"Or... you could spend a month with a distant relative you've only met once...in a foreign town you've never heard of..."
That was the alternative my dad gave me when I asked to do a month-long study abroad program in France. It was the summer after my freshman year in college, and firmly within the narrow window of time when a person is most likely to go along with a scenario that sounds like the plot for an episode of "Locked Up Abroad". On the surface, my dad's plan seemed pretty solid, but there were plenty of unknowns only people under the age of 25 would be willing to ignore. As a fully formed adult, you couldn't pay me to share plumbing with a person I barely know for a full month, with no smart phone, no car, and a weakly-conversational grasp of the local language. To my dad, though--it was a discount solution to an otherwise expensive problem. In his defense, the university-sponsored trip would cost multiple thousands of dollars, while his proposal would be the price of a plane ticket and whatever mutual patience is required for two total strangers to spend a month together. Plus, the demands on me were going to be laughably low. No school work, no work study--just spending time with my grandmother's brother, who'd recently lost his wife. I would get to experience France like a retiree at 19 and my great-uncle would get a little companionship. Win, win.
So I went. And it literally changed the course of my life. It was the first time I'd ever done something totally alone, that none of my siblings had ever done before me. I ate well, I drank even better, and I got the chance to really use a language I'd been listening to my grandmother speak since I was 6 years old. I'd taken French in school for years, but I'd never made a real attempt to have a full conversation. Trying, failing, and gradually succeeding was the most challenging and invigorating thing I'd ever done. After struggling to express myself in a foreign language, I came home and changed my major to Communication Disorders, so that I could help people learn to overcome difficulties in speaking their own language. I also took the leap and made plans to go back to France for a real study abroad program this time--a full semester with other students under the age of 75. But that's another story.
The foreign town I'd never heard of was Épernay, one village in a cluster of cities that make up the Champagne region. Much like "the tri-state area" or the "Research Triangle" back in the U.S., this northeast corner of France has 3 major commercial centers: Reims, known as "the capital of Champagne", Troyes, which I still know literally nothing about, and Épernay, home to my great-uncle Jean-Marie, roughly 20,000 people, and approximately 35 champagne houses. By contrast, I currently live in the suburbs of a medium-sized, city in the southern U.S., with about 75,000 people and exactly zero champagne houses. That's mainly because we just can't make that kind of wine here. It's hotter than fuck most of the time and wine is a fickle business. But more importantly, like Chianti, you can't call your wine "champagne" unless it's made in that very specific geographical area.
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| View from a side street off Avenue de Champagne |
So, as you might have guessed, in a very small town with an incredibly high concentration of champagne, that's pretty much the whole economy. Everyone there is either directly involved in the industry or supporting it through the shops, restaurants, services, and agriculture that keep it running. My great-uncle, for instance, had retired from a position in international sales with Moët et Chandon, whose entire operation was a block away from his house. At least once while I was staying with him, the Moët truck came by to drop off a shipment for his personal wine cellar, with all the ceremony of an Amazon delivery van. To my great-uncle, there was no other champagne (even if he did take me to tour Ruinart in Reims during my stay). We never toured Moët, but he gave me a glass of it just about every night before dinner as an aperitif, along with a tiny European-sized serving of nuts or seasoned crackers while we watched the the French Open on TV. It was the cutest.
My great-uncle, affectionately known as "Oncle Jean" (pronounced "Onkla Jean"), passed away almost 20 years ago. It was the week before my wedding. While he introduced me to countless family members during my stay, he was the only one I'd really kept in touch with. I'd told plenty of people about Epernay over the years, but almost no one in my life had ever been there (outside of my immediate family). Until April of 2024, while we were living in London for the month. We'd already planned on taking the Chunnel to Paris for a vacation-within-our-vacation, but Ray organized a day trip to Épernay midway through the week, so that he and the boys could finally see it for themselves. That, and so mom and dad could drink a bunch of champagne while the kids played Uno. Here's how it went...
Arrival in Épernay
The day of our Épernay excursion got off to a rough start. Our first champagne tour wasn't until 1:00, but we took the train early with the hope of walking around town beforehand. The train ride was easy enough and just under 90 minutes. We arrived at about 9:00--and I needed to go to the bathroom. Bad. And not the kind of way you want to take care of on a moving train. To my relief and surprise, the train station was equipped with the coveted "single-hitter" restroom (i.e., one room, one toilet, one individually lockable door) and no one but us waiting to use it. Unfortunately, to my profound dismay, there was absolutely no toilet paper. In fact, the entire dispensing apparatus had been ripped from the wall, as if to say, "We know why you're here and you can fuck all the way off".
Having been in London for the preceding two weeks, I really should have been better prepared. I'd grown accustomed to walking around with a stash of tissues and paper napkins in my purse, just to ensure that I could pee properly while out and about. The likelihood of a city toilet stall having toilet paper was low. The tuft-style tissue dispenser was also disturbingly common and always seemed to jam, so that the only way to get a new sheet of toilet paper out of the tiny plastic pinhole was with a set of jeweler's magnifying glasses and a pair of tweezers. The American last resort of brown paper towels was also out of the question, as both the UK and Europe care a lot more about the environment that we do. That's right; paperless hand-drying machines only. So while I absolutely should have known better, I'd forgotten to restock my purse with paper products. There would be no #2 at the Épernay train station for me. Time to clench and move on.
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| Taken from Gare d'Épernay |
Once we left the train station, we were just a five minute walk from the City Hall building (called the Hôtel de Ville), where a bunch of school children had gathered for the start of a race. An adult was talking to them through a megaphone as we wandered through the gardens behind the building.
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| Hôtel de Ville |
In a perfect world, we'd envisioned letting the boys throw the Frisbee and run around in the green space--but it wasn't clear what was happening with this race situation. And, it was colder than shit. While both London and Paris had started to warm up by the last week in April, it was very much still winter in Epernay. The feeble sunlight had flirted with the idea of coming out at first, but it disappeared as soon as we started walking through town. The sky was overcast, intermittently weeping a cold rain onto our faces while a biting wind lashed at every inch of exposed skin. We paused at one point in the doorway of an apartment building like a family of hobos to force our children into a set of rain jackets. As any parent of a middle-schooler knows, all outerwear beyond the ubiquitous hoodie sweatshirt is tantamount to child abuse, and my kids were already wearing what they considered the maximum amount of outerwear. They refused to recognize the added benefit of a water-repellent layer, even as the cold mist collected in their hair and streamed down their faces.
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| Walking down Rue Maurice Cerveaux |
We spent a few minutes whisper-yelling our rationale for rain-jackets-over-hoodies on a deserted side street. We'd seen maybe one pedestrian and very few cars since we'd arrived. The permanent residents of Épernay were likely watching us from their windows, laughing to themselves as we stuck out like cold, wet, American sore thumbs in a climate they knew better than to mess with until summer. Again, I should have known better. My first stay in Épernay had lasted from mid-May to mid-June. I'd shown up in my North Carolina tank tops, only to freeze my ass off half the time I was here. The average annual temperature in Épernay likes to hover in the 50s--which feels great in the sun. In a constant drizzle, however, it feels like sadness and regret--which is pretty much where my mental state was headed thus far into our Champagne adventure. I had talked about this place for half my life to anyone who would listen, but so far, it was not living up to the hype.
Too early to visit the Champagne houses and too cold to enjoy ourselves otherwise, I dragged my soggy family to take a picture in front of my Oncle Jean's house on Rue Maurice Cerveaux. Like many of the homes in the town center, the front wall of the house was flush with the sidewalk, the driveway hidden behind a gate of green metal too tall to see over. All we could see on this particular day was the big green metal gate, so that's where I had the kids pose with me. I didn't know who lived there now, but it was all still very alive in my memory...
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| Oncle Jean in his courtyard (Fall 2000) |
Oncle Jean's black Peugeot was parked in the cozy courtyard next to his late-wife's tiny white hatchback. He'd offered to let me drive it, but I was too uncoordinated to drive stick and too clueless to know where to go. The tall stone walls of the courtyard were covered in ivy that turned bright red in the fall. A set of stone steps led up to a door on the side of the house, and inside, the kitchen table was spread with the stereotypical red-and-white-checkered tablecloth where Oncle Jean's Portuguese housekeeper had laid out the best lunches of my life. We washed them down with red wine, followed them with cheese, and downed a shot of espresso with a single square of dark chocolate--because that's what you do when you're retired and ready for a nap in the middle of the day. My uncle would excuse himself for what he called a "petite sieste" and I'd hang out in the guest room, trying to read The Notebook through my drooping eyelids until I finally admitted to myself that 19-year-olds nap too...
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| The guest room at Oncle Jean's (Summer 1998) |
Fast-forward nearly 25 years to this cold day in April... someone standing in the parlor could've seen four damp Americans through their front window, snapping photos like sightseers in LA looking for Jack Nicholson's house. If the current homeowners saw us, they politely let us linger, rather than bang on the glass with a "WTF?" gesture before shooing us along. It was surely anti-climactic for Ray and the kids, actively contracting pneumonia for a picture in front of this dumpster-colored gate. It was worth it for me, though--as personal pilgrimages to long-lost, beloved places usually are.
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| Posing in front of Oncle Jean's House |
The Boulangerie
After our photo opp on Rue Maurice Cerveaux, we walked 5 minutes back across town to have impromptu brunch at a little shop called Gourmandises d'Amaelle that falls under the categories of both "boulangerie" and "patisserie". "Patisserie" sounds a lot like the English word "pastry" and refers to an establishment that specializes in artisanal bakery treats like eclairs, operas, madeleines, and biscuits roses de Reims. "Boulangerie" sounds a lot like the English word for a "boutique" that sells "lingerie", but it basically means "bread bakery". And since baking bread is a boulangerie's time-honored specialty, go ahead and prepare yourself for some life-changing bread. A plain baguette from one of these places is the very definition of "something to write home about". Add carefully crafted meats, cheeses, or butter to the mix and you may just forget about "home" entirely. For a family traveling in France, the boulangerie offers a low-key culinary masterclass in culturally authentic cuisine. The food is accessible via counter service and kid-friendly AF in its flavor profile. You'll spend less than you would at a sit-down meal and still feel like you've tasted something special. As a boulangerie-patisserie, Gourmandises d'Amaelle offered tasty sandwiches alongside kick-ass desserts, and helped us kill time until the champagne houses opened for tastings on the Avenue de Champagne.
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| Gourmandise d'Amaelle |
The Avenue de Champagne
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| Giant globe at the base of AC (aka, Avenue de Champagne) |
The Avenue de Champagne was a few blocks north of my uncle's house and it's exactly what it sounds like: a mile-long main street lined with roughly 20 champagne houses. Basically, it's the Bermondsey Beer Mile of champagne. Except that, while Bermondsey Beer Mile is a relatively recent phenomenon, these houses have existed for hundreds of years, owned by regional families who've intermarried, competed, and collaborated for centuries of champagne-making. Because champagne can only be made from grapes grown in the Champagne region, these families have shared the finite resource of land that rises in the hills around Épernay and into only a few neighboring villages and cities. The champagne houses lining the avenue are the store-fronts of champagne-making operations that range in size from multiple city blocks, like Moët et Chandon and Perrier-Jouet, to structures that are literally houses of champagne, in that they are, quite frankly, someone's house.
Maison Collard-Picard
Maison Collard-Picard was our first stop, a newer house founded in 1996 by a husband-and-wife team with degrees in things like "viticulture" and "oenology". Their building had an inviting little gated courtyard with a small collection of umbrella'd patio tables arranged just so in a zen garden of bright white pebbles. The signage was very discreet, to the point that we weren't 100% sure they were open, but we nevertheless walked sheepishly into a "tasting room" that might also have been the foyer of a boutique real estate office. The "bar" was more of an elevated counter or "front desk" situation, and the two ladies behind it weren't quick to acknowledge us when we walked in. There were four of us, after all--and two of us were clearly children, but they were definitely waiting on one of us to burp out some broken French before they'd engage. They turned out to be very pleasant, though slightly taken aback by the question about whether or not the tasting room was "ouvert"(aka, open). I mean, obviously, was their implied response, along with the unspoken caveat of: It's also 11am, you messy Americans.
To be fair... they were not wrong. And I totally get it. It was not even noon on a Wednesday. But if the town is day-tripping distance from Paris, you know we weren't the first set of eager beavers they'd encountered trying to make it up and down the Avenue de Champagne before the last train. According to the legend, Dom Perignon claimed to be "drinking stars" the first time he tasted champagne. We were at the source, the bubbling, beating heart of it. There's no shame in showing up early to appreciate it.
Lucky for us, the sun finally came out, and with it came the few other tourists who'd apparently been waiting in the wings for us to break the seal on the Avenue tasting rooms. Ray and I sampled our glasses of Collard-Picard at the tables in the courtyard while our kids played cards. At one point, I ducked back into the tasting room to use the bathroom, which was a narrow broom-closet-like space so tight, I had to suck in to close the door. It had the look and feel of a bathroom at your grandma's house, right down to the decorative hand towels. It appeared to be built to the exact measurements of the tiny French ladies who ran the tasting room, and gave the me the familiar bull-in-a-china-shop feeling I'd often experienced in France as a sturdy, American-sized woman. Had Ray decided to pee during our visit, he would've had to leave the door ajar and aim from a distance like the cartoon on a Calvin and Hobbes bumper sticker. Fortunately, we made it out before anyone else had to go, but we did pause for a photo in front of the random white bear statue at the far end of the courtyard. Again, the signage was very minimal, so the significance of this oddly placed art wasn't obvious--but I've since come to find out that there's actually an art gallery within the Collard-Picard champagne house. It showcases the work of an artist named Richard Orlinski, who specializes in large geometric animal sculptures...
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| The geometric bear |
Champagne de Venoge
Less than 300 meters from Collard-Picard, we stopped into Champagne de Venoge. De Venoge was a larger and sleeker operation, with another gated courtyard enclosing de Venoge-related structures. The main house straight ahead reminded me of the boarding school from the Madeleine books (minus the vines). Known as Hôtel de Venoge, it was built in 1899 and was once the family home of Perrier-Jouet Champagne's president. It's currently considered a UNESCO World Heritage site and became the property of Champagne de Venoge in 2014. To the right side of the courtyard was the tasting room, with outdoor seating for less brutal weather days. We opted for seating indoors, where drink tables were distributed among a series of tufted blue velvet couches and banquettes. L'Ecurie as the tasting room is called, is a renovated 19th century horse-stable that now serves as the bar and shop of Champagne de Venoge. The interior was pretty swanky, a far cry from its horse barn beginnings. Very few tables were occupied at such an early hour and no one gave us the stink-eye for busting with children.
They offered small plates (nuts, cheese, humus, smoked salmon on toast) in addition to a champagne menu, and non-alcoholic selections (like soda) were available for the kids. You could order champagne by the glass beginning at 12 euro with their cheapest version, or by the bottle, with prices ranging from 41 euro to 265 euro. Tasting flights were available in 3 variations: 2 glasses of their least expensive, 2 glasses of their mid-range, or 4 glasses of mid-to-high priced varieties. We enjoyed the low-level flight while the boys dove back into Uno.
At one point, we noticed a honey bee crawling along the seat next to us. While we were deciding what to do about it, the female component of an older French couple slid into the booth and sat her ass right on top of it. After a series of wide-eyed, "oh shit..." looks were exchanged with my kids, I summoned just enough French to communicate that someone was about to be on the business end of a bee sting to the butthole. The French word for "bee" is apparently "abeille", which the lady was kind enough to share after mildly freaking out and successfully shooing it onto the floor. While I'd been able to adequately convey there was "un insecte" under her ass, the lady at de Venoge deserves all the credit for reminding me that it was actually "une abeille"--and for giving my kids a few seconds of added entertainment in Épernay. I wish I could say the bee was unharmed and happily returned to pollinating the world, but it's safe to assume the abeille didn't make it...
Moët et Chandon
The next stop was Moët et Chandon, a 6-minute walk from Champagne de Venoge and the first of two cellar tours scheduled for the day. Moet (pronounced "mwet") is the home of Dom Perignon, the former workplace of my great-uncle, and probably the most familiar champagne label in the U.S., thanks to decades of mid-song name-dropping by everyone from Freddie Mercury to Snoop and Pharrell.
The footprint of Moët is enormous, with estate-like properties on both sides of the Avenue. Before the tour, we were ushered into a gilded room that looked like a salon from Bridgerton, where you'd play the harpsichord and wait for the next Lady Whistledown letter to drop. Refreshment stations were set up on antique buffets with pitchers of still and sparkling water and everyone got white Moët et Chandon ribbons tied to their wrists, like we'd been marked for sale in a posh boutique. The decor was upscale chateau-chic, with antique chairs that were only comfortable if you sat up straight and mirrored walls reminding you that you're painfully underdressed for the ball. The wall displayed a framed list of "illustrious sovereigns and important people" who have visited Moët et Chandon since its inception in 1743, including both Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington (who ultimately beat Napoleon's ass at the Battle of Waterloo).
As one of the bigger and more famous houses on the street, Moët et Chandon proudly offers a variety of guided tours on which children are permitted. While kids are technically allowed, I wouldn't say they're necessarily welcome, depending on their ages. By "children", they're referring to kids like mine, whose spirits have been gradually broken by school and exposure to intermittent parental rage, making them capable of standing still and shutting the hell up when someone else is talking. The tour was on foot, so reliable walking skills also gave my older kids the edge in terms of safety and low potential for getting lost...
Younger children are a bit more unpredictable. On our leg of the tour, a young Argentinian couple brought along an infant and a 3 year-old, both of whom visibly tested the patience of our tour guide throughout the experience. As you probably know, infants tend to cry whenever the mood strikes and don't really give a shit if they drown out the voice of your guide as he's trying to list Pinot noir, Pinot meunier, and chardonnay as the grape varieties used to make Moët. Likewise, a 3-year-old doesn't see the danger in squirming out of their parent's grasp and running down a dimly lit underground tunnel with breakable glass bottles from floor to ceiling. The Argentinian couple was doing their best, but they'd essentially brought a ticking time bomb and rabid squirrel on the tour. The guide was thoroughly unamused, but did a good job of powering through, nonetheless.
At the end of the tour, adults got to sample 3 varieties of Moët, while the kids were offered white grape juice in fancy glasses. This location wasn't a good place to whip out the Uno cards, but the tasting was generous and the tasting room itself was a great backdrop for pictures.
Champagne Paul-Etienne St. Germain
En route to the second and final cellar tour of the day, we stopped at the house of Paul-Etienne St. Germain. An easy 9-minute walk from Moët, one of the biggest and oldest houses on the street, Paul-Etienne St. Germain was one of the smallest and newest. According to their website, the house was founded by another husband-and-wife team, who named the business after their kids sometime within the past decade or so. As we approached the house from the sidewalk, it looked for all the world like someone's family home, and as far as I could tell--it was. We walked up to the front door like a group of Girl Scouts hoping to off-load some Thin Mints and were greeted by a graceful older woman who may have lived there. She ushered us into the "tasting room" (which was basically the front parlor) and served us from a portable bar in the corner of the room where a cozy sectional couch could just as easily have gone. The boys took a seat in the bay window of the room and maintained a somewhat awkward silence as we chatted quietly with the guide and sampled what she had to offer. There was nothing for the boys to do but sit there and smile, so we didn't linger too long, but it was still a worthwhile experience. As what might be considered a "micro-brewer" of champagne, a house like theirs wouldn't have the funds to export to the U.S., so tasting their product was a unique privilege we absolutely wouldn't have back home.
Champagne de Castellane
Champagne Mercier was our last stop on the Avenue de Champagne and the site of our final cellar tour. Mercier was 4-minutes walking distance from Champagne Paul Etienne St. Germain with a traffic circle known as Place du Champagne midway between the two. On the north side of the circle, we could see what looked like a chess piece made from Minecraft blocks. The tower of Champagne Castellane had fallen off our list of attractions for the day, but it was easy to see rising above the skyline of neighboring structures.
Champagne de Castellane was founded in 1895. Its tour includes a trip 8 floors up to the top of the tower for a panoramic view of the city and surrounding vineyards. Earlier in the week, we'd given my older son a near-panic attack with our ascent of the Eiffel Tower--so it's probably just as well that we skipped this one... The Castellane Tower is not nearly as tall and much more enclosed than the Eiffel. But one tower per week seemed like plenty at the time.
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| Replica of the giant wine cask |
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| View from a side street off Avenue de Champagne |
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| En route to the train station in the sunshine |
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