Veuve Clicquot is the champagne in the unmistakable yellow label, made in Reims since 1772 and shaped by a young widow who took over the house at twenty-seven and changed the way champagne itself is made. It is the bottle the world reaches for when a moment needs marking.

Somewhere in the next few weeks you will be handed a glass of it. The yellow label has a way of turning up at the exact moment a year tips over into celebration: the engagement, the promotion, the first properly cold night that calls for something better than a Tuesday red. Veuve Clicquot is so woven into the idea of a good occasion that it is easy to forget there was a real person behind it, and that she was one of the most quietly radical figures in the history of wine.

Who was the Widow Clicquot?

Barbe-Nicole Ponsardin married into the Clicquot family in 1798, when champagne was still a cloudy, unpredictable drink and the house was a modest concern trading in wine, wool and banking. When her husband Francois died in 1805 she was twenty-seven, with a young daughter and every reason to step quietly aside. Instead she took control of the business herself, at a time when a woman running a company in France was close to unheard of. Veuve is simply the French word for widow, and she wore the title like a badge.

What followed was not merely survival but invention. Champagne in those days was murky, the spent yeast left clouding the bottle after its second fermentation. Around 1816, working at her own kitchen table, Madame Clicquot developed the riddling rack: a slanted board that held the bottles neck-down so the sediment could be coaxed into the neck and removed cleanly. It is the reason your glass is clear tonight. She also ran the naval blockades of the Napoleonic wars to land the first serious shipment of champagne in Russia, where the imperial court fell for it completely. The 1811 vintage, bottled the year a great comet crossed the European sky, sealed the legend.

Why is the yellow label everywhere?

The modern house still turns on that famous Veuve Clicquot Yellow Label. The colour was registered in 1877, a piece of branding so confident that it now reads as shorthand for champagne itself. In the glass it is Pinot Noir at its heart: broad, golden, faintly biscuity, with a baked-apple richness and enough backbone to stand up to food. It is not the most delicate champagne in the world, and it has never tried to be. It is built for conviviality, for the clatter of a full table, for being poured generously rather than sipped in reverence.

That is exactly why it has become the default celebration bottle, and at £49.99 it sits in the sweet spot between everyday fizz and the genuinely serious stuff. If you want to understand where it fits in the wider pecking order, our guide to grower champagne versus the big houses is a useful map. Veuve is a grande marque to its bones: consistent, recognisable, made at scale and all the better for the blending skill that scale demands.

La Grande Dame: the house at full stretch

When Veuve wants to show what it can really do, it reaches for La Grande Dame, the prestige cuvee named for Madame Clicquot herself. This is the yellow label's serious older sibling, built around the house's grand cru Pinot Noir and made only in years that earn it. The current 2018, boxed for giving at £179.99, trades the everyday warmth of the brut for something taut, mineral and long: white flowers, toasted hazelnut, a thread of salinity that keeps all that richness honest. It is the bottle for the dinner that matters, or for the person you want to impress without saying a word.

Between the two sits the whole story of the house. One is the sound of a party getting started; the other is the sound of a room going quiet because something special has just been opened. Buy the first by the case for December. Buy the second when the occasion deserves a sentence of its own.

How should you serve it?

Cold, but not frozen. Eight to ten degrees is the window, which means a couple of hours in the fridge rather than a brutal spell in the freezer that numbs all the aroma you paid for. Skip the narrow flute if you can; a white wine glass or a proper tulip gives the wine room to actually show itself. On food, champagne is far more versatile than its reputation suggests. It loves salt and fat, so think gougeres, good crisps, fried chicken, a wedge of hard cheese, oysters if you are feeling the occasion. The yellow label in particular has the weight to sit beside a roast bird, which makes it a quietly brilliant choice for the Christmas table rather than just the toast before it.

Is Veuve Clicquot worth it?

If you are buying a champagne whose name everyone at the table will recognise, few deliver the same hit of reassurance and reliability that Veuve does. It is not the cheapest route to good bubbles, and a well-chosen grower or a sharp English sparkling can rival it on pure flavour. But that has never quite been the point. Alongside its stablemate Moet & Chandon, Veuve is the champagne that carries meaning as much as taste, and on the night that is worth something. For more on turning a bottle into a present, our guide to the best champagne to give this Christmas does the rest.

Two centuries on, the house a young widow refused to give up still pours at more celebrations than almost any other. She would, you suspect, be entirely unsurprised. Pour a glass this winter and raise it to her: the woman who looked at a cloudy, difficult wine and a world that underestimated her, and quietly made both of them better.