We continued our deep dive into the Champagne region and the bubbly juice that takes its name.
We started with a mom and pop tour at Champagne Lamiable in Tours-sur-Marne, France.
By this time we'd hit a good rhythm of taking shifts entertaining his highness while the other two adults enjoyed the bubbly.
They had a little pond out front so we had fun throwing rocks in and sticking our hands in and... really whatever might make the biggest mess.
We walked around the mostly deserted neighborhood and entertained ourselves as best we could. I invited a game called "ding dong" where you hit things with a stick to see what sound they make whilst saying "ding dong". I should really send my resume to Parker Brothers.
Ernie likes his mama a whole lot and sometimes wants to see her real bad. Even if he's in the middle of an engrossing game of "ding dong" in the middle of the French countryside.
Phew back with mama.
Our guide said that these blue tanks date back to the 70s. Someone has to crawl in here to clean it. Sounds like an actual nightmare, no thank you.
One barrel is 300 bottles.
I think this was the first time we got to see a place's complete current day machinery operation. Some of my notes from the outing:
The press they use has a balloon inside that inflates from the inside and is meant to more uniformly squish the juice out of the grapes. It's a delicate process because if you crush too hard you release the pigment in the skins. You can also squeeze the nasty tannin flavors out of the grape seeds if you press too hard.
The amount of juice from the grapes is regulated for quality control.
First press cuvée. Second press is darker. Third press into alcohol for pharmaceutical industry and for brandy. Fortified wine is sweet wine from bad juice with alcohol. Throwing juice away is not allowed because the government wants it all accounted for so no fake champagne is made.
Their big aluminum tanks hold 20k bottles worth of champagne. They wait to label the bottles until after they sell because the label differs depending on which country they're headed to. Climate change is good for them. They aren't allowed to irrigate because this increases the amount of water in the grape juice, lowering its quality.
Where the village defensive wall used to be.
This place had a good taste to price ratio and Zoe and I bought a case and had it shipped back to Seattle.
In the local shop windows there's been a TON of carrying cases, cool things to hang on your wall, maps, etc. with the purpose of collecting and displaying these champagne bottle caps. NOT TODAY SATAN. These days I collect only cash, passport stamps, and the dreamy gazes of female champagne tour guides.
We saved the biggest boy for last: Moët & Chandon in Épernay.
They made us wait a while but it was in a pretty cool area.
If you were wondering "did Moët & Chandon have a series of beaded embroidery pieces created to show the company's history?" well then I can put your mind at ease.
A small gripe I had was that the tour guides on the big company tours were never French. This doesn't make any difference to me other than the fact that there were a lot of words that I would've liked to hear the correct pronunciation of but the guides didn't know any better than I did.
Napoleon named Moët the official champagne supplier to his imperial court and armies. Before every military campaign, he famously stopped at the Moët estate in Épernay to stock up. The product that most people associate with the company is called Moët Impérial. Impérial was named after the late Emperor in 1869, and the house has continued to produce it under that name ever since.
“Champagne is like vampire. He hate light." Foreshadowing!! We'll soon be in Transylvania.
At the tasting at the end of the tour Ern got another bottle of his favorite vintage of chardonnay grape juice.
He didn't drink it so much as swish it around in his mouth, spit it out, then make dismissive comments regarding terroir.
I was glad we bought our wine at the smaller operations. The gift shop at this place was very unfortunate. These bottles of pink Dom Perignon were 410 euro.
One of the things on this list was 12,000 a bottle.
Back at headquarters we watched some more olympics.
