Oh la la…Champagne!

It’s been an amazing week of touring the Champagne region. We’ve seen cathedrals, medieval forts, fortified towns and of course more vineyards than you can imagine! Reims (pronounced Ronse – go figure) has been our home base and we have traveled to Epernay, Troyes and Sedan. In Epernay we walked along the Avenue de Champagne where we saw Moët et Chandon, Mercier, and many others. Troyes is the original capital city for the region and had some amazing tutor-style buildings. We visited the medieval castle in Sedan and we also toured the remains of bunkers 1 & 2 of the Maginot Line near a village called Villy. 

We’ve had 2 champagne tours. The first cellar tour was at Taittinger. It was an hour long tour that took us into the underground cellars where millions of bottles of champagne were stored. It was very impressive and in the end, we bought a bottle of their bubbly which we will drink when Evelyn arrives to celebrate the completion of her Masters.

Our second champagne tour was very cool. We went on this bus that drove through the countryside of Epernay, twisting through little villages and vineyards upon vineyards. It’s incredible to see that many vines all together. On the bus we had champagne (of course) and some brioche – very yummy bread. This bus tour is very new (only 2 months in busy) so they really treated us well. We were the only paying customers – another couple was on board but they knew the owners and were on the bus as tour guides I think. This couple owned 4 or 8 hectares of vineyards (we can’t remember) and shared all kinds of interesting facts about grapes, vineyards and the champagne industry with us. We had a great time on this tour!

We have 2 more days in Reims before we had back to Paris to pick up Evelyn. From Paris we head to Burgundy where we will stay about 30km from Dijon. The photos are more or less in order of our days in Reims.