"Ah! I have tasted the stars!"

"Ah! I have tasted the stars!" is what Dom Pérignon is purported to have exclaimed when he first tasted the sparkling wine he had created.

"Champagne! In victory, one deserves it; in defeat one needs it."- Napoleon

"The effervescence of this fresh wine reveals the true brilliance of the French people." - Voltaire

"Champagne...the wine of kings, the king of wines."- Guy du Maupaussant

"Champagne is one of the elegant extras in life.”- Charles Dickens

"If you like Champagne, you’re full of fun and love the festive. If you don’t like Champagne, you don’t know what you’re missing." - Parade Magazine


This morning, I pried myself out of bed, got dressed, and sleepily ambled out of 68 Rue Boissiere and into the cold streets of Paris when it was still dark outside. I walked for 25 minutes through silent, deserted streets and crossed a bridge in order to rendezvous with a small group of weary adventurers who too had been lured out of their own warm beds. We shared a common passion: Champagne.

About 18 students met up at school at 7:45am and boarded a bus to the French region of Champagne. It took over 2 hours to get there, but the time seemed to pass quickly. I watched the scenery outside the window morph from the classic architechture of Paris into the neverending grassy fields of the French countryside. Eventually, we arrived at this small, rather dead looking town. All of the buildings looked really old and were covered in ivy, the streets were narrow, and everything was completely deserted. But when we passed a street labeled "Rue Dom Pérignon," I really felt like we were in Champagne!

This is the only place in the world that makes actual champagne, and French people are very protective of this. When Yves Saint Laurent created a perfume called Champagne, French champagne producers sued... and won. We first visited a small champagne production plant where the owner gave us a tour and explained to us (in French, but the tour guide translated) how his champagne is created.

To be called champagne, it has to come from three varieties of grapes: chardonnay, pinot noir, or pinot meunier. Chardonnay is a white grape and the pinots are red grapes. The drink can be comprised of 1 type of grape or a combination of the grapes. According to the owner, the best quality champagnes only contain chardonnay and pinot noir. Also, the best champagne comes from the middle of the Champagne region; the grapes are supposedly not as good further south.

All the grapes must be picked by hand; machines are not allowed to harvest the grapes. The owner told us that he used to pay his workers by the hour, but now he pays them by the kilogram, or something like that, because they work much harder and he can only use 20 workers instead of 30. According to him, a fast grape picker can earn 1000 euros in 10 days.

I thought it was interesting how red grapes were used to make champagne. Inside, all grapes are white, so it's the skin of the grape that gives the beverage its color. When the grapes are being pressed, it has to be done very fast to keep the clear color. Yeast and sugar are added to the grape juice. To create champagne and not just wine, the mixture is fermented twice. The first fermentation simply turns the mixture into white wine. The second fermentation adds the bubbles and makes it sparkle.

The bottles have to be turned twice a day. He used to turn the bottles by hand until he bought equipment that does it for him. In order to get rid of the yucky sediment that collects in the neck of the champagne bottle, the tip of the bottle is dipped in something that makes it freeze. Then the bottle is opened and the frozen part with the sediment is taken out. (I was a little hazy on exactly how this is done, but I think that's the gist of it.)


Before they developed this method for removing the sediment, people just avoided drinking it in their champagne. This is why champagne glasses have long stems. Those stems used to be hollow, and when people would sip their champagne, they would let the heavier sediment fall into the bottom of the glass. They would never finish the entire glass; they would only drink the good part.

The champagne is required to mature for a minimum of 15 months, although the longer it ages, the better. The way Rosé is made is simply by mixing red wine with sparkling white wine, for example 12% red and 88% white. Rosé is always such a pretty pink color; I WANT so badly to like it, but I don't like red wine very much and I can always taste it in my glass.

I was interested to learn that all the major champagne companies (Dom Pérignon , Moët et Chandon, Veuve Clicquot...) buy some of their champagne from local manufacturers. Demand is so great that it is impossible to produce it all themselves and they need to buy from local producers. He said that he sells half of his champagne to Moët et Chandon and sells the other half under his own name.

So after our tour was over, it was time for the tasting! I didn't expect for us to be given very much, but to my surprise, he brought out bottle after bottle and told us all about the different variations we were drinking. Apparently, he had expected 30 students to show up instead of 18, so we got to drink a lot more champagne than we expected. It was really funny because most of us hadn't had breakfast since we'd woken up so early, so it didn't take much before everyone was tipsy. Some people were flat out drunk. Everyone was giggling and taking pictures and knocking back glass after glass.

We were then able to purchase bottles of his champagne. (Maybe this was his strategy all along, to get us drunk so we'd buy more of his champagne...?) I bought a bottle of the kind I had tried that I liked best, the "Blanc de blanc." The champagne was surprisingly inexpensive; I had expected to pay about 30 euros for a bottle, but it was about half that.

We finally left the champagne factory and sobered up with lunch at some restaurant. It was pretty good; the salmon was yummy and the chocolate dessert was by far the best part. They served Bordeaux with our lunch but I could only manage a few sips since it was red wine.

Then we went to the Pommery champagne estate and took a tour there. Pommery is supposedly a well known brand of champagne, but I had never heard of it before. They have 20 million bottles of champagne housed in the estate, and they sell 4.5 million per year. It was a creepy place! They led us underground through a maze of chilly stone dungeons with moss growing on the walls, racks of aging champagne on either side of us. It was definitely haunted. As we were walking, someone said, "I feel like we're walking to Snape's Potion class" and that was definitely the vibe I got there. There was a lot of weird modern art there too. I learned that champagne bottles come in really huge sizes and can cost hundreds or thousands of euros. The biggest size at the Pommery was called the Salamanzar and it holds the equivalent to 12 normal bottles. All I could think about was trying to stuff one into my luggage.

Pommery gave us a tasting as well, but we only got one glass each. Their champagne was pricier than at the small place, but a lot of the girls, including me, bought a bottle of Pink Pommery POP because it was so pretty. They had told us about POP during the tour; it's a creamy type of champagne that is meant to be consumed with a straw; people drink it a lot at nightclubs. Oh, and a bunch of us swiped our champagne glasses from the Pommery tasting.



Finally, we ended the day with a tour of the Reims Cathedral. It was a little boring, as most cathedrals are, but we weren't there for very long. I think I liked it better than Sacre Coeur though, because we were allowed to take pictures inside. The gothic architechture was beautiful from the outside, and enhanced the creepy, spooky feeling of the day.

At last we headed back to Paris. I was exhausted and slept some of the way back. So I returned home with two bottles of champagne, and a newfound appreciation for and interest in this effervescent beverage. Now if only I could find a red wine I liked...

"My only regret in life is that I did not drink more Champagne.”"― last words of John Maynard Keynes