"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!