Madame Pommery, Creator of Brut Champagne

 

Madame Pommery, Creator of Brut Champagne

Rebecca Rosenberg

Publication date: March 21, 2023 by Lion Heart Publishing

Summary: A Champagne Widows Novel

Champagne, France, 1860. Madame Pommery, an etiquette teacher and orphanage founder, loses her husband and is forced to support her family. With no experience, the forty-year-old widow decides to make champagne. Her unique vision is to change it from a sweet dessert beverage to a dry, crisp wine to be enjoyed anytime. When champagne makers refuse to teach her their craft, she forges ahead on her own and secretly begins the excavation of champagne caves under the Reims city dump.

Soon after, her son and her entire crew are conscripted to fight the Franco-Prussian war, leaving Madame Pommery alone to struggle with her champagne dreams. After Napoleon and a hundred thousand French troops are captured, the Prussians invaded France, and Prussian General Frederick Franz occupies Madame Pommery’s house as his army headquarters. Undaunted, Pommery uses her secret wine caves to hide the Francs-Tireurs, resistance fighters for France, while she plans to build a spectacular castle winery above the caves.

But when her former lover, a Scottish Baron, unexpectedly proposes marriage, Madame Pommery must choose between nobility and her passionate quest for fine champagne and the most beautiful winery in the world.

Based on a true story, Madame Pommery is a heroic novel about a mother and widow who fights the Prussians, the social class system, champagne patriarchs, and champagne tastes to create a champagne legacy.

My thoughts: Women have been so underestimated throughout history. Ironically though time and time again women have proven to the world that they are survivors. This book reveals the story of Jeanne Pommery. Rosenberg once again delivers in this latest novel of her Champagne Widows series. Readers not only get introduced to another bold, courageous, successful woman, but they also get to experience the cut throat savagery of the time period. While there is plenty of history within this story, Rosenberg makes sure to allow readers a glimpse of Madame Pommery as a woman. Pommery was not just a single mother trying to survive in a man's world. She was also a woman who loved deeply and had desires that she wanted fulfilled. Bravo to a woman who championed for orphans' education, workers rights, and for having the ambition to create something that the world had never tasted before. Many thanks Rebecca Rosenberg for highlighting this extraordinary woman! 

I received a copy of this title via the publisher, Lion Heart Publishing.