Bringin' the (Cham)pagne

Myself, the Baguette Winner and two of our friends hopped on a train to Epernay, in the Champagne region. That’s where they make the champagne.

The easiest way to explain it - even down to the travel time – is that it’s just Martinborough. A cute little town set up to accommodate tourists for a day or weekend, there to tour the champagne houses.

We kicked it off with a tour of Mercier. The pride and joy of their house is a really big barrel:

The cask was made for the World Fair in 1889, and nicknamed the ‘Cathedral of Champagne. Apparently, it was such a big deal that it was considered the main attraction of the Fair – alongside a little metal structure made by a chap named Eiffel. It doesn’t get a shout out in the Wikipedia entry for the Fair, however, and I’m starting to think that Mercier’s promotional video may have taken some liberties. According to Wikipedia, the main attraction (aside from the Eiffel Tower) was in fact a “Negro Village”, but perhaps Mercier felt that mentioning this would be a tad negative.

To get the cask to the fair, Mr Mercier had to buy and then demolish five houses. They seemed rather proud of this fact.

The tour included a slightly bizarre laser-guided train tour of the cellars (which they refer to as caves, with good reason). This was way slower and more boring than it looked in the pictures, as there really isn’t a lot to see. The trouble is, these vast, endless cellar/cave things pretty much look the exact same the whole way. The histories of these places are obviously pretty interesting, but all the best bits of this were detailed in the promo video mentioned above. And the cellars are pretty much full of bottles that just sit there and don’t get touched for awhile, so unless you’re a identical-stationary-bottles-with-no-labels-ophile, there isn’t much to see. What did make it impressive was the size, and the fact that these tunnels had been around since Queen Victoria.

The good news was that the tour finished with two glasses of champagne (a brut and a rosé), and it had barely hit midday. So can’t really complain.

After Mercier, we took ourselves back down ‘Champagne Avenue’ and into Epernay, in search of a traditional French lunch. We managed to find this at La Cave a Champagne, a funny little Fawlty Towersy restaurant, which had a collection of Michelin Guides on a shelf, but did not in fact have a Michelin Star. [It is in the Guide, though]. It was a very classically French menu, meaning that everything was either in a cream, butter or cheese sauce, and it was very good for the price (€20 for three courses). The huge disappointment, for me, was seeing the chicken come out to every other table, immediately after I had ordered the fish. I just don’t like fish as much as chicken. When will I learn?

You can read more about this meal (which included snails!) here.

After lunch, feeling tired and full (all that cream!), we stumbled back up Champagne Avenue to check out Moët. They didn’t have a big barrel, but they did have a statue of Dom Perignon:

This tour began with one of the tackiest promotional videos I have ever seen. People were audibly giggling during its screening. Luckily, it’s on Youtube!

Let’s examine some of the finer points:

-       Great generic music; because nobody is so rich that they want to pay royalites;

-       Every time we saw that finger delicately tracing the rim of the glass, people laughed. Is it a pensive gesture? Sensual? Erotic? It is clearly meant to be evocative of something, but we all just thought it was stupid.

-       “Pioneer in technology and innovative research”: A whiteboard pen? That would be a huge claim to fame, indeed.

-       The main problem with this video is that it says ABSOLUTELY NOTHING OF VALUE. Did you know that Moët is owned by the same company as Henessy and Louis Vitton, two other standards of luxury? Why not throw that in? Or how about showing some of the process, or giving some of the history?

-       This is literally the bit in Entourage where all of the talent agencies are trying are sign Vinnie, and they all show virtually identical clips beginning with “BMW…Rolex…Vincent Chase”. Nobody buys this crap.

I guess it’s not that bad. But they actually sat us down with a straight face and had us watch this. We had already paid, so who were they trying to convince? And if they really wanted to sell champagne, this would have been a far more tasteful advertisement:

The good news is that the tour itself went straight uphill after this. The cellars in these places are directly under the buildings, so we went from watching that dumb video, straight down a marble staircase in the same room. Suddenly, we were in the caves where they store millions of bottles of champagne. Of course, it looked virtually identical to the Mercier caves, even though each house would claim that it was the ‘original’ or whatever.

For this tour, there was no train, and we actually had a human guide (about 15-20 people in our group). This meant that we could ask questions and interact a little more. Our guide could pick up a bottle and point out the sediment, for example, and demonstrate how they are rotated. There still wasn’t a lot to see down there, but it felt much more informative.

Moët & Chandon also produce Dom Perignon, which you will recognise from your favourite rapper’s humble-brags. Dom Perignon is strictly a vintage champagne, which means that all of the grapes used are from a single year, deemed to have produced an especially good crop. There were other facts about what made it special, but you have Wikiepdia.

"Y'all drink Dom but not rosé..."

A few fun champagne facts before we end this thing:

-       You know how champagne bottles are really thick? That’s because they used to explode all the time (due to the bubbles). Apparently, Dom Perignon himself may have come up with this solution.

-       The Moët people claim that “magnum” is the best size for champagne, because it has the best volume to surface area ratio (ie, the amount of wine touching the air pocket at the top). There’s a good chance that this is just the size they wanted us to buy, for margin reasons and whatnot.

-       Champagne is fermented in the same bottle right the way through, in either your standard bottle or a magnum. If you buy a bottle bigger than a magnum, it will have been filled from other bottles (and this is why they reckon magnums are better tasting).

A Be'er-Do-Well In Paris

I’ve been keeping a close eye on Parisian beer habits. I can confirm that they drink beer. Throughout my study, I have made some observations; have had some thoughts. I will try and have these thoughts again, in writing.

Beer we go!

The beers here seem to fall into two broad categories: lager pilseners (Heineken and Kronenberg 1664 are everywhere!) and strong “Abbey” beers, which are typically Belgian (Leffe, for instance). There is very little of anything hoppy, not an IPA in sight. Not much dark beer (except for Guinness), not much “amber” and nothing “low carb”. While most of it is better than your standard Lion Brewery stuff back home, I am yet to have a beer here that is more than “just another beer”. The beer aisles at supermarkets are nothing like the long, packed shelves back in Wellington. Everything is beerily similar.

One of the more perplexing differences between New Zealand and France (it’s probably more than just France, but how should I know?) is the slight difference in serving sizes. For instance, instead of 600mL bottles of soft drinks, they go for 500mL. Instead of 330mL bottles, they prefer 250mL or 500mL (they also refer to these as 25cL or 50cL. I can only assume this is some high-brow existentialist maths). This actually makes sense; 600mL is a stupid volume. Half a litre is more common sense (by the way, 2.25L?). But having had the 600mL, I just can’t get used to the smaller bottles. I bet that’s how Heidi Klum feels.

You can get beer in 33mL bottles and cans, but it’s far less popular than the littlies and the slightly biggeries. I’m told you can also get craft beer, but it is rarely on tap, and the range is not like back home. Which seems odd. You would expect there to be a vast range of beers from all over Europe, each nation’s export claiming to be superior to the next. But maybe this is that thing that you always hear about: the snooty (read: xenophobic) French. They know what they like, and what they like is usually French (or Belgian, but what’s the diff?).

[Beer in mind, I realise that a great deal of the beers here are not from France. I am trying to say that the stereotype of the French not being open to new ideas might be reflected in their beer selection, as it is not varied. Like Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends.]

Before leaving New Zealand, people kept warning me about the French, and how they can be so rude if you don’t speak le français. I haven’t found that thus far. Most people are very nice. In fact, just this evening, a man rang our doorbell, wanting to advertise that he is a real estate agent, and if we ever want to move apartments, here is his business card. He spoke about as much English as I do French, so this (theoretically) short interaction took about five minutes, with both of us trying to express something or other in horrific versions of the other’s mother tongue. It was delightful. Pointless, as we are locked into our lease for a year (something I failed to express immediately), but delightful. There have been two occasions where people have said something to me in French, and then become pretty brassed off when I replied with “je ne parle pas français”. One was an apparently crazy old woman, and the other was a 20ish young guy who I think wanted to seem tough. I could have taken either of them.

Sorry for the tangent. Thanks for beering with me. I mentioned earlier the strong beer fetish. It is perfectly acceptable to stroll around the streets, parks and canals of Paris with one of these things:

That’s proper homeless territory, as far as I’m concerned. Just this morning, I saw a guy, mid-thirties, suit and tie, leisurely heading off towards the metro with one of them in his hand. It was 10:30am! He’d probably just brushed his teeth. And this is pretty popular over this way. It seems pretty much the norm to have a big, strong beer for brunch, on a work day, while you walk, pushing a pram. Maybe it’s a bohemian, life-is-meaningless-type thing (you know, Jacque Kerouac-style). All I know is, if I ever drink one of these things, somebody better get John Kirwan on the phone:

When I Googled Faxe Extra Strong, I got a bunch of “Worst Beers Ever” reviews. That is a litre of 10% beer in one can. Don’t tell Family First.

On the plus-side, the Parisians have done a few things right when it comes to beer:

-       A pint here IS ACTUALLY A PINT!!! As in, when you ask for a pint, you get roughly 473mL of beer (usually they round up to 500mL). Bars in New Zealand seem to have concluded that the word “pint” is just an expression, and will happily advertise “a pint for $5” and proceed to deliver a handle. A pint is a specific measurement, which makes that false advertising. DON’T MAKE ME CALL FAIR GO!

-       Happy Hour is an institution, and somewhere along the way, someone must have wrongly translated “hour”, because it’s never just an hour! Our nearby café Les Anemones (“the anemones”) has a happy hour from 4pm-midnight. What’s the point in ever having full price?

-       There doesn’t seem to be any liquor ban here (as evidenced by my suit and tie friend above). It doesn’t seem to cause much of a problem. Whereas us Kiwis can’t be trusted – we fight or break shit – the French just seem to get a bit tipsy and talk about Voltaire (I assume). There are a lot of street cleaners out in the mornings, though.

And those are my thoughts, more or less as I thought them. Apologies if you expected something comprehensive, but I think we got the beer necessities. (Good night.)