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approval, François would always back down.
    So when a mandatory draft was announced, Philippe started pulling strings wherever he could find them, and François went along with it. When a medical waiver proved impossible, Philippe set about buying his son a noncombat commission. The young man had learned something about botany. Perhaps he could serve in the army’s pharmacy. Philippe wrote anxious letters urging his son to consider it, while he struggled to arrange an appointment to the medical corps. Later, he would consider any branch, as long as it did not mean sending his son into the battlefield.
    In the end, Philippe did manage to keep his son out of harm’s way. Whatever bribes he paid were effective. In the spring of 1794, François began his military service on French soil, working in commercial import and export administration offices. There was no great glory in any of it, and it was hard for François to feel that he had not missed out, although in the years to come, this experience in the export business would lay the groundwork for the new directions in the family business.
    When François was discharged in the final months of 1796—in the euphemistic words of one early biographer, “retired from active service”—he returned to Reims, and whatever courtship the young couple enjoyed took place in those eighteenth months between François’s return and a June morning in 1798, when they were wedded in a secret ceremony in the dank cellars that wound for miles underneath the ancient city of Reims.
    Now a married woman with her own home and a lively young husband, whose company and conversation she enjoyed, Barbe-Nicole looked forward to the future with happiness. But even if she did not realize it yet, she and François were essentially mismatched in at least one fundamental way. She had inherited all her father’s—and Philippe’s—ruthless pragmatism and keen business instincts. Barbe-Nicole, however, had married a dreamer. And he had his heart set on the wine business.
     
     
    In the first year of their marriage, François was determined to reinvent the family business. He was immediately brought into his father’s company as a partner, and before long he was preoccupied with developing the small wine trade that his father had started more than twenty years before. It was a commitment that Barbe-Nicole would come to share.
    The company had what should have been the most important asset for a wine trade: vineyards. The Clicquot family owned a good deal of property, including several excellent parcels of land in the countryside southeast of Reims, perfect for growing grapes. There were family vineyards in Villers-Allerand and Sermiers, on the northern slopes of the mountain that divides Reims from the nearby village of Épernay, in Bouzy to the east, and farther south along the river, in the grand cru village of Tours-sur-Marne.
    The French system of the échelle des crus —the ranking of vineyard growths—is a time-honored tradition still used today to indicate the quality of the grapes used by the winemakers. The title of grand cru (“grand growth”) is reserved for the highly select localities (currently only seventeen in the Champagne region) where the very finest grapes are grown, those rating a perfect 100 on a percentage scale. The second category, premier cru (“first growth”), refers to the next forty-three best wine-growing regions in an area and is given only to those rating from 90 to 99 percent excellent.
    It is an admittedly arcane system, and the laws governing it are occasionally comic to the uninitiated. In his authoritative work French Wine, Revised and Updated , for example, Robert Joseph explains that, today, “unless a wine is from a premier cru vineyard…the vineyard name must be printed in characters no more than half the height of the ones used for the village name.” Details like this make for superb satire, and I defy anyone to find them useful when confronted with