Champagne in Champagne

The first two weeks of March I was in Europe.  Business and pleasure.  The reason for my trip was to visit Portugal and learn about cork harvesting and production.  Since I was already most of the way to Paris (my favorite place in the world, it's a cliche but it's true) I decided to take a few days to visit France before I came home.  My trip to Portugal was crazy informative but all those pictures and videos are taking longer to organize, so I'll write first about my time in France.

These pictures of Paris were taken on the only nice day while I was there.  This day it was about 68F and then a day later it snowed.

Here I am with cheese, meats and wine.  It was this night that I decided I should visit Champagne.  I'd never been and it seemed pretty close.  Also, I wanted to drink Champagne in Champagne.

 The next morning I went to Gare de l'est and bought a ticked to Reims.  The lady looked at me a little funny when I asked for a return ticket for that same evening.  I waited here for half an hour until the train came.  Then 45 minutes later by TGV (train of great fastness) I was in Reims.

I stepped off the train and immediately realized that this was really stupid.  I had no plan.  I didn't know where anything was, I think I expected the wineries to be walking distance from the train station.  I was probably going to need to take a bus, or a shuttle or taxi maybe?  So I head over to the Tourist Info booth to make a plan to make the most of my few hours in Reims.  This was a Sunday, so it was closed.  Turns out a lot of things are closed on a Sunday.  Here are the completely empty streets.  Check out the sweet parking job of the black car on the left.  

 Fortunately all was not lost.  Turns out the wineries are walking distance from the train station and each other.  This is the opposite of Napa and everywhere else I know in Northern California.  I walked to Tattinger (which was closed).  But it only took 20 minutes!

Then I walked 10 mins down the block to Veuve (also closed).  Which was actually OK, because I was just excited to be in such an adorable town near all these great Champagne houses.  My plan at this point was to walk into a wine shop and at least drink the stuff that I was walking by.  I was going to buy a bottle and drink it in the park, hobo style.  

This wine shop even had adorable bottle carriers.  A sardine tin, an old school refrigerator and maybe a hand bag of some sort.

 So I kept walking to the next winery on the map.  Pommery.  Oh joy of joys, it was open! And they had a tour starting in 10 minutes!  What luck!

 The tour starts down the stairs into their caves where the wine is stored. 116 steps down.

I do have tiny hands, but those are also giant 12L bottles.  A whole freaking hallway of them.

This is part of their library collection.  They have 1 bottle from 1898 and 1 from 1874.  Eighteen seventy four!  That's nuts to me.  That bottle has been around for a lot of things.  The Pommery (and I'm sure other caves in Reims are similar) cave was one of the most impressive places I have every been inside of.  Unfortunately with the low light my pathetic iphone camera could not capture the amazingness, so I wont bother posting those pictures.  But believe me, it was unbelievable.

At the end of the tour I finally had Champagne in Champagne and I bought some to have in Napa too. I took the train back to Paris that evening and came home a day later.  I've been home for six days and I've been swamped trying to catch up on work.

I'm really looking forward to making some sense of the pictures from Portugal trip (the real reason for my transatlantic trip) and to share a lot of what I learned about cork.  It's the weekend soon, so that should give me time. . . .

-L