Death, Ascension, Heaven, and Hell

Quite the theme for this post, eh?  It really is pretty appropriate, though, since we visited all four by dinner.  The Catacombs, Montmartre, the Sacre Coeur, and Pigalle - the respective synonyms for these Parisian staples fit rather well.  As I mentioned before, I'd never visited the first three, so it was an exciting day.





Death.  The Catacombs of Paris, quite literally, are full of it.  The sign at the entrance warns you: Arrête: C'est ici l'empire de la mort - "Stop: Here is the empire of the dead."  Kind of a grave greeting (pun intended), isn't it?  The catacombs are part of the caves and tunnels carved out of the rock underneath Paris' streets, the only part open to the public.  The rest of the tunnels are shrouded in legend and myth, closed off to the casual visitor yet spanning 280 kilometers in reach.  My favorite story involves police stumbling upon a secret cavern and the eery circumstances of it all.  I mean, it's straight out of a novel or a movie.  The old entrance to the city was right around the current entrance to the tourist site, and it was given the name Hell's Gate.

As for us, halfway through the tunnel we passed under the sign that warned us of our entrance into the actual ossuary, and that's where things got interesting.  Six million people rest there, and you see a lot of them.  Bones upon skulls upon more bones are stacked on each side of the path, often elaborately fit together so that they could fit as many as possible.  Memorials are interspersed throughout and you can touch as many as you want... or none at all, of course (the memorial in the photo above translates to "Come, people of the world, come into these silent abodes and your tranquil soul will be struck by the voice that rises from within.  It's here that the greatest of schoolmasters, the Tomb, holds its school of truth.").  Even in a place so overwhelmed with death and generally-accepted scenes of repulsion, it was actually really peaceful.  I wasn't sure how I'd feel walking through, but I felt much the same as I would in any of the Parisian cathedrals - calm, respectful, in awe, and not at all revolted by any of it.

Ascension.  I was feeling renewed, ready to climb back to the surface and keep climbing up to Montmartre.  Taking one of the longest metro rides possible while still remaining inside the city itself (20 stops on the same line!), we emerged in Montmartre.  The artist's nirvana, it's a village within a metropolis, known for cultivating the talents of Van Gogh, Picasso, Monet, Salvador Dali, Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec - even Langston Hughes, believe it or not.  Lunch at a nice, if slightly overpriced, bistro felt like Paris in pure form, and I definitely needed a beer after all of the walking we'd done so far.  However, there was still more to be done, and at a steeper clip.  We climbed at least 100 stairs, which look like a 'roided-up version of the stairs from The Exorcist down which the priest gets thrown to his doom, to reach the Sacre Coeur, the highest point in all of Paris.



Paris, from the Sacre Coeur

Heaven.  Well, sort of.  You could see from one end of the city to the other, with familiar glimpses of the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the spire of the Sainte-Chappelle, and the Centre Pompidou.  Inside, you are forbidden to talk above a whisper, and you can add it to the list of beautiful cathedrals in Paris.  The big Pope's hat on the hill is a favorite of school kids and couples during the day, and of gypsies and the homeless by night.  I really wish we'd known that we could have climbed up the dome, but we missed out because we had no idea.  Wish #2 from my imaginary Montmartre genie would be that I wish we had a better idea of Montmartre's layout, because we could've visited a few of the cooler places there on the way down from the Sacre Coeur, instead of just bypassing it on the way to Pigalle.  If we're going with the three wishes theme, my last wish would be to have a house in Montmartre, duh.

Hell.  Pigalle.  And I don't mean Pigalle is Hell in that it's a horrible, despicable place, but more so that it's a hub of debauchery and hedonism.  Visiting where I stayed for the first time in Paris, I felt much more comfortable during the day with a few companions than last time, at night by myself.  The sex shops, strip clubs, and brothels-in-disguise looked much less menacing than before.  We ignored the Asian "performer" outside who was playing innocent to try to lure people into their club, but some tourist had no idea what was going on and got sucked in.  Poor guy.  We confirmed that we couldn't afford a show at the Moulin Rouge (80 euros to get in, a lot more than that if you wanted dinner/champagne to with it), so we looked for a bar.

Going through all of the afterlife's various states was exhausting, so a pre-dinner nap was on tap (shocker).  And remember how I said you shouldn't go looking for a decent meal between rue Saint-Jacques and boulevard Saint-Michel?  Yeah, well, we pushed our luck and ended up on the losing side this time.  The food wasn't good, but at least the company was.  Bummed about our dinner misfortune, we turned in early, but drinking wine in the apartment wasn't a bad consolation by any means (and cheaper!).  The benefits of staying in an apartment just kept adding up!

It's possible to have too much of the Champs Elysées

March flowers in the Jardin des Tuileries

It's official, I'm jaded.  What else is better than strolling along one of the most famous streets in the world on a Parisian spring day?  Well, there's a whole list, and I'll go into greater detail in a later blog post, but if you're not shopping then the Champs Elysées is kind of pointless if you've already been there before.  Sometimes there are just way too many other things you can be doing that you feel like you're wasting precious time.  Don't get me wrong, I love the Arc de Triomphe and the history it stands for at the top of the hill, and I love the Grand Palais, Jardin de Tuileries, and l'Orangerie (still haven't been inside, but I want to!) at the Louvre end - but I can do without all of the in-between, unless I'm looking for something specific, like my France jersey, of course!

Before I start sounding like a grumpy old man (too late?), allow me to set this up.  Back when I was studying abroad, I lost my passport and had to go to the American embassy in Paris to get a new one.  The receptionist at my scruffy hotel in Pigalle told me to metro to the Arc de Triomphe and the embassy was right around there.  Wrong.  A thousand times wrong.  Getting off the metro at the Arc left me 2 km away from the embassy.  So, running short on time and having no idea how far I had to go, I ended up running halfway until I finally gave up and took a taxi the rest of the way in order to make my appointment on time.  It got worse from there, but the point is this: bad memories.  No, the Champs Elysées wasn't to blame, but it's all about guilt by association.

On top of that moment, though, it's just hard to get into the stores and cafés around the George V metro stop.  Overpriced and not very reminiscent of vieux Paris, it's just not my bag - I'd rather shop in the Marais, around Châtelet, or, if I had the money, at Place de la Vendôme.  I didn't have all of these thoughts until after the fact, of course, since I was too busy being Grumpy McGee.  I felt like we were wasting an afternoon, but it was my fault for waffling and not coming up with other suggestions.




La tour Eiffel

 The day started out great, though, with a nice metro out to the Eiffel Tower.  I hadn't yet ridden on an above-ground metro in Paris, so part of line 6 provided a welcome break from the underground metro-boulot-dodo (look it up) atmosphere.  It kind of reminded me of Chicago, riding above the street, breeze coming through open windows, green trees lining the sidewalks below.  We did the Eiffel Tower thing, which is always nice because the scenery (the Champ de Mars, Trocadéro, the Seine, etc.) really can make a twisted metal structure look pretty special.  We played the obligatory game of "Dodge the Overbearing Guys Selling Crappy Souvenirs" and ended up getting lunch on a street corner by the Seine.

Sailboats in the fountain, framed by the Musee d'Orsay

One lady even asked if I lived in the neighborhood and if I knew where such-and-such place was.  Stifling a desire to hug her, I shook my head no.  Désolé, mais merci beaucoup !  I'd done it, ladies and gentlemen - I'd finally been mistaken for a local Parisian!  My life's work was complete at that moment, and I could revel in the fact that I nailed my clothing choice, body language, and other comportments that day.  If I could remember how I did it, I'd tell you, but I probably just had a blackout moment and everything clicked.

Another pleasant metro ride took us to the Arc de Triomphe.  The serenity under the Arc is amazing considering the kamikaze driving situation going on around it on the Place Charles de Gaulle.  We even found some street performers that we had seen on our visit back in 2009 in the Latin Quarter, which was awesome!  They're 3 great dancers who always seem to attract big crowds, and I would bet that they pocket some good change for it.  But then came the trek past the countless stores and people (Haagen-Dazs ice cream helped!), and we were spent by the time we reached the Jardin des Tuileries.  At that point, I didn't care about the kids sailing boats in the dormant fountain or the flowers just starting to bloom.  I was exhausted, ready for a pre-dinner nap, and I wasn't the only one.

Our friend Chuck de Gaulle

Luck was on our side as, somehow, we found this great place for cheap in the Latin Quarter for dinner.  They say you shouldn't eat between rue Saint-Jacques and Boulevard Saint-Michel, and I wholeheartedly agree, but we found a place that worked out great.  Hors d'oeuvre, main plate, and dessert for 10 euros, and they were all good.  I don't advise doing this, because the success rate is slim in finding a solid place, but we got incredibly lucky.  We even found this place called The Great Canadian Pub along the river that was everything you'd imagine a stereotypical Canuck pub to be like - hockey and boat racing on TV, all wood interior, Labatt and such on tap - sounds pretty good there, eh?  A few brews there and we were ready to call it a night.

We were excited about the next day, especially me, when we'd visit the Catacombs, the Sacre Coeur, Montmartre, and Pigalle.  I'd never been to any of those places except Pigalle, and even that would be interesting to return to the site where I stayed 2 years ago.  I couldn't wait!

Allez les Bleus !



The goofy author

I woke up and it was game day - kind of like a Hokies gameday, but not - and I needed to equip myself with some FFF (Fédération Française de Football) swag.  We emerged from our quiet little residential oasis on rue des Ecoles, headed in the direction of the Champs Elysées, and more specifically, the Nike Paris store.  I really wish I had some more money to throw around, because the shirts and shoes in there are awesome, and some can't be found in the States.  My new France away jersey seriously depleted my spending money for the day, but it was totally worth it.  The team was only unveiling it later that night at the game, so I was one of the first to score one.  I guess I'm kind of like a girl in that sense, I want to do 2 things with fashion choices: (1) find something that no one else has, and/or (2) get there before everyone else, so I can wear it out before it gets overplayed.  Really though, can you blame me?  Besides, I pulled off both, which is what I like to call The Double Whammy... to answer your question, yes, sometimes I'm ridiculous.

We popped in and out of a few more stores before metro'ing back to the Châtelet area.  Strolling the rest of the way back to the Latin Quarter, crossing the Seine and l'Ile de la Cité, we settled for a croque monsieur, an omelette, and a few beers at a café near the Saint Michel metro stop, where our friends met us.  Feeling recharged after an afternoon nap, we were ready for the footy match.  I donned my new jersey and we hopped on the RER to the Stade de France.  They had some great-smelling street vendors right off the train and we scooped up a few merguez and french fries - and they were delicious.  To tell you the truth, the 4 of us blended in pretty well with the rest of the French fans at the food stations, and we stuffed our faces accordingly.



Le Stade de France

The atmosphere was festive, and it was an experience to just observe the French version of our football pregames.  On our way towards the stadium, the Croatian fan section passed by us - surrounded by a SWAT team escort.  I'm not sure whether they felt that the Croatians needed to be protected or contained, but guys fully clad in riot gear and automatic rifles were somehow deemed necessary.  We found our seats after a lot more walking, and, although we were in the upper deck, we were in the very first row, which gave us perfect views of the action.  We marveled at the teams warming up, the singing of La Marseillaise (their national anthem, in which they sing about killing "infidels" and French fields being watered with their blood - look it up, I'm not lying), and the introductions of each team.  Some of the best and most famous players in the world were playing in front of us, like going to an all-star game in the U.S.



Le stade de France, in its massive splendor

The game itself was pretty entertaining but, unfortunately, ended 0-0.  There was some exciting play and a few great chances, but no dice on goals.  It was the return of Patrice Evra and Franck Ribéry to the Stade de France, and they each got healthily booed - Evra for his World Cup captaincy failure and Ribéry for his World Cup failure along with the whole had-sex-with-an-underage-prostitute-besides-the-fact-that-he's-married thing.  That usually sours public opinion about someone.  The crowd warmed back up to him once they realized that he was the best player on the field that night, and he really did have some slick moves that spiced things up (still talking about soccer here).  During halftime, some French actor bombed his act.  I think it was supposed to be funny, but it really just sucked, frankly.  In the second half, the Croatians, answering my concerns in the previous paragraph, set off a flare in their section (their section was surrounded by a chain link fence) and threw 3 smaller flares onto the field near the corner flag.  Of course, the fans booed and whistled them, but that only made them even more enthusiastic.

After the game, we somehow bypassed a lot of the crowds and got on a train decently quickly to go back into the center of Paris.  We had a few brews at a pub around the corner and I made friends with the bartender at the expense of my English-speaking amis.  As the bar was about to close down, we were still hungry and we knew what time it was - it was kebab time.  It was about 1:30 am, so there really wasn't much of a choice, but if you ever read my old blog from my time abroad in France, you know I was in love with kebabs.  I was ready for another one, as were the rest of our group.  Loaded up on tomato, lettuce, ketchup, mystery kebab meat, pita bread, and french fries, we ambled back to the apartment, tired but completely satisfied that the night had unfolded well.  Sleep felt almost poetic, with the Parisian night sky filtering into the apartment through the 2 skylights.

But that's what Paris is all about, right?  It's the feeling and vibe you get from otherwise mundane activities, stopping and thinking about how it's all just... better.  Everyone feels differently about Paris, but here's how I think about it: imagine the times when you were stressing over exams, and when you finished your last exam each year, ready to go home to the beach for summer, you walked out of the class and let out an audible sigh that spread into a smile, or maybe even a surpressed yelp of joy - a realization that better times had arrived (however temporarily).  Paris makes me constantly feel like that split second of directionless emotion, where you're ready to let loose but you haven't even thought about where and when and with whom - when you just want to hang in that balance before responsibility hits you again.  It even makes me think about and write sappy paragraphs like these!

You know what, I knew I liked this place.

La belle Ville-Lumière

"Remember, gentlemen: it's not just France we're fighting for, it's Champagne!"

Winston Churchill would be this quote's originator, and do his motivations really surprise you?  I'd fight for Champagne, too, after the amazing hospitality they showed us on this day.  It started with another insanely beautiful day.  All of our hostesses and taxi drivers in Champagne kept telling us how lucky we were - to give you an idea, the French Riviera gets about 2,500 more hours of sun per year than Champagne does, so there's usually not much sun to be had.  It was the kind of spring day you could imagine Ronsard making a poem for (yep, I just went literary on you), so it was a perfect day to venture out to the countryside town of Tours-sur-Marne, site of Laurent-Perrier.


A little background to set up this great chance we were given: Laurent-Perrier is closed to the public, and only offers tours to wine professionals.  Des politely asked if they would allow a tour for a wine student and they generously accepted.  We were stunned, in the best way possible.  I mean, maybe they're not that exclusive, but I guess we didn't have our hopes up that they'd accommodate us.  But they did, so we hopped in a cab on a Monday morning and zipped along the Marne River until we reached their estate.  Unfortunately but probably smartly, we didn't take any pics because we didn't want to come off as too touristy or ungrateful.

Entering the gates of heav- I mean, Laurent-Perrier

Tours-sur-Marne is tiny, with only 1,300 people living there, and you can drive right through it in under 2 minutes.  There are zero tourists, or at least, there weren't any when we were there.  We pulled through the gates of Laurent-Perrier, and it looked like any normal work-filled Monday - the only people we saw were employees.  After all of the public dog-and-pony shows we'd been through, it was awesome, albeit slightly intimidating, to know that we were the only outsiders there.  The concrete sculpture inside the gates greeted us with an all-too-appropriate maxim: "Ne Buvez Jamais d'Eau" (Never Drink Water).  Madame Snozzi (stop it, way cooler than the person you're thinking of) was the name of our tour guide who gave us, and just us, a nifty tour of their building and the cellars down below.


We saw their steel vats where last year's harvest is going through the first fermentation process, and Mme Snozzi told us that the master wine maker will taste all 80+ of them in order to figure out how much of each vat goes in which champagne, or which ones will become reserves for later years' production.  That sounds like a fascinating task, but can you imagine trying to notate and remember all of them?  Right next to the vats was the bottling process, complete with bottle conveyor belts and Rube Goldberg-esque machines.  A few extremely polite workers passed by every now and again, each one nice enough to extend a "bonjour" to us while on the way to what I wanted to imagine was some romantic wine-making task.  I'm sure it was a lot more mundane than that, but I can have my own champagne dreams, right?


Their cellars were much more industrial-looking, but I liked that.  It truly felt like we were in the middle of a workplace, not passing through a doctored-up show piece like some of the public tours (nothing wrong with that, we'd just done enough of that already).  There was a lot more brick than chalk showing since they're so much closer to the river and the chalk is softer because of it.  We stopped and talked to a riddler (bottle turner) for a bit and watched him work his magic.  Machines have taken over most of the riddling process, but human hands still turn the most expensive and irregularly-shaped bottles.  In less than ten seconds, the guy had quarter-turned all of the bottles on the rack (40 or so) and pushed them in slightly so that the bottles stood at a steeper angle, a small part of the up to 50,000 bottles he can turn per day.  He turns more bottles of champagne before lunch time than we'll ever hope to touch in our lifetimes.  Their wine library was really interesting, with about 6 to 8 (if I remember correctly) small, gated vaults holding about 30 bottles each.  Note to self: add "tasting a champagne bottle that comes from a producer's wine library" to your Bucket List.


We finished with a fantastic tasting.  We were led to a small salon-type room, complete with all of the classic Beaux Arts accents and furniture.  We were served glasses of their non-vintage brut and their brut rosé ($90 on the market, score!) by what seemed like our own private butler (double score!), and Mme Snozzi joined us and gave us some cool Laurent-Perrier swag to take home (hat trick!).  Both wines fit perfectly with the theme of the house and of the salon where we were seated - neat, clean, and classic, and the taste was full of white floral and citrus tones (more red fruit, of course, with the rosé).  We spent a little while talking it up with Mme Snozzi and learning about her career adventures, discussing France, the U.S., and, of course, champagne.  We bought a bottle of the brut, not sure how else to thank them for such an amazing experience.  One day, I hope to come back and enjoy a bottle of the Grand Siècle or the Alexandra Rosé on-site.  Of course I'll offer Mme Snozzi a flute, too.  It really was about as close to a once-in-a-lifetime event as you could get for someone like me who's not involved in the wine industry, and I encourage anyone to have me tour guide/translate for them on their own trip to the area (please?).

From the train, vines for miles

We could've stayed for many more days in Champagne, exploring the other small towns and visiting other seductive producers, but we had a date with Paris.  We took a taxi back to Epernay, bought our train tickets, picked up one last bottle of champagne (Henriot), and hopped on the next train to the City of Lights.  In about an hour we were unloading at the Gare de l'Est, in the hypnotizing hustle and bustle of mid-day Paris.  An awkward metro ride with our heavy, champagne-laden suitcases took us to our apartment in the 5th arrondissement between the Cardinal Lemoine and Maubert Mutualité metro stops (in hindsight, a bus might've been better and just as fast).  On the first floor just off a quiet courtyard, our apartment was awesome - I really recommend renting one if there are any more than 2 of you.  Skylights spilled natural light over the loft and the small room below, with a futon, a small kitchenette, and a nice bathroom with a great shower (although hot water was tough to spread out over 4 people every morning).

La Seine

We were one long block from the Seine and La Tour d'Argent, and if you've been to Paris, you know that's a sweet spot.  For about $30-35 per person per night, that was unbelievably cheap!  Quick sidenote: please educate yourself on the restaurant La Tour d'Argent.  Founded in 1582, it's one of the oldest and certainly the most famous restaurant in Paris.  Although recently downgraded from its 3 Michelin stars, its cellars hold about half a million bottles of wine!  If you're really lucky and show some interest in their unfathomable selection, you might be invited down to see their cellars, filled with the most famous wine labels and vintages in the world, some dating back to the 1800's.  It's an utterly incredible place that has history that I don't have enough time to illustrate here, and I'm obviously fascinated by it.  Ok, maybe that wasn't that quick of a sidenote.

Our walk home every night - Victor Hugo would be proud

Anyway, two more blocks down the river was the Notre Dame, and it was our backdrop every night on the way home from a night out.  On our first afternoon, we hung out around the Notre Dame and the Latin Quarter.  We were exhausted and headed off to bed pretty early, nothing too exciting other than that.  We had a lot on our plates the next day - we had to tackle our first day in Paris, our friends Mary and Jon were arriving, and, my favorite part, we were going to the Stade de France to watch France take on Croatia in a footy match (uh, unreal!).  I'll cover that next time, à bientôt!

La rue sans pareil...

...Would be the Avenue de Champagne in Epernay, of course (la rue sans pareil = the road without equals/the road with no match).  Shaking off the lingering effects of the previous night's wine (rather than the Grapes of Wrath, we can call this the Wrath of Grapes), it was time to mount up and conquer this 2 km slice of heaven.  It was a day for Champenois sunshine and cellars alike.  A day for champagne rooms and champagne royalty.  It was a day for Moët and Chandon.

Dom and the author, hanging out together

We were excited for a tour and tasting of Moët and Chandon, and they really didn't disappoint.  It was Napoléon's favorite champagne for a reason, and their property really showed off their luxurious style.  Their cellars are really different, with a lot more of their walls fortified by bricks rather than bare chalk walls.  They have 25 km of cellars, made up of 3 different levels of caves underneath the streets of Epernay, which amounts to... you should be sitting down for this... over 100 million bottles down there.  That's absolutely unreal!  Even while I was in the cellars, I couldn't fathom that many bottles in one place.  The cellar tour took us past a few artifacts that Napoléon picked up, back in the day, for his favorite champagne buddies, and we ventured past their priceless wine library, as well.  For the most part, we heard the same old things as we did in the 1st 4 tours, but our guide also talked about a lot of refreshingly new things.  We were shown a bottle of Dom Pérignon Oenothèque Rosé that was still fermenting in the cellar, and we were told it'll stay that way for at least another 7 years.  Last year, Dom P. unveiled their 1st vintage (1990) release of this 50/50 blend of pinot noir and chardonnay, and bottles fetch somewhere between $700 and $1,000 a pop.  It really was a wild experience to check out tens of thousands of these cocooned beauties, covered in chalk dust and still containing the yeast sediment.



Dom bottles fermenting (1 busted, can I lick it up?)




The champagnes we tasted afterward were great.  I had the Impérial Brut and Rosé while Des had the newly-released Grand Vintage 2002 Brut and Rosé.  The Impérial Brut was good - I got a clean, floral, and pear feel - and the rosé was more floral-and-red-fruit.  The Grand Vintage was like an upgraded Impérial, but with apricot and slightly more caramel notes... high fives all around if I got all that right.  Kept in ideal conditions, the 2002 will mature well for at least the next 10-20 years, but it's still perfectly fine if drunk today.  During our tasting, we even took a picture with Scarlett Johansson!  Ok, so what if it was a poster??  I don't see any photos of you with one!  Our tour guide told us that he got to meet her when she came 3 months before for her advertising photo shoots and general schmoozing, and it goes with out saying that we were both extremely jealous.



Dom Pérignon Oenothèque Rosé



The Grand Vintage was about the best that we could also afford, so we bought some.  Maybe one day we can come back and afford the Dom Oenothèque, but until then we're settling for Grand Vintage.  If you think you're a baller, you have to be verified, first, by buying up a few Dom bottles along with some accessories to go with it.  The scrubby-looking guy in front of me at the register picked up 2 Dom magnums, a 3-bottle Dom ice bath, and a few other items, to ring up a solid bill of about 700 euros (about $950).  Thanks, man, for showing me up with my 2 "wimpy" bottles of Grand Vintage 2002.  And he was wearing a Canadian tuxedo (jeans/denim shirt/jean jacket combo)!  I mean, raise your hand if you saw that coming... yeah, me neither!  Of course, then he promptly strolled over to his $200,000 Mercedes S65 AMG and sped off.  I want to be that guy.  He mounted up with his all-denim get-up because, frankly, he doesn't care what he looks like since he makes it rain more than Pacman Jones in a Vegas strip club.  If it was me, I'd take an Oenothèque or 2 and some of their Andy Warhol-designed wine glasses - and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't don a jean jacket.  But again, that's just me.

My XL hand next to a Dom magnum

La tour de Castellane

After lunch, we strolled the Avenue de Champagne, looking for our next victims to suck dry of their champagne (instead of vampires, champires?).  Unfortunately, a lot of places were closed to the public, and, being a Sunday, some that usually are open weren't.  We settled for Champagne de Castellane, which, if you remember, is the house that has the big tower that dominates the Epernay skyline.  Thankfully, they allowed us to skip the tour and just taste 4 of their styles.  The champagne and their house were good, but (snob alert!) a little unremarkable compared to the other champagne producers we visited.


Then it was time to track back to the champagne bar we visited the day and night before to have some oak-aged champagne (not really my cup of... well, champagne) and to take in the day we just had.  The place is called C-comme (pronounced "say come"), and it's pretty awesome.  A swanky champagne bar with a gift shop in the front and a cellar downstairs, check it out here.  As for dinner, it was at a simple brasserie up the road since it was a quiet Sunday night in town.


Rest up for tomorrow, because the single best experience of our trip is coming tomorrow morning, along with our arrival in Paris!  A bientôt!

Epernay, the capital of champagne

A Reims morning from the hotel room

It was time to move on to Epernay, the renowned capital of champagne (but not of Champagne, mind you - confused yet?), but we still had one last morning in Reims.  Breakfast was a pain au chocolat, of course.  Seriously, if you haven't had one of these, you are truly missing out on a simply beautiful thing.  With a direct translation of "bread with chocolate," how could you go wrong?  It's a croissant-type bread with 2 streams of chocolate (usually dark!) running through the middle of it, and this is a perfectly acceptable, and often encouraged, breakfast staple.  And French people aren't fat!  We rolled out an experiment while in Reims and Epernay where we counted the number of overweight people we saw while we were there (4ish days), and we only reached 10.  Ten people.  In 4 days.  How long would it take to get to that number in America, 30 minutes?  Fifteen minutes?  Less??  It's obviously a combination of lifestyle factors that contribute to this, and I even lost 4 pounds in our 10 days in France (that I don't want/need to lose).  *Disclaimer: please don't take this as me singling out overweight people, we just thought it'd be interesting to see the visible contrast in health levels between France and the States, because there's no denying that it's stark.

So, pastries consumed, it was wine time.  We checked out a wine store next door to see if their prices were cheaper than at the champagne houses.  You know, if you take a touristy tour and pass through the gift store on the way out, you figure that you would pay tourist trap prices, right?  Surprisingly, that wasn't the case.  It turns out that the champagne in the local wine store was slightly more expensive than at the source, so we pointed our palates in the direction of Mumm to scoop up 2 of our favorites.


But first, it was time for another tasting.  A lesser-known house (for Reims) called Charles de Cazanove was pretty much on the way to Mumm, so we figured, "why not?"  That's the great part about champagne, it doesn't matter how you drink it.  Dr. Seuss could have easily written a story about champagne - you can drink it in the morning or at night, with fish or with tripe, invented by monks under steeples, you can drink it alone or with people... ok, enough rhyming, I'm obviously pretty poor at it.  But you get my point, and right then we wanted some.  Cazanove may be smaller, but it has plenty of experience, being around since 1811, and still produces about 3 million bottles each year.  We shared 4 flutes of their bubbly line, starting with their brut, passing through their millésimé and either blanc de blancs or blanc de noirs (hey, I can't remember them all!), and ending with the brut rosé.  They were all great, and I'd recommend the millésimé to anyone.

In front of Mumm, holding my prized posession

After that, it was on to Mumm.  Our guide and emcee-in-the-making from 2 days before, Sarah, wasn't there, but it wasn't hard to navigate their small shop in order to pick out which champagnes we wanted.  I wanted the Grand Cru and Des wanted the Rosé, but it was difficult to not get distracted by the other bottles and accessories.  Even more difficult was trying to resist the urge to biggie-size our bottles and go with a magnum or jeroboam.  Of course we don't really need a gold-colored case, a Cordon Rouge champagne bath, or crystal, Mumm-engraved champagne flutes, let alone a gigantic bottle of champagne that I would have absolutely no chance fitting in my budget or suitcase, but they looked so fancy and shiny and I couldn't stop marveling at all of them.  Yet resist we did, and we walked out as proud parents of 2 bundles of Mumm joy.

Funny thing about vacation is that the days blend together.  They all feel the same, so you forget day-specific events like the Saturday markets.  Well, it was Saturday, and the market lay directly in our path.  Needless to say, I was stoked.  The vision of rows of whole fish, whole chickens, sausages, oysters, terrines, and fresh fruits and vegetables appeared not long after the mouthwatering aromas had reached us.  We followed our eyes and noses to a stall selling 2-serving portions of chicken and seafood paella for just 5 euros.  We bought 2 forks from a guy selling househould items right next to the paella vendor (we washed them first!), and lunch was served outside the train station while waiting for the train to Epernay, basking in the brilliance of another sunlit Champenois day.

In case you forgot

What about the vines, you may ask?  The 30 minute journey between Reims and Epernay, along with the area just south of Epernay, is filled with the best vines in Champagne (grand cru vines, for those of you playing at home).  Louis Roederer, Moët and Chandon, Mumm, Clicquot, etc., all buy their chardonnay and pinot noir grapes from them in order to make their best cuvées, so it was a really cool sight.

More champagne!

Aside from the tall tower at the Champagne de Castellane house that you see from the train, the town of Epernay is rather underwhelming at first.  It has a beautiful church and theater, and a few cobblestone streets, but, to be honest, I was worried we weren't going to find anything interesting besides the champagne.  I was right for the most part about there being nothing else, but I underestimated how interesting the champagne would be.  Silly me, you don't need anything else.

Our hotel was nice and cozy (Hôtel La Cloche) and, just like Hôtel Bristol in Reims, was well worth what we paid.  Our window looked out over one of the 2 main circles in town, and the bathroom was utterly enormous for a European WC.  Following our hostess' suggestion, we popped into a champagne bar around the corner to take our medicine before taking a pre-dinner nap (I love those!).  Dinner was great and so was the rosé to go with it, and so was the Bordeaux we drank in the room afterward.  Like I said, not much else to do in Epernay if you're not from there (for future reference, does anyone have any suggestions for the nightlife?).

On deck: Moët and Chandon and our homeboy Dom P.  Thanks to the early readers of this blog, it's gone international with some views from the UK and France!  Perhaps the French readers can advise me how best to teach (in print) the Yanks how to properly say Reims.  Merci bien, à bientôt !

"Too much of anything is bad, but too much champagne is just right."

Thanks, F. Scott Fitzgerald, for continuing our trend of title quotes and for accurately summing up my feelings for this day.  It started innocently enough, with some Limonade, Orangina, and espresso outside our hotel.  The sun was spilling out all over the square, the temperature was just right, and it just felt like another glorious day for champagne (although, isn't every day, regardless of the weather, a glorious day for drinking champagne?).

Salade de gesiers, terrine de lapin, et un Leffe

Wait, what's that you say, Des?  We need to get some lunch first so we don't drink on an empty stomach?  That's a great idea, why don't we duck into this neighborhood joint where they serve things that my French abilities fail to translate for us?  Oops.  We were hungry and away from the popular, more central part of town, so we decided to pop into a brasserie full of all locals.  I'd say that's a good sign, even if it meant we stuck out like Manute Bol at a jockey convention.  The menu, a prix-fixe deal, had 3 hors d'oeuvres and 3 main plates to choose from and you could have one from each.  I hadn't heard of salade de gésiers or the second one, but the 3rd choice for an hors d'oeuvre was rabbit terrine.  I took the rabbit terrine and chose the salade for Des - turns out that gésiers means gizzards, cow stomach - who knew?  Believe it or not, the terrine and the salad were delicious.  The gizzards were pan sautéed and tasted like beefy bacon, which makes sense considering this and bacon come from around the same part of the animal.  I was proud, I felt good, I knew Anthony Bourdain would be proud of me for the gastronomic adventure I'd just taken.  We finished up our more normal main dishes (escalope milanaise and a veal cutlet) and geared up for champagne house #1: Taittinger.

Pommery vineyards

I can sum up the tour at Taittinger with one word: sterile.  Don't get me wrong, I didn't hate it, it just didn't have any personality.  Our tour guide was great, looked great (common theme!), and was extremely nice, I just walked away feeling like Taittinger was too plain.  Mumm was simple, but it was personable, hands-on, and cozy; Taittinger was simple, too, but it was white, plain, and a sort of arms-length transaction.  Like I said, sterile.  We visited the cellars and learned that they are a "chardonnay house," meaning they like to use chardonnay grapes the most in their champagnes.  It works, too, and their goal of creating an elegant, classy brand has succeeded.  Where most of the other houses allowed you to choose the champagne(s) you would taste at the end of the tour, all you had at Taittinger was their original Brut.  It's a great champagne and it's easy to drink, but I can buy that in the stores.  Maybe I'm asking too much, but I want the choice, and I want to be able to taste champagnes that I might otherwise miss in stores - your Millésimé, your Grand Cru, your Comtes de Champagne Blanc de Blancs.  But let's end this on a good note - their Brut didn't disappoint and the history behind their house is amazing.  Definitely go here if you're a history buff.

Kicking off the Veuve Clicquot tour

About 3 blocks away lies the famed Veuve Clicquot Ponsardin house.  You know, the champagne that Wiz Khalifa drinks while rocking his yellow diamonds.  Ok, so I don't have any yellow diamonds (or white, blue, or black diamonds for that matter), but I did sip Clicquot in Reims.  Can I get half of a street cred point for that?  No?  Damn.  This tour was in French since the English tours were booked already, so this one was a little more challenging.  The weird thing is that there were more English folks than French on the tour.  We went through their history first, and our guide, although nice and (again) pretty, the script was a little B.S.  It could be that I'm insensitive and skeptical, but don't tell me that "the bottle is a darker shade since Madame Clicquot was in mourning of her dead husband" (Veuve = widow, FYI) and that "the chardonnay grape reflects Madame Clicquot's elegance and beauty while the pinot noir in the champagne shows her nurturing, maternal nature..." Blah, blah, blah.  Sorry, I don't buy it.  It didn't taint my opinion of the tour or the house, but I just couldn't help but chuckle when she would throw those nuggets at us.  The rest of the tour was great, seeing their interestingly different chalk cellars (pyramid-like caverns rather than carved-out hallways) and walking through their Aroma Garden.  In the garden, they have the organic manifestations of every aroma and taste you experience in a Veuve Clicquot glass.  They were growing white flowers, lemongrass, cherry blossoms, raspberry bushes, etc., to serve as a sort of inspiration to their master wine maker in order to keep producing the same, consistently great experience in each year's product.  In other words, go to the Aroma Garden, smell each of the plants, then go inhale a flute of Veuve Clicquot Grande Dame, and the two should be similar experiences.  Pretty awesome, right?  I know!  Our tasting was of their rosé, which was good.  Not my favorite, but I wouldn't hesitate to have another glass.

Getting closer to dinner time, Pommery was our last stop.  We joined one of the last tours of the day, set off down into their cellars, and promptly realized this was going to be... different.  Pommery has turned a small part of its cellars into a modern art exhibit, and that's the part they show you.  Um, excuse me, Miss Guide?  But why are there clay sculptures of the business end of a hippo, or a plant that looks like it's covered in maggots, or a video that looks like the end of Michael Jackson's "Black or White" video?  Whether you call that art or not, it's also really creepy.  Even though I was tired of hearing the same things by then, I would much rather have gone through the same old champagne lesson we'd heard at the 3 previous houses we'd visited so far than have to endure the "art" show.  The tasting afterward was great, made more so with the knowledge that we wouldn't have to go back into the cellar.  We asked the guy pouring everyone's champagne a few questions and we ended up getting a kind of private commentary through our tasting, so that was exciting.  Somehow we even got a 5th glass even though we only paid to share 4.  We shared flutes of their Brut Royal (great), Brut Apanage (great), Brut Rosé (not a fan, a little rubbery on the back end), Brut Grand Cru Millésimé (good, very heavy and rich), and Rosé Apanage (another good rosé to try).

Dinner was at Brasserie Flo, an upscale place right by our hotel.  It was delicious for us both, and the bottle of Bordeaux to go with was excellent.  We decided to turn in early and went back to the hotel room for TV and bed - or so we thought.  After about 15 minutes in our room, at about 10:30 or so, we began to hear... a band?  Is that a marching band playing Britney Spears' "Toxic" in the square outside our hotel?  Why, yes, yes it is!  They played for almost an hour.  We watched from our balcony until they were done, watching the crowd around them grow and a bizarre conga line form at one point, and it was a pretty cool surprise for the night (the video here is sideways, but shows part of their performance and some moving pictures of the Place d'Erlon).  So then it was bed time, because a big day awaited us.  We still had to wrap up our business in Reims and catch the train to Epernay.  A demain!

"Come quickly, I'm tasting the stars!"

A lot of people get to experience the joys of champagne - its bubbles, its aura of luxury, its beautiful propensity to pop up during celebrations and other happy moments.  Dom Pérignon provided the title of this entry when he discovered this fantastic potion, and who would disagree with him?  But how many get to experience the joys of Champagne?  You know, the region where this bottled beatitude is conceived?  Well, (humble brag alert!) Des and I are now lucky enough to be counted in that number.  And, well, I'm going to tell you about it.

Reims is the largest city in the Champagne region, and the first stop of our champagne trail - and we absolutely loved it.  In fact, I think I'd be a rather convincing travel marketer for Champagne, especially for Reims; that's how highly I think of the place.  It's exactly the right size: not too big, not too small, with enough good restaurants and nightlife to hold you over between champagne house visits.  Our stay started on a great note and provided the perfect launching point for the rest of our trip.

From our hotel room balcony

We arrived during the early afternoon on a beautiful spring day, taking an hour long TGV ride from Charles de Gaulle Airport straight into the Champenois countryside.  It's an amazing sight to see miles and miles of rolling green farmland, with brown, gnarly vines becoming more predominant as you approach Reims.  Good Feeling #1 was soon replaced by Good Feeling #2, when we realized that our hotel was right on the main square in town, la Place d'Erlon.  Our room was cozy and simple, and for the price we paid it was more than worth the value.  I don't remember seeing an air conditioning unit (doesn't mean it wasn't there, necessarily), but who needs A/C when it's low 60's and sunny outside every day that we were there?  If anything, our room would get warm, which is when we'd open the double doors on to our small balcony over looking the sunny square, listening to the hum of conversation, the clinking of silverware on cafe plates, and the buzz of distant traffic.  We also thought we heard champagne calling our names, so we were all too obliged to follow the call.

G.H. Mumm Cordon Rouge

Late in the afternoon was our 1st champagne house visit, to G.H. Mumm.  Des and I didn't have a very good idea of what they were about, and frankly we weren't sure what to expect.  However, we were blown away.  Mumm is very clean and classy, and the tour is rather simple, which I like.  There's nothing too flashy, they just let their champagne speak for itself.  We learned about the 3 types of champagne-making grapes (chardonnay, pinot noir, and pinot meunier) and their qualities (chardonnay - light and crisp, pinot noir - heavy and bold, pinot meunier - fresh and fruity), the vats they keep the new crop in, bottle sizes (the quart up to the nebuchadnezzar), and champagne-making procedures before we hoofed it down to their cellars.  With about 15 km of cellars and 25 million bottles, their cellars were about average size (crazy, right?).  Sarah was our guide, and she was great.  A good-looking Belgian girl living in Reims, she's aspiring to make it big as a female MC (artist name Sarah Blingie), so of course I was floored by this.  We talked to her for a long time, you gotta listen to her music all you up-and-coming producers out there!

After the tour, we tasted the 3 glasses of champagne we had picked out: the Cramant, Rosé, and Grand Cru.  They were all fantastic, each with distinctly different aromas.  I know this sounds naive, but before this trip I wasn't aware that different champagnes can taste so completely different.  It's really amazing tasting such different ends of the spectrum like Cramant and Grand Cru.  For those oenophiles out there, don't worry, Des or I will post on our blogs later about each of the champagnes we tasted while on the trip in much greater detail.  Anyway, back to what I'm good at - tasting.  I was a huge fan of the Grand Cru and Rosé, two very pinot noir-heavy champages.  The Mumm Rosé was wild - barely a slight shade of pink and mostly a deep gold, it had a rich, flower-and-red-fruit taste rather than the sweet and syrupy aromas of other rosés I've had before (and disliked).

Our Mumm guide Sarah suggested we try a restaurant around the corner from our hotel, Côté Cuisine.  It was sensational.  The 1st course had us hooked, when we shared a mussel soup, which was the best soup I've ever had in my life.  Yeah, that good.  The half bottle of Haut Médoc red and our main courses were just the icing on this delicious cake.  After a digestif in a bar on the Place d'Erlon and watching the French U-21 footy team beat Spain's U-21 squad, we dragged our tired but happy selves to bed.  I mean, after all, this was only Day 1; we still had 9 more days to go...