Épernay

Épernay is a modest town of around twenty thousand people, and beneath its main avenue alone sits an estimated hundred million bottles of champagne resting in chalk cellars, which is a fact I found genuinely difficult to hold in my head as we walked it. The Avenue de Champagne is lined with the ornate nineteenth-century mansions of houses like Moët & Chandon, Perrier-Jouët, and Mercier, each competing gently with its neighbours for the most impressive facade, built during the boom years when champagne became fashionable across European royal courts.

The avenue and what’s underneath it

We toured the Moët & Chandon cellars first, an efficient, polished operation with over twenty-eight kilometres of tunnels and a gift shop that made clear how large this business really is, and it was impressive in the way a well-run factory is impressive. It wasn’t until the next morning, at a much smaller grower a short drive outside town, that Épernay actually got interesting to me. We sat with a fourth-generation vigneron named Étienne in his kitchen while he poured us three vintages side by side and explained, patiently, the difference between a house blend built for consistency year after year and a small grower’s wine that changes with every harvest. Lia asked more questions than I did and by the end had bought a case to ship home, something neither of us had planned on doing.

Hautvillers and the monk who didn’t invent champagne

A short drive north into the hills, the village of Hautvillers is where the Benedictine monk Dom Pérignon spent much of his life at the abbey, and while the popular story crediting him with inventing champagne is mostly legend — sparkling wine likely developed gradually and by accident — he genuinely did pioneer techniques for blending grapes from different vineyards that shaped how champagne is made to this day. We walked up through the vineyards to the village, all narrow streets and hanging wrought-iron shop signs shaped like grape clusters and corkscrews, and stood at the abbey where his grave is marked, before heading back down for a lunch overlooking the valley of vines rolling toward the Marne.

When to go: Late September during the vendanges, the grape harvest, when the whole region is at its most active and many smaller growers are more open to informal visits than during the rest of the year.