cellars such as this that Barbe-Nicole would craft her first vintage. Until the moment she married François, she had no personal connections to the sparkling wine with which the name Clicquot would one day be synonymous. She was simply the daughter of a wealthy and well-connected textile merchant, living a quiet life in a small city in the northeastern corner of France, and her marriage into a family with a wine brokerage was all more or less a matter of chance.
    But Barbe-Nicole had been named after her maternal grandmother, a woman who would have been very pleased with all that this marriage would bring. Because Marie-Barbe-Nicole Huart–Le Tertre had been born a Ruinart—the daughter of Nicolas Ruinart, already a famous man in Reims. Although, like so many in the extended Ponsardin and Le Tertre families, he, too, had started life as a woolen dealer, this Nicolas was famous for champagne. He was the nephew of the monk Dom Thierry Ruinart, the friend and sometime collaborator of that legendary figure Dom Pierre Pérignon. As the story goes, before his death, Dom Pérignon imparted his winemaking secrets to Thierry, who passed them on to his nephew Nicolas, who founded in 1729 the world’s first champagne house. Barbe-Nicole’s great-grandfather had invented the industry that she would someday revolutionize.
    The couple’s respective families had negotiated this marriage. If Nicolas no longer entertained ideas of an aristocratic marriage after the Revolution, he certainly intended to arrange an advantageous one. François’s family had also made their fortune in the local textile trade, although his father’s wine brokerage, established some time in the 1770s, was becoming an increasingly important sideline, advertised in national news circulars. By 1777, the year of Barbe-Nicole’s birth, the Clicquot wine brokerage was already selling a modest ten thousand bottles of wine a year, and a significant part of it was the local sparkling wine.
    The Ponsardin family surely purchased wines from Philippe Clicquot during this period—perhaps even some of the champagne that their daughter would one day make famous. When Nicolas and Jeanne-Clémentine enjoyed a bottle of bubbly to celebrate the birth of their first child in 1777, perhaps it was a Clicquot family wine. The two families, after all, were near neighbors. The impressive Clicquot home, built along the gray cobblestone street known as rue de la Vache, was only a stone’s throw from the Hôtel Ponsardin. More important, the two fathers worked in the same business. Despite the wine sideline, Philippe Clicquot was first and foremost a textile merchant, and in Reims this was a tight business community. Nicolas and Philippe were local industry leaders, with their commercial offices next door to each other. Competitors and neighbors, the families undoubtedly lived in each other’s pockets.
    By the time of their marriage, Barbe-Nicole and François had known each other for years, and it would be pleasant to imagine a childhood romance. The reality, however, was probably less sentimental. Marriage was an economic decision and not a romantic one, and it involved the future of an entire extended family. Children were not typically forced into marriages that they despised, but the first duty of a young girl especially was obedience and submission to her father: Love was something that blossomed within marriage and not a prelude to it. At its heart, this was a match arranged by their respective fathers, calculated to extend the complex web of social and entrepreneurial ties that connected the prominent merchant families of Reims.
    Studying her new husband in the first days of their marriage, however,