While wine and film individually enjoy modern reputations as glorious pursuits that combine skilled craft with artistic vision, the pairing of the two disciplines tends to result in cinematic catastrophe. “Wine movies” are typically riddled with winemaking wrongs that cause anyone with any oenological understanding to cringe, and they usually rely on wine mostly as setting and lifestyle, rather than central role. (The most notable exception, of course, would be our own region’s starring showcase in Sideways.)
Thankfully, the recently released Widow Clicquot does not fall victim to such disaster, proving to be a serious, emotive, and pensive film about tragedy, terrible sexism, and ultimately triumph, with sparkling wine and famous vineyards simmering steadily in the background. It’s also a very true story, based on Tilar J. Mazzeo’s 2008 book The Widow Clicquot: The Story of a Champagne Empire and the Woman Who Ruled It .
The book and the film, which focuses on the early chapters in this saga, reveals how a French woman named Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin fought against the Napoleonic era’s patriarchal ways to retain the estate of her late husband, who died (possibly from suicide or an overdose, or both) seven years after their wedding. While fighting to keep her property and business, the “widow Clicquot” made innovations that changed Champagne production forever, specifically by developing the first sparkling rosé and inventing the process of riddling, which made for cleaner wines.