The life and times of:: Champagne

Enough of getting jealous of Daniel’s travels! I have now joined him. I left on Sept 18^th, which happened to be Daniel’s 30^th birthday. Marie was able to get ridiculously cheap airfares for us both, but I didn’t have much leeway in when we could go sadly, so Daniel spent his birthday in Madrid. We joined him a day later, in Paris…eventually. There were some credit card issues but no matter. The TGV machines don’t like NZ cards.

First stop was Dormons, in the Champagne region, and home to Marie’s lovely parents. I would be listening hard during their conversations for any words I recognised (mainly numbers) to see if I could pick up where the conversation was heading. Short answer: no. Stefan is much more skilful with this than I. Dormans is a cute little village with a population of about 5000 (I think), and about 30 min dive from Epernay, the ‘capital’ of the Champagne region (those are inverted commas because I don’t know if this is official or self-styled).

I was quite excited to go to a REAL French person’s house and have real French food etc. And we did! nothing less than three courses, and a different wine with each. The food was amazing and Daniel was in seventh heaven, eating seconds of everything.

On Tuesday we went to Epernay for a tour of the Mercier cellars. The tour opened at 2.30, so we killed time by drinking a bottle of champagne between the four of us and having lunch (plus Daniel’s first pain aux chocolat of the trip, €1).

Mercier is France’s most popular champagne due to some aggressive marketing, starting about 100 years ago. A massive barrel (160,000L) was made for the World Fair in 1889. It took 12 pairs of oxen to drag it to Paris over 8 days, requiring the reinforcement of bridges and the buying and destroying of several houses so the barrel could get through. It took second prize at the Fair due to some upstart building a more impressive Tower. Anyhoo, we learnt about the making of Champagne in their 10 °C underground caves, and then we sampled some vintage and non-vintage brut, and a rosẻ. This was a bit much on top of the Champagne from lunch so Daniel finished off everyone’s glasses (he is a Finisher-Completer, which comes in handy). We skipped off to Reims after this, which is famous for its 800 year old cathedral, where 34 sovereigns began their reign. Since I read The Pillars of the Earth, I have a greater appreciation for the work required building enormous walls and putting windows in them. This cathedral has a LOT of windows.

Our Champagne lunch

Moet and Chandon export about 80% of their product, so they are pretty big world wide, but not so much in France

You can see the enormous Mercier barrel in the background

On the Mercier Champagne train

CHAMPAGNE! Aging happily underground. I believe this is after the first fermentation, turning, degassing, second fermentation, turning to let the sediment settle, freezing and popping out the sediment, putting int he cork, and then aging. I might have got the order wrong though.