Champagne trips and tours
Champagne
Champagne
Chalk is the whole story here. It drains the vineyards, it gives the wine its nerve, and it made the cellars – pyramid-shaped quarries first cut by the Gallo-Romans in the third century, worked for a thousand years after, then joined into a labyrinth beneath the Saint-Nicaise hill in Reims. Down there it's a steady 11°C, pitch dark, and the quiet is total. Above ground, Reims Cathedral has crowned twenty-five French kings and now holds Chagall's deep-blue windows in the apse behind the altar. Half an hour south in Épernay, the Avenue de Champagne runs barely a mile of nineteenth-century mansions with around 200 million bottles resting beneath the tarmac, which is why people who live here call it the most expensive street in the world. Then come the growers. Some 16,000 families farm nine-tenths of the vines, and the small ones bottling their own are where this region gets properly interesting: one village, one plot, a person who can point at the row your glass came from. The big houses sell consistency. The growers sell place. Give both an afternoon.
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That first mouthful taken in the cellar itself, eleven degrees and thirty metres below the street, where the wine has sat in the dark for years waiting for you. It does rather spoil the supermarket stuff forever.
Drive two hours south to the Côte des Bar, where a quarter of all Champagne's vines grow on the same Kimmeridgian rock as Chablis and nobody makes a fuss about it. Les Riceys is the only commune in France entitled to three appellations, one of them a still pink wine so scarce it barely leaves the village. Renoir summered twenty minutes up the road at Essoyes, and the studio he built at the end of the garden is still standing.
Champagne doesn't look like Burgundy and won't pretend to. Much of it is flat cereal country, and Reims lost roughly 80 per cent of its buildings in the First World War, so the city you walk through is a rebuilt one (the Art Deco that went up in its place is rather good, mind). The scenery here is underground.
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