Madame Pommery: Inventive Wine Widow
- N.J. Mastro
- Jun 25
- 6 min read
How many engagement parties and wedding ceremonies will you attend between now and September? The annual summer wedding season is upon us, bringing with it the opportunity to enjoy a glass of bubbly. Did you know we have women to thank for inventing some of Champagne’s unique attributes?
Rebecca Rosenberg's biographical novel Madame Pommery: Creator of Brut Champagne features one such individual. Reading it you’ll learn a thing or two about the legendary history of making Champagne while enjoying a superb story. Madame Jeanne Alexandrine, a resident of Reims, France wanted a certain taste in Champagne that no one had come up with yet, so she did what any determined woman would do: she created it.
Madame Pommery opens in Reims in 1858. Jeanne Alexandrine Pommery is forty, and her husband has just died, leaving her to raise their 17-year-old son and two-year-old daughter alone. He’s also left her a failing wool store and a wine-making business but little money on which to live. Circumstances force her to find a way to support her family.
All Madame Pommery has really done until this point is to be a mother and teach etiquette to children at the local orphanage she founded, where she had also created a women’s auxiliary to help care for the orphans.
Madame Pommery, however, makes a bold decision. She decides to sell off the wool business but continue making wine, and she will make not just any wine but a dry Champagne. Red wine gives her headaches, and the Champagnes being distributed by powerhouses like Veuve Clicquot and Moët & Chandon are, in her opinion, too sweet. Madame Pommery wants a Champagne she can drink all the way through dinner.
Don’t we all?
Her decision is audacious. And potentially foolish. She hasn’t a clue how to run a business, let alone manufacture Champagne, a wine notoriously difficult to make. On top of that, France’s economy has tanked, hardly a time to embark on a new endeavor as risky as making Champagne. There are other forces against her as well, most notably that she is a woman. When her husband’s employees find out she is taking over where her husband left off, they quit. Only her husband’s manager, Henry Vasnier, stays. Fortunately, not all is lost. Madame Pommery and Vasnier set out to appease her unique tastebuds. They experience ups and downs, but things go relatively well until a decade later when the Franco-Prussian War begins. Madame Pommery soon finds her home inhabited by Prussian soldiers who threaten her family, her country, and her livelihood.
Madame Pommery has all the right elements of entertaining historical fiction: detailed world-building in a beautiful land, ambitious characters who jump off the page in their authenticity, and events in history that pose real and dangerous threats. I especially enjoyed the voice of the novel. Madame Pommery narrates her own story with sass, and there are courtships and secret liaisons for those like me who can’t stand a story without at least a bit of romance; it is, after all, a novel about Champagne. Believe me when I say Rebecca Rosenberg delivers an engaging read that will leave you wanting to know more about the women who helped make Champagne a luxury wine beloved the world over.
So who was the real Madame Pommery?
This delightful novel follows the broader historical record but takes some literary license in filling in the gaps, therefore not all of what you read in Madame Pommery can be taken as fact. If I told you what these points were, I’d spoil the story for you. But the bones of Rosenberg’s novel are true, and Madame Pommery’s tenacity mesmerized me. I really couldn’t put the book down.
I reached out to Rebecca Rosenberg to learn more about her thought process in developing the character of Jeanne Alexandrine Pommery. Like Champagne, Rosenberg has an effervescent personality. She has an entire series planned about the women of wine making. Madame Pommery is the second book in her wine widow series. The first is aptly titled The Wine Widows. The main character is Barbe-Nicole Clicquot, whom the world knows today as Veuve Clicquot. In an email exchange, Rosenberg graciously answered the following questions.
N.J. MASTRO: What do you really think made Madame Pommery so determined to turn to winemaking when her husband died? I get why she wanted to make a drier wine, but what compelled her to step into a role in which she had no prior knowledge or experience? Was it money? Curiosity? Did she have a prior interest in the business? Reading the book, that wasn’t completely clear to me.
REBECCA ROSENBERG: She and her husband were actually planning to move to their country house and sell off the wool business. And the old partner wanted out. I know her son was in law school and that she had the young daughter. So I can only think she wanted to support them, rather than remarry. I think women of this era saw men doing businesses and knew in their hearts that they could do it. Being a widow was their chance to own a business of their own. Veuve Clicquot had been successful. Why not her? Veuve Clicquot lived in the same town of Reims and served as a great example. There was no other history regarding her decision that I could ascertain from the people at Pommery winery. I like historical fiction because I can flesh out the story between the gaps of historical fact.
N.J. MASTRO: Given her lack of winemaking or business expertise, I can’t decide if Madame Pommery was audacious, fearless, or terribly naïve. Which do you think she was? Or would you use a different word to describe her? Perhaps a combination of descriptors? She also seemed to be a very calm person, like nothing really ruffled her. Did you get that impression as well?
REBECCA ROSENBERG: Visionary. Tenacious. Innovator. As I wrote, Madame Pommery had founded an orphanage, so she had organizational skills, dedication, and determination. She was educated at English boarding schools. I believe she wanted to do something with her life, and she saw an opportunity. Because of the wars, and husbands dying, women had to step up and change their roles.
N.J. MASTRO: In the collective group of women you’ve chosen to write about, what is it about Madame Pommery and the other wine widows that captivate you most?
REBECCA ROSENBERG: First, their innovations: Veuve Clicquot invented riddling to clarify champagne. Pommery created dry champagne. Bollinger created a unique disgorging process. Second, their sheer belief in themselves to make something of themselves and provide for others. That will to keep going no matter what is in their way. Each woman does it differently, but they are tenacious.
N.J. MASTRO: If you could go back in time and meet just one of the wine widows, who would you most like to spend a week visiting, and why?
REBECCA ROSENBERG: I’m laughing at this! I have spent two or three years with each of them! They all want their stories told, and for me to get it right. Understand their challenges, desires, hardships, and triumphs. I work to understand their personalities through the clues in their lives. Right now I am living with Lily Bollinger, who took over her husband’s family winery during WWII. Having no children, she rallied her nephews around her to manage the vineyards and winery, and at 50 years old, she went on several long sales trips throughout the US and Europe to ensure that her premium champagne was known and respected, the top of every sommelier’s wine list. She vastly increased Bollinger’s sales while building a solid family to run the winery until she was 75 years old. She moved champagne into the modern age by making it James Bond’s favorite in 16 James Bond movies!
I really enjoyed this novel and count it in my top five read so far this year. I encourage you to visit Rosenberg’s website, where you’ll see other feisty women she writes about, not just the wine widows. All of them have daring personalities and left an indelible mark on their world.
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(If you like the topic of the early days of Champagne making, read my review of The French House, a novel by Helen Fripp about Veuve Clicquot. It was one of my earliest posts about audacious women in Herstory Revisited. Also, follow me on Substack, where I also publish posts from Herstory Revisited.)
N.J. Mastro is the author of Solitary Walker: A Novel of Mary Wollstonecraft.
“A captivating work of historical fiction, intellectually stimulating and dramatically engrossing... The author’s prose authentically captures the dialogue of the time and powerfully evokes the contradictions that make Wollstonecraft’s legacy so richly complex.”
-Kirkus Reviews
