The Wine Widow (The Champagne Dynasty Family Saga Book 1) by Tessa Barclay

Author:Tessa Barclay [Barclay, Tessa]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: family saga, family secrets, French historical romance, must read, enjoyable romantic read, twists and turns, page turner
Publisher: Wyndham Books (Family Saga)
Published: 2016-02-21T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

The champagne cork popped with a satisfactory small explosion. A little vapour came from the neck of the green bottle. The sparkling golden wine frothed out into the narrow glasses.

‘Well, madame,’ observed Richard Patterton, ‘it looks perfect and ‒’ he took the glass brought to him on a silver tray by the butler ‒ ‘it smells delicious.’

Madame de Tramont ‒ the Widow Tramont ‒ watched while he raised to his lips the wine that bore her name, and sipped.

‘Ah!’ he said, raising his eyes to heaven.

Or rather to the shell-pink ceiling of the salon which Nicole had had constructed at the back of the Villa Tramont. It had become necessary, as the fame of her wine grew, to have a large room in which she could entertain day-time visitors to the manor.

It took up what had once been a breakfast room and a lesser drawing-room. Outside the long windows there was a terrace, and beyond that a lawn on which the young people were playing croquet in the summer sunshine.

The gathering in the salon consisted of the elder members of the de Tramont family ‒ Madame de Tramont senior, Aunt Paulette, and of course the head of the House of Tramont herself, La Veuve Tramont. To some muted protests from Clothilde, Nicole had dropped the ‘de’ of aristocracy. ‘The wine is aristocratic, madame,’ she had said jokingly to her mother-in-law, ‘I am not.’

She had done it for simplicity. It was difficult enough when doing business with the English, who mostly refused to learn any language but their own. Many English visitors, imagining it to be her actual name, addressed her as ‘Madame La Veuve’ ‒ which, while quite correct in French, wasn’t what they intended.

The visitors consisted of wine-importers from abroad, a few connoisseurs, and some of her own landing agents. Her chief of cellar was also present, but Arnaud Compiain was never any use to her on social occasions. He would scarcely speak at all, and when he did it was only about the wine. Social badinage was quite outside his ken.

The occasion was the launch of the new fine dry wine. There had been a growing interest in less sweetness in the cuvées since poor Mr Burnes attempted to make it popular in 1850. Through the fifties and into the sixties, a few wine-makers produced what was thought of as an ‘English cuvée’ with much less sugar, and in the forefront was The Widow Tramont.

‘You had great courage, madame,’ said Patterton. ‘Once it is done it cannot be undone ‒ I wonder you had the fortitude to go on with the idea when it was so slow to become profitable.’

‘I had good reason. A friend of mine first gave me a taste of a champagne brut. He told me then it was a wine with a great future and, as he was generally right, I heeded his words.’

‘Indeed? May one ask who he was?’

‘The man after whom I’ve named the new brand ‒ Le Baptiste.’

‘Good heavens! I

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