All about Champagne

Quercy making her way along the River Marne near Epernay today

The Village of Mareuil sur Marne where the Champagne house Guy Charbaut is located

Today was our first day in the Champagne region proper and so having done a bit of research and established that the medium sized Champagne producer Guy Charbaut was doing cellar tours at 10am this morning, I duly rang them at 9am and booked us on the tour. It was a thoroughly enjoyable and informative tour of the old cellars dating from 1810 followed by a tasting in one of the old rooms surrounding the courtyard of their town house, which is also a chambre d'hote.

It is also just yards from the canal so we did not have far to lug our purchases.

Old walls of chalk with added concrete here and there where it has cracked.

Our guide explaining the turning process

Where they add something, I'm not sure what to replace the amount lost when they have to open the bottle to remove the silty yeast deposits

Automatic turner.

After our tour, having stored our purchases on the boat, we got on our bikes and cycled the few miles to Epernay the home of Champagne, and a town that has little going for it apart from one street which is lined with Champagne Houses.  Starting with Moet et Chandon.  A large modern building with big gold lettering - all a bit too much bling for my taste and I believe that you must pay 40 euros for the tour.  Glad we didn't, it's well and truly on the trodden tourist trail, and we prefer to take our chances with the little guys.  In fact the little guys sell their grapes to the big ones and it's all blended and generally a mix of many grapes from different areas within Champagne.

I have not drunk enough champagne to really tell what is good and what is not.  Champagne tends to drunk at weddings and special occasions where there are so many distractions. Here we were sitting quietly and could just concentrate on what we were drinking. I learned that rose Champagne tastes a little bit like red wine.  I love the colour but I was not keen on the tanin taste, made either by adding red wine at the end or crushed grape skins at the beginning. Although I had gone there determined to come away with only the beautiful rose, we realised that it did not taste as good as the whites.

Anyhow, we are not hard core when it comes to this kind of thing, so although there is a lot of banter amongst boating folk about getting in as many tastings as one can manage, no number is too many etc etc, the one visit was thoroughly enjoyable and enough for us.  We made some nice purchases for the family and we might even drink a bottle ourselves.

One of the ornate Champagne Houses

Another bigger posher one

The hill over the cellars of 1810 where we had the tour. The cellars were in this hill.

Having done the tour and then cycled onto Epernay we realised it was 1.25pm.  Panic immediately set in.  We were never going to find anywhere serving food at this hour.  Almost everyone in France is finishing, or at least half way through their lunch by 1.30pm.  A quick look at the restaurants confirmed this and so sadly we had to make do with a cafe'brasserie, that was still serving and offered seating in deep shade.  Friendly enough, with no English, which is fine if there is French spoken slowly which there was not.  I ended up with a salad that comprised of half an undercooked egg (thank god it wasn't a whole one) soggy tomatoes, limp lettuce, very thin slices of processed cheese and dried up Serano ham.