Tuesday : Overcast then Sunny

We were going on a tour of the Moët & Chandon cellars this morning. We picked breakfast up at a store and had it on our walk back into town. We thankfully gave ourselves enough time because I stepped in a huge pile of dog dodo, and had to clean it off my shoe in a park before going into the champagne house.

The tour was very good the guide gave us the run down on the history of Moët and the house. She then lead us down into the dark cellars. Moët is the largest producer of champagne in the region and that make it the largest in the world. There are just over 100kms of cellars underneath Epernay and M&C has 28kms of them. The cellars are in 3 levels, 30m deep. Over 80million bottles of wine are down there! Also there are over 30000 hectares of vineyards in champagne and Moët & Chandon has 1200 hectares and come harvest combines with other growers and takes on a further 3500 hectares and employes more than 3000 grape pickers.

She also told us what grapes are used in the different types of champagne that Moët produces. She also went through the two stages of fermentation it takes to make the champagne. The bubbles are produced naturally in the bottle over time after a injection of yeast, and it takes 2.5 years for the cheapest bottle of Moët from grape picking to get the finished product. We also went into the dom perinon cellars, and were told how they have to hand turn all their bottles daily! Throughout the two fermentation stages, they are extremely strict on the quality of the grapes too. That's why the Dom perinon champagne is only produced in certain years, they only produce the wine when the grapes are perfect. The tour finished after the tasting and then we walked through the gift shop, we were pretty close to buying some Dom.

After the umming and arrring in the Moët shop, we went and did a tasting at another house up champagne ave. The champagne had a very different taste to Moët, and was still very good. We couldn't do anymore tastings just yet, because the houses close for a couple hours for lunch. So that's what we went and did.

When we were ready to come back into town the sun had come out. Kim said the sun had come out because I stepped in dog poo and that I should step in some more next time there was no sun and we wanted it to be nice and warm.

We walked up to a Vineyard nearby to hotel, where we saw the strangest machine driving up between the rows of vines spraying the grapes. It looked like a giant spider on tiny wheels. We then went for a nice slow walk around town before visiting two more champagne houses, and drank champagne in the sun. They were very good tastings, very nice wines. The two girls went through the whole range of their wines and we ended up buying a couple bottles.

It was a lot of fun today, drinking champagne in champagne! Would definitely do it again. When we had spent all or money It was late in the afternoon and we went back to the hotel to have dinner and do some more trip planning.