Next I walked to the Taittinger house for my tour. I chose this one as it is pretty expensive stuff and it is one of the few that I recognised that are open this time of year. The lady started by telling us the history of the company & house. It is a family owned business & they only use grapes from a small number of local families. Then we went down to the caves. Wow! There are 2km of chalk caves filled with bottles at a number of different stages in the process. They also have a bigger property in the centre of town (not open to tourists) with 10km of tunnels. In total both properties hold 26 million bottles of champagne!! Holy cow that's a lot of bubbles! She told us the step by step process of how champagne is made. It is so labour intensive! The bottles stay there for 3.5yrs for non-vintage & 10yrs for vintage. It was absolutely fascinating! Then we went for tastings. I bought a ticket that included 2 tastings: the classic and the Comtes champagne blanc de blanc 2006. Ooooh myyyy godddd! I need to get seriously rich cos that vintage Comtes was outstanding! I could drink that all the time! Even the classic was excellent!
After that I walked through town before catching a train to Epernay. It's another town in the champagne region but on the other side of the mountains. This town is home to Moet (pronounced mo-ET, not mo-E) & Chandon and the location of my second tour. I chose Moet as it is well known in Australia. From the outside this house looks quite modern and beautiful. Again we started with a history of the founder & the house. Moet dates back to the 1700's and he was friends with Napoleon. We went down into the caves again. These caves are 28km long and hold many millions of bottles. They felt much emptier than Taittinger though as they didn't have any bottles in the final stages of processing so there were lots of empty racks. There is a locked area where they keep rare, old & all the vintages. They have champagne that was bottled in 1860! It was interesting to hear the differences and similarities between the 2 houses. Moet is the largest and most popular in the champagne region. Each bottle of Moet Imperial (the normal stuff) has a blend of 150 different wines in it! They have 800 vats because the juice from each village and each type of grape has it's own vat. Again we had tastings. For me I had the Imperial & Imperial Rose. Much drier then the Taittinger I think. I know which one I prefer! Interesting fact: champagne is made from chardonnay grapes, pinot noir grapes & pinot meunier grapes. There are rules staying how much sugar, processing time etc that must be met to be classified as champagne.
After that I had a quick walk along champagne avenue and saw lots more champagne houses. Then I got the trains back to Paris & checked back into my hostel. Now its bedtime as I have a big day walking around Paris tomorrow :)
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