Journey to Champagne

Riding out to Epernay (in first class seats!) this morning reminded me in a way of my trip out to Devon (sans the first class seats for the latter), particularly as we left the large city/train station and headed out into more rural areas. The fields and vineyards were beautiful, but most of my attempts to capture them on film ended up with a nice glare from my camera reflecting in the train windows and/or some kind of blurring action in the fields. Nonetheless, Epernay was a charming little city and the weather was gorgeous, all of which made for a lovely day to tour Moët & Chandon and some more village wandering...

After arriving by train, we had some time to wander the city and eat lunch at this cute little pizzeria. Seeing menus for the past couple of days has definitely reminded me of my high school and early college French courses, when we would practice ordering random items and everyone would pick the easy-to-pronounce foods and drinks. Unfortunately, it's not practical to order those easy foods all the time (they're usually easier to say because they're closer to English names), so I got to branch out again with some new menu options and help a couple of my lunch companions decipher their menus. Pizza with tuna and egg was one such unusual discovery, but we all passed on that in favor of some more familiar choices.

There was some free time between lunch and our scheduled tour, during which I strolled around the city and found some cute little historical landmarks, none of which were really explained well but had their own historical marker designations. The only souvenir shop we could find didn't seem to have much in the way of souvenirs beyond postcards, pipes, or magazines, so that wasn't such a successful venture, but it was a curiosity. There were flowerbed everywhere, and lots of small park areas, so even though most all of the stores we found seemed to be closed—perhaps for the holiday tomorrow?—we did have a pleasant walk before the Moët & Chandon tour.

I've never been to a winery before or been in any kind of wine cellar, so the whole Moët tour was a new experience for me. The brief history of the company given upstairs (ground level) was interesting, but they definitely weren't kidding about people wanting a jacket or coat of some kind when down in the cellars themselves. It was rather brisk, even as part of a group of people touring together, and the maze of routes within the cellars was a surprise. Who knew they had 28 km of cellar space alone? At any rate, our tour path was a significantly smaller portion of that distance and yet the huge (for lack of a better word) stockpiles of wine we saw were impressive in their own right, let alone as a fraction of the total production.

The tour ended with a tasting that was very popular among the tour participants, but I really enjoyed the informational part more. I think I was probably the only one in the group that didn't know Dom Perignon is made by Moët & Chandon, and while that was not part of the tasting at the end, it was still neat to see the statue dedicated to him and one section of the cellar in which Dom Perignon is housed. Peep was impressed as well during the tour and came out for a photo op once, but since it was so cold and the poor guide would've thought we were all crazy to be taking pictures with random toys and pictures, Peep stayed hidden for the rest of the time. Epernay was quaint and pretty, though, and it was wonderful to visit such a cute little relaxing place (in great weather) and have a little break from the action, noise, and lights of Paris, if only for an afternoon. :)

Peep in an alcove down in the cellars