Champagne

The French Champagne region is a beautiful landscape of vineyards, small villages, rolling hills and forests.  We took an all day tour and tasted champagne from several houses plus toured their production facilities.  We had lunch under a canopy in the country and drank more champagne. This picture looks like it's from a tourist brochure but I actually took it and, you know, it does look exactly like the brochure.

Moet Chandon is the biggest producer of champagne.  This is just one hallway of the 28 kilometers of underground caverns that store the champagne in various stages.  We saw numerous areas off this hall where they stored 10-20 thousand bottles.  The tour guides say the management won't say how many bottles they store in the cellars, but it has to be in the millions!  They noted that the oldest bottle was from 1869.  It is staggering to see the amount of hand work that must be done to produce the champagne.  The temperature in these caverns is 10-12 Celsius year round....perfect for the making of champagne.

I am standing by a storage cavern that is holding 29,528 bottles of champagne.  Apparently I have to wait 10 more years before I can drink any of it.  Who knew that it was an aged wine.

No flash was allowed in the caverns to protect the wine as it matures.

To be labeled as champagne, all the grapes must have been grown in this region.  They grow three types of grapes: Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Pinot Meunier. We were there on the last day of harvest.  Most of the vineyards had been hand picked prior to our arrival.  We found these grapes hanging around at a park in a little village on the hill.

A statue of Don Perignon stands outside of Moet Chandon. According to our tour guide this monk has been identified as the founder of champagne when in fact he spent his life trying to get the bubbles out of champagne.

Moet Chandon is just one of the champagne houses that line the Avenue de Champagne.  You can wander in each place, have a taste, buy wine, and stumble to the next place.

Sante`!