Mmmm bubbly

~backblip~

Today was spent in a region of France which has given me much pleasure over the years - the champagne region! I do love a glass of bubbles :)

First we headed to the centre of the champagne industry, the rather strange town of Epernay. Basically an industrial town, it has a bizarre street (the Avenue de Champagne funnily enough) running through the middle where the beautiful headquarters of the great champagne maisons sit. It was nice to see but I think the drive through the vineyards in the surrounding area was the best part.

In the afternoon we visited Reims, for a tour of the Taittinger champagne caves. We got there slightly later than planned after a wrong turn at a roundabout 2 miles from our destination led us on to The Toll Road of No Return, where not only did we have to pay to go in completely the wrong direction, but ended up back where we started the day since there were no motorway junctions for 20 miles! Oops.

Once we finally made it to Reims the tour of the caves was really interesting. The guide told us all about the different processes involved in making champagne and gave us some information about the different blends Taittinger use, the difference between vintage and non-vintage etc. In these caves they "elaborate" the more expensive blends so everything is still done manually (they do have a more modern plant somewhere else), with cellar-hands turning thousands of bottles every hour to keep the sediment moving round. In just one room of the vast cave network there were 17000 bottles, that's a lot of champagne :)



PS: as you can see from the EXIF data, it was dark! Very inconsiderate to photographers...