The Champagne Houses

Visiting a Champagne House is nothing like visiting a winery in Australia. The Champagne Houses all have these grand chateaux, with hundreds of years of history attached to them. We saw bottles of champagne that are older than white Australia.

Some of the houses on the avenue du champagne

 Pommery Champagne House (literally the tip of the iceberg, with all the Champas in caves underneath)

Inside a cave - this particular cave held 17,000 bottles of yet to be corked, fermenting champagne

Champagne is kept and ferments underground in caves made of limestone. This limestone provides the perfect environment to store champagne - it being approximately 10 degrees with 90% humidity (an unusual combination).
The second Pommery House (and a French motorcycle gang)

Our favourite House was of course, GH Mumm, it being our drink of choice thanks to one of Booba's friends who smuggled us into their tent at Melbourne Cup last year. Despite doing his best to offend them at last year's after party (in which my cousins Tam and Cath got him absolutely sloshed - or was it the otherway around?), they welcomed us with open arms.

Why is champagne champagne? Because the French, concerned as always about German intentions, had it put into the Treaty of Versaillies that only they could use the term, at the end of WW1, when everyone was else was concerned with less important things, like counting their dead etc etc.

Champagne is actually made in quite a fascinating way:

1. Make wine:essentially they follow the wine making process of picking grapes, bottling them and storing them, but they add yeast and sugar before storing it for about 3 years.

2. Riddle it

Then some poor person (called the "riddler") has to turn each bottle of champagne every 6 hours to rotate the yeast - at present, a riddler turns something like 56,000 bottles a day and machines do the rest. The Champagne Houses tell us it makes no difference to the taste if a machine or a riddler does the turning, but still they employ riddlers all the same... that's socialism for you isn't it?

3. Ice it

Up until now the Champagne has a metal lid. Once the yeast has fermented for long enough and eaten all the sugar in the bottle, the neck of the champagne is frozen and the lid taken off, with the pressure in the bottle causing the left over yeast iceberg to pop right out.

4. Add some sugar

They then add sugar to replace the volume that was lost by the iceberg (the amount of sugar determining if it is a sweet, dry etc champagne), cork it, store it and sell it.

GH Mumm makes 8million bottles of champas this way and Moet and Chandon makes 15 million each year.

In both of these houses, the champagne is stored in the aforementioned underground caves  - Moet's underground caves cover 128,000 km's and Mumm's approximately the same. The caves basically cover the entirety of the town. You are literally walking on Champagne. In theory, if you got thirsty one night, and had a shovel.....

The price of the champagne is slightly cheaper than in London (by about £2-4 a bottle) but insanely cheaper than Australia. A bottle of my favourite Mumm is £20 in Australia its $70 (based on exchange rate it should be about $30).