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Bottle 1 — A Little Every Day, Clearly
ShortsPublished 2026-09-26
Video coming soonThe bottle
The story in this episode
The first bottle opened at Bar Suda is Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label, the Champagne a 27-year-old widow put her name on. Veuve is French for 'widow'. When François Clicquot died suddenly at thirty in 1805, Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin, under pressure to wind up the company, put her own name on it instead, and in 1814 she got 10,550 bottles into Russia ahead of every competitor and won over the court at St Petersburg. In 1816 she devised the riddling table: bottles set at an angle and turned a little each day so the sediment collects in the neck. That is how cloudy Champagne became clear. The yellow label followed in 1876 to mark dry Champagne for the British market, and in 1877 the colour itself was trademarked.
