Visit of the Champagne Cellars: Veuve Cliquot & Moët Chandon – Road Trip in France #2

This article is part of our “Road Trip by Car in France” series, where we are touring France for 4 weeks in August 2020. To read the first part, click here

In the beginning, I wanted to visit only one cellar and revisit the Villa Demoiselle (just opposite Pommery), which I liked very much. But JB pointed out to me that he has ONE LVMH share and that he is a member of the shareholders’ club. So we can surely benefit from free visits to the Champagne region. That’s how we found ourselves visiting TWO cellars ahahah eh yes

Part 1: Travel Diary
Part 2: Practical Tips

Part 1: Travel Diary

Day 1 (continued)

Champagne cellars

We leave Amiens with regrets, in the direction of Reims & Epernay. Champagne is an AOC, so apart from this region & a few other authorized places, we can’t produce champagne. If Cognac (also produced in France) is mainly exported and consumed abroad, champagne is very appreciated and consumed by the French. Domestic sales are estimated at 46%. In the region, many cellars have been classified as world heritage sites by UNESCO.

If there are so many cellars, it’s because they were already there! Since antiquity, basements have been exploited for their chalk. Many Gallo-Roman chalk pits were connected to each other by galleries. Nicolas Ruinart in the middle of the 18th century was the first wine merchant to recycle these humid cellars at a stable temperature (between 10 and 13 degrees) for the aging of champagne.

Today, there are 200km of cellars and chalk cellars in the region, and millions of bottles of Champagne being aged.

How is champagne made?

• The beginning of champagne is like an ordinary wine, fermented in an ordinary way
• Then comes the blending of three grape varieties (pinot noir, meunier and chardonnay) from several years of harvesting, and the recipe changes from one house to another
• The vintages are bottled, a little yeast and sugar is added to make bubbles
• A second fermentation takes place, this fermented sugar is transformed into alcohol and carbon dioxide.
• This is followed by stirring, which allows the dead yeast and deposits to concentrate at the head of the bottle.
• The bottles are put upside down and tilted, and turned regularly. It used to be done by hand, now it’s automatic
• The neck of the bottle with all the deposit is put in an icy mixture of nitrogen.
• The deposit turns into an ice cube and will be expelled at the opening under the pressure of the carbon dioxide contained in the bottle
• Some champagne is lost in this process, so to fill the bottle to the brim, the expedition liquor is added.
• Depending on the dosage of this liqueur (more or less sugar), we obtain semi-dry, brut, extra brut or plain champagne

Visit of the cellars of Veuve Clicquot

We leave Amiens at 12:35 pm precisely and are even in advance for the visit at 4:30 pm at Veuve Clicquot. The yellow color, the decorations and the foodtruck in the garden are very modern.

We will visit the cathedral of Reims and attend the sound & light show in front of the Cathedral (I will tell you about it in another article).

Day 2

Visit of Moët & Chandon’s cellars

Moët & Chandon is located in Epernay, 23 minutes by car from Reims. Even if the champagne houses look a bit tight here, there is a large parking lot reserved for visitors, don’t worry. We are there from 9:30 am because we still have a long day of visits ahead of us.

At Moët & Chandon, the marketing pitch is: “we are the biggest champagne house” + Napoleon liked us a lot (although he just stopped by and offered them something). Moët & Chandon’s “brut impérial” is in fact a reference to Napoleon. However, we learn much more about champagne making than with Veuve Clicquot. The tasting is conducted by a real sommelier who also worked in the vineyards, so we learned a lot and enjoyed the visit.

Unfortunately, we don’t visit real cellars where the bottles of champagne for sale are stored – because the riddling is done with a machine now, it’s less sexy than showing us the “traditional” cellars. So the bottles we see are just for home use, to study the evolution of the champagnes for example. These bottles are still stirred by hand, so it’s more visual and more authentic to show to tourists.

Domaine Pommery & Villa Demoiselle

Due to lack of time, the visit of the cellars of the Pommery house isn’t part of this road trip, but I add it anyway in this article because this visit marked me. We went there 5 or 6 years ago. I remember having a guide who kept telling us that she had been trained for 2 weeks to become a guide at Pommery. She seemed very impressed but very proud to have been trained for so long. The one-hour visit consisted in showing us the different stages of champagne making but it was so complex and not very educational that we didn’t understand anything but nobody dared to say it, moreover, she was very haughty and made very aristo (surely at the request of the house). At the end, when the guide asked us if we had any questions, a tourist took her courage in both hands, for the good of the whole group, to ask the question “by the way, how is the champagne made? It is at this moment that we finally realized ahahah that nobody had understood anything, without her, we would have made one hour of visit without learning anything 😀

The cellars of Pommery were huge and we loved to see thousands of dusty bottles without labels sleeping behind bars, like gold ingots… Some of them date from before the war. After the tasting (offered with the visit) of the champagne of the house (we had the choice between different types of champagne if I am not mistaken) which did not impress me much (I am not very alcoholic), we were expected for the rest of the visit: the Villa Demoiselle.

Luckily JB opted for this visit because at that time I didn’t know what it was and why it was necessary to visit it, but I preferred this visit to the cellars. This villa was abandoned and very damaged. Squatted and almost destroyed (squatters used to destroy the parquet floor to warm up), Paul-François Vranken, president of Champagne Vranken, bought the villa in 2004, and undertook restoration work for five years. The villa is splendid, a masterpiece of Art Deco and Art Nouveau, but the guided tour was exceptional. It was the first time I had enjoyed a guided tour so much. For a small villa as well. Here too, the house asked the guide to choose an aristo accent but she was not haughty at least.

I enjoyed this visit too much! It seems to me that this villa was used to welcome the children of the directors of Vranken Pommery during the vacations. The parquet has been completely redone and comes from the wood of the wine barrels, hence the natural “tie and dye” color. There is another parquet floor with very complex patterns and entirely handmade. The decorations have been made with custom stencils, or painted by hand. Many details have been applied with gold leaf. The staircase, although small, is beautiful and has been completely redone by a very well known craftsman (sorry, it was a long time ago, and I never remember the names). We ended the visit with a small room where we could show pictures of the villa before, and some information about the restoration. This villa is a tribute to French craftsmanship.

In short, I highly recommend you to visit the Villa Demoiselle, separately or with the visit of the cellars.
Visit “le Rêve d’Henry Vasnier”, Visit of the cellar and the Villa Demoiselle 90 minutes for 45€ My opinion comes from a visit made a few years ago, I don’t know if the quality is still the same in 2020.

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After these visits, we realize that everyone is friends with everyone in this environment. The houses finally buy the same harvests from all over the region, so it isn’t necessarily the quality of the grapes that changes from one house to another, but it is the creator of the house, like the “nose” for the perfumes, who is responsible for the specific taste of each house and who decides if there is a vintage or not in that year. For our part, we find it quite sad to see so few vineyards. I thought I would see as far as the eye can see, but it’s hard to see a tiny one around Epernay, which nevertheless proclaims itself as the capital of champagne.

The continuation of our road trip, it’s this way

Part 2: Practical Tips

Useful links

• More information about the Shareholders’ Clubs here
• 4 weeks Road Trip in France by car: program & detailed plans here
• These points of interest are part of the +800 tourist places in France that we recommend. To access free Google Maps of these 800 places, click here
• More info about our car rental at Leclerc here
• Accommodations: ibis Centre(Link Booking)
• To see more activities & excursions, go to Viator ( a Tripadvisor company)

Budget

• Cellar visit & tasting at Veuve Cliquot Esprit Clicquot : 30 euros
• Cellar visit & tasting at Moët & Chandon L’iconique : 25 euros
• Visit“le Rêve d’Henry Vasnier“, Visit of the cellar and the Villa Demoiselle 90 minutes for 45€
• Accommodation: ibis Centre in Reims for 60 euros, very well located and well decorated, I highly recommend(Link Booking)