Champagne

We took a day trip to the Champagne region which is only 1 1/2 -2 hours away from Paris by car. To start the day, we learned of how the grapes are grown before visiting a small winery. Traditionally, the land in Champagne goes back hundreds of years through family generations and it was the same situation with the small producer we visited.



Champagne is generally made with two different grape types, pinot noir (below) and chardonnay (second below).


It's a beautiful part of the world to visit for anyone, even those who don't drink alcohol.

The grapes don't taste the same as normal grapes but still are nice to sample. The skins were acidic but the juice tasted wonderful. Harvest finished the week before so it would've been too busy in the area if we showed up earlier.

The windmill on the hill is owned by Mumm Champagne.


The soil of Champagne is filled with chalk which is the bedrock that aging caves are dug out of. The cellar we first visited was quite small by local standards but the same methods apply to larger productions as in the smaller ones.

Once yeast is added to the juice for fermentation and bottled, the sediment takes a lengthy process to settle near the cap as pictured below. The bottles are stored in racks for many months and turned a quarter turn once a day to move the sediment towards the cap. Once the sediment is above the cap, the neck is frozen and the cap pops off launching a frozen cube of sediment out of the bottle so the final product is completely clear. To replace the lost juice, a combination of wine and sugar is added which determines how sweet a Champagne tastes.

Enough talk, let's drink!

A different region for growing grapes and note that the grapes are always grown on a slope in Champagne.

At lunch we were given a special dessert treat to celebrate our honeymoon which topped off a wonderful meal in central Reims.

After lunch we visited the cathedral of Notre Dame in the center of Reims which is very important for a lot of reasons...which you can lookup on the internet because we don't remember a whole lot about it. The thing about Europe is that there is such an abundance of religious buildings that they all sorta blend together unless someone is highly interested in their history.

Before heading back to Paris, we visited the extensive aging caves of Taittinger to contrast with the smaller winery we visited earlier. Shauna poses below near a rack of large format bottles. The names of different bottle sizes are after Biblical figures such as Jeroboam, Balthazar, and Nabuchodonosor for the largest size of 15 liters or the equivalent of 20 bottles.

Bottles of Champagne as far as the eye can see! The labyrinth in the caves holds millions of bottles of Champagne and is 4 total kilometers in length.

Shauna is standing in one of the oldest cellaring caves in Taittinger, it dates from approximately the fourth century and was a chalk quarry made by the Romans who used the chalk as a building material. Each of these original Roman caves is a pyramid shape because the design was to dig straight down then in a pyramid formation for the roof to be supported.