🤔thoughts from me, mai!

👋Hiii! Happy Women’s Month 💁🏻‍♀️💁🏼‍♀️💁🏽‍♀️💁🏾‍♀️💁🏿‍♀️

This week we wanted to take a step back and talk about some ladies that transformed the wine industry by defying traditional gender roles AKA smashed the 🍾champagne ceiling.  

Barbe-Nicole Clicquot AKA La Grande Dame of Champagne

At 27, when her husband Francois Clicquot suddenly died, she defied male opposition and took over the Champagne house in the early 19th century when women were relegated to being wives or baby makers.  During her reign, she became known as the "Grande Dame of Champagne” and transformed Veuve Clicquot into one of the world's greatest Champagne houses. She invented 🌹rose Champagne and was behind the distinctive modern Champagne bottle we see today. On top of all those accolades, during her tenure, Veuve Clicquot invented ‘riling’ - a method of turning the bottle to get rid of the cloudy sediment, a technique that is employed today that keeps your wine bright & clear.

Louise Pommery AKA Cuvee Louise

Louise was also a young widow, and when her husband passed away, she renamed Veuve Pommery into Pommery and transformed a small estate into a Champagne powerhouse. During her tenure, she invented the world’s first brut Champagne (dry champagne) at Queen Victoria’s request (a powerful English queen that was also a widow). Before that, Champagne was very sugary and was more akin to jam like flavor.

Today, Veuve Clicquot is the world’s largest Champagne maker followed by Pommery.  🏆

xx

🙋🏻‍♀️mai

🧐wine talk

lebron is a wine kingmaker Last November LeBron James ⛹🏾‍♂️posted a photo of the 2014 Jordan Alexander Valley Cabernet Sauvignon on his Instagram. The following day, a user named Meg posted a review of a Jordan Chardonnay on Vivino, the popular wine app, awarding the wine 4.5 out of 5 stars. Her tasting note read simply “LeBron.” Nuff said. 👑

marketer says critics drive the wine industry NOT consumers...wine store owners vehemently disagree The argument is that wine companies spend millions of dollars to understand consumers through focus groups, surveys, and sophisticated analytics on people don’t know what they want. So instead of wasting money, wineries should listen to their peers and wine critics 🧐to define the market. Wine stores owners disagree and respond with 🗣“that sounds like a 21-36 yr old hipster that loves natural wine and just got their first buyer job”. Yikes.

burnt bacon, wet ashtray, a smoldering fire tasting notes for smoke tainted wines. Ever since California’s wine country was plagued with 🚒wildfires, this is a question that has gotten asked more and more. Unfortunately, winemakers won't know how badly their vines will be affected by smoke taint until after fermentation. So we’ll have to wait and see.

🍽where to wine or dine this week in NYC

like wine? like chicken? check out the FLY a new bed-stuy natural wine & rotisserie 🐔chicken bar. The acclaimed restaurant team opened Hart’s in 2016 and followed up with Cervo’s in 2017 which received a star from Times critic Pete Wells, who specifically tipped his hat to its wine list.

📖what we're reading OR 📺 watching this week

keep your International Women's Day celebrations going by reading about the fierce Greek witch Circe. Author Madeline Miller has two degrees in Classics, so the story of the powerful daughter of Zeus ⚡️banished to a desert island 🏝and featuring familiar characters like Odysseus and Hermes is essentially high-brow Greek mythology fan fiction. Pour yourself a glass of Assyrtiko and enjoy this captivating page-turner.

👋have something you want to learn more about or less about? email us at mai@maivino.com with any feedback!