UK cheechako

Bubbly Anyone?

OK, so this post is a little out of order since we went to France before Spain, but I forgot to take the computer to France.

Anyway, at the end of August, Yankee Girl and I went to the Champagne region of France with the Yankee parents. Pictured above is a photo of all of us at the Piper-Heidsieck tasting room. Heidsieck is pretty cool. They have a ride that takes you through the cellars and caves and gives you an audio tour, which includes the history of PH champagne (it's like Disneyland for winos). The picture to the left is of the chalk caves which have been carved out in the shape of grapes.

Some of the other Champagne houses that we visited were (with links):
Veuve-Clicquot , Taittinger , Pommery

For those interested in more, this LINK will take you to a site listing almost 300 Champagne Houses.

While in Reims, we took a day and drove out into the country to see some of the vineyards. Eventually we arrived in Epernay. Epernay is the home of Moet & Chandon (we also have pictures of us with Mr. Perignon if you want to see them) and Perrier-Jouet.

On the way back, we also stopped at this small champagne house which was basically this woman's house. When we walked up, there were just a bunch of people sitting around having a cookout. Unfortunately, none of them spoke a word of English. Fortunately, Yankee Girl speaks a little French, and we all spoke the language of alcohol. We tasted some Champagne and biscuits, and ended up buying 3 bottles of Champagne.

We also stopped by a little Champagne village called Ay. While we were there we found this small Champagne house called Lallier. They only bottle around 200,000 bottles/year, and they only export around 15%. It's good and fairly cheap, so if you manage to find some, I would try it.


These are just some pictures of the French countryside and some pinot noir grapes that we thought were pretty cool.

posted by Yankee @ 7:43 PM