Aÿ is not a place that announces itself. It sits at the base of the Marne slope between Épernay and the river, a compact town of perhaps seven thousand people with a church, a main square, a weekly market, and a collection of wine estates so quietly distinguished that the whole place feels like it is holding a secret it has no intention of sharing with passersby. The name has been on wine maps since the 16th century — Henri IV called himself Sire d’Aÿ and kept a cellar here — and yet the town has none of the self-conscious charm of the tourist villages higher on the hillside. It goes about its business with a certain provincial seriousness that I found immediately likeable.
Bollinger is the reason most wine travelers find their way here, and Bollinger is genuinely worth finding. The house is on the main street — a long stone wall, iron gates, a courtyard with barrels stacked against an old building — and it operates with the slightly intimidating self-assurance of a house that has been making Champagne since 1829 and knows exactly how good it is. What distinguishes Bollinger is the continued use of oak barrels for fermenting the reserve wines and, most extraordinarily, the maintenance of a library of vieilles vignes françaises — old pre-phylloxera Pinot Noir vines, propagated on their own ungrafted rootstock, that have survived on a handful of plots in Aÿ since before the phylloxera epidemic of the 1870s wiped out nearly every vineyard in Europe. The wine from these vines — Vieilles Vignes Françaises, released only in exceptional vintages — is made in tiny quantities and costs accordingly. I didn’t try it. I tasted through the rest of the range and that was more than sufficient.
The town has a second life beyond its famous house. A half-dozen smaller growers sell from their gates or at the local cave coopérative, and the wines from these Aÿ-grown Pinot Noirs have a distinctive generosity — rounder and more full-bodied than the northern-slope examples from Verzenay, with red fruit and warm spice and a surprising approachability even in their youth. I bought a bottle of still rouge — the quiet, underappreciated red wines that Champagne producers are permitted to make — and drank it that evening with a plate of local charcuterie. It tasted like what Pinot Noir always wants to be.
The market on Saturday mornings is the heart of the town’s social life — stalls of vegetables and cheese and local wine, the café on the square doing a brisk trade in café-crèmes, old men reading newspapers at outdoor tables regardless of the weather. I sat there for an hour one cold November morning and felt, as I often do in small French market towns, that I was observing a very old, very functional rhythm of life that the rest of the world has largely misplaced.
When to go: Harvest in late September and early October is the obvious answer — the slope comes alive with pickers and the estate gates are open more often than usual. But the Saturday market runs year-round, and a quiet December visit, when the town is properly itself, gives you the best chance of getting an unscheduled tasting at one of the smaller producers.