The Widow Clicquot by Tilar J. Mazzeo

settle gently on the fruit, and it could not be exported alone. It made a delicious vintage, but without enough body to age or transport reliably unblended. It is in part because of the fragile nature of the finest must that it is said the French never export their best wines.
    After the must from the cuvée was drained away into barrels, roughly filtered through plaited baskets, the première taille, or the first cutting, began. The man working the press would gently crank, adding enough pressure to break or “cut” the grapes, coaxing from them more of their ripe juices. Perhaps Barbe-Nicole tried her hand at the press, to the wry amusement of the farmworkers. The première taille gave what some considered to be the most valuable juice from the grapes—a fine and full-flavored must, rich with promise and strong enough to age deliciously.
    With each successive cutting, the pressure exerted on the grapes would have to be increased, with consequences for the quality. The next pressing was the deuxième taille, or second cutting, and it gave full-bodied and clean juice, often with the tawny hue known as “partridge eye.” For a superior wine, Barbe-Nicole knew that the winemakers would use only the juice from the first three pressings. By the time of the fourth and fifth cuttings, the must was ruddy and sharp. Most common cask wines were a blend of the third, fourth, and fifth cuttings, and they were sold inexpensively and as quickly as possible.
    There were also family estates at Verzenay and Chigny-la-Montagne, where Barbe-Nicole could have learned the essentials of fermenting and clarifying cask wines as well. Although François would still depend on others to make the raw wines that he would blend and bottle, as wine merchant and speculator he had learned early in his career how to judge a well-made vintage. Perhaps as their carriage rolled along mile after mile through the fields of the Champagne, this was part of what François talked about during those summers.
    After the harvest, fermentation began as a natural process. First, the must was racked and the bits of organic debris were allowed to settle. It was then moved to a new cask. Because making the best wines took considerable skill and some luck, winemakers had all sorts of tricks of the trade. One of those tricks can be a real headache even today. Winemakers would smoke their casks with “brimstone,” gently lowering into the barrel a burning rag dipped in sulfur, in hopes of producing a bright, clear wine. Without knowing the reason, these early winemakers were on to something. Winemakers today still rely on sulfur’s antiseptic qualities to prevent the natural bacteria at work in fermentation from taking over and ruining the wine, and sulfur is widely used as a preservative in many wines on the market. But some unlucky people find that it gives them a pounding headache, and for a small percentage of people it is even a life-threatening allergy.
    Over the course of the next three months, the must would be allowed to ferment naturally in the barrels, slowly becoming a sharp young wine. With the dead yeast cells and other organic debris floating in it, however, this raw wine did not make for elegant drinking. Sometimes, clearing the wine was relatively simple. Racking was a straightforward business, relying on gravity. The wine was poured from one barrel to another, leaving the gunk behind. If the cellars were cool enough, all the sediment would fall to the bottom, leaving the wine clear and appetizing.
    More often than not, however, the wines were still cloudy, and clarifying the wine from here was a hit-or-miss proposition, involving considerable ingenuity. When a wine wouldn’t clear easily, winemakers had to turn to a colle —the French term for the secret concoction used to separate the particles from the wine. Usually in cloudy wines the problem was suspended tannins or yeast cells, and here the solution was a colle made of egg whites or bone-marrow