Veuve Clicquot Champagne

Discover Veuve Clicquot champagne

The great house with the yellow label, founded in Reims in 1772 and propelled to legendary status by a woman facing the world alone: Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin, widowed at the age of 27. She is credited with major breakthroughs in the history of champagne: the creation of the first known vintage champagne in 1810, the invention of the riddling table to clarify champagne in 1816, and the creation of the first blended rosé champagne. Three revolutions that defined modern champagne production, and that are still practiced the world over today. Veuve Clicquot remains true to the motto it bequeathed: "Only one quality, the very first."

The House of Veuve Clicquot

Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin was founded in Reims in 1772. In 1798, Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin married François Clicquot, heir to the champagne house. In 1805, François died suddenly, leaving Barbe-Nicole, barely 27, a widow with an infant daughter and the head of the family business. The young widow convinced her father-in-law to let her run the business, becoming the first woman to head a champagne house and the first female champagne producer.
Assisted by her cellar master Antoine de Müller, she invented the riddling table in 1816, which transformed champagne from a cloudy state to crystal-clear clarity by gently shaking the inverted bottles, causing the yeast deposit to migrate to the neck. In 1818, Veuve Côtes du Rhône created the first blended rosé champagne, integrating a proportion of still red wines from its Bouzy vineyards into its champagne, breaking with the tradition of adding elderberry brandy to tint rosé wines.
The house shipped 10,550 bottles of the 1811 vintage to St. Petersburg as soon as the Russian blockade on French products was lifted, receiving a triumphant welcome, a champagne soon celebrated by Pushkin, Chekhov and Gogol. Since 1987, Veuve Clicquot has been part of the LVMH luxury goods group.

Veuve Clicquot Champagne terroir and style

Veuve Clicquot owns some 390 hectares of its own vineyards, among the largest in Champagne, covering the Montagne de Reims, the Marne Valley, the Côte des Blancs and the Côte des Bar. Around 86% of parcels are classified as Grands Crus and Premiers Crus. The Grands Crus of Aÿ, Verzenay, Bouzy and Ambonnay reinforce the power and identity of the house. The Veuve Clicquot style is based on the primacy of Pinot Noir, a grape of structure and body. The house has the largest and most varied collection of reserve wines in Champagne: 400 wines, aged for up to 30 years, which ensure the consistency and aromatic richness of Yellow Label from one year to the next. Since 2018, the house has used no herbicides on its entire vineyard, which has been certified Viticulture Durable en Champagne since 2014.

Veuve Clicquot cuvées

Brut Carte Jaune

Brut Carte Jaune is the house icon, recognizable by its yellow label registered in 1877. A blend of 55% Pinot Noir, 15% Pinot Meunier and 30% Chardonnay from over 50 different crus, supplemented by up to 45% reserve wines to ensure consistency of style. Yellow Label reveals an aromatic profile dominated by notes of white and yellow fruit, pear, apple, peach, complemented by citrus and brioche, structured by the power and generosity of Pinot Noir. Festive, vinous, immediately accessible: the champagne of celebration par excellence.

Rosé

Cuvée Rosé non-vintage cuvée is composed of 45% Pinot Noir, 33 % Chardonnay and 20% Meunier Meunier with 12% Bouzy red wines blended for color and structure, from three separate parcels. A direct descendant of Barbe-Nicole's 1818 invention, this cuvée, with its aromas of raspberry, strawberry and cherry, embodies the generosity and gourmandise of the house style in a rosé register.

Extra Brut Extra Old

Extra Brut Extra Old is a cuvée made from a blend of carefully selected reserve wines aged in our cellars for several years. Extra Brut Extra Old is characterized by its low sugar content, minerality and aromatic complexity, with notes of dried fruit, spices and toast. A champagne for demanding connoisseurs, revealing the unsuspected depth of the house's library of reserves.

Vintage

Vintage champagnes Vintage champagnes from Veuve Clicquot rest much longer than the legal minimum: at least 8 to 10 years in the cellar for vintage champagnes. Produced only in exceptional years, they express the character of a single harvest with an intensity and complexity that non-vintage cuvées, by their very nature, cannot match.

La Grande Dame

The ultimate prestige cuvée, a tribute to the woman who changed everything. Launched in 1972 for the company's bicentenary, La Grande Dame is produced from the house's finest Grands Crus vineyards. Since 2008, the cellar master has chosen to blend La Grande Dame with almost 90% Pinot Noir, expressing with force and precision Madame Clicquot's vision of this grape variety. Viney, structured, with great ageing potential, it is the ultimate expression of the Clicquot style brought to its pinnacle.

Cave Privée

The house's most confidential collection, featuring rare vintage champagnes that have benefited from exceptional ageing, sometimes several decades, in the crayères of Reims. Bottles for collectors, at the crossroads of history and oenology.

Did you know?

In July 2010, 47 bottles of Veuve Clicquot champagne were discovered in a shipwreck off Finland's Åland Islands, at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Despite spending almost two centuries underwater, the contents were remarkably well preserved. Tasting this nearly 200-year-old champagne allowed oenologists to confirm that Barbe-Nicole's techniques had produced wines of uncommon longevity, and that the stirring table she had invented in her kitchen two centuries earlier had stood the test of time like no other technique before her.