Champagne-Ardenne

The day after Rock Werchter ended, we hired a car in Brussels and Doecke drove us southwest into France. Our destination: Reims (say: Rhayms), the capital of the region of Champagne-Ardenne. After setting up camp in our hostel, and learning to our displeasure that gambling sites were blocked on the internet there, we walked into the center of Reims and managed to score a table at Le Foch, a Michelin one-star restaurant there. The prices were very reasonable - I had a 4-course menu plus cheese for 45 euro - and the food was excellent. An older couple from Alsace had the table adjacent to us and the man helped us translate the menu, talked to us a little about the regional peculiarities of Alsace, and at the end of the meal gave us his address and contact details with an invitation to visit him in Strasbourg. I have no idea who started the rumour about the French being arrogant and unfriendly, but it would be right up there with "The food in Italy is great" on a top-ten of completely untrue statements about Europe.

The next day we caught the train to Epernay (something like Ay-pear-nay), the wine capital of Champagne. First we went to a bar I had read about, called C-Comme Champagne, where five different small producer wines are served by the glass, changing weekly. We got a glass of each and they ranged from average through to very good. Then it was time to tour the cellars of Moet et Chandon. After learning about the methode champenoise, Doecke asked if there were any champagnes made without sugar added after fermentation as is normally done. After finding out that these "zero-dosage" wines do exist, he decided he wanted to try one, so we headed back to C-Comme Champagne and asked if they had any. They only had one, so we bought a bottle to drink, and coincidentally the producer (owner or winemaker or maybe both, I'm not sure) of the champagne was in the bar at the time. He was a friendly guy who chatted to us for a while about the wine we had bought, his business and the region in general. It was a really good experience. We had dinner at a place that allowed you to bring your own wine to drink (a very uncommon idea in France - and no corkage charge!), but unfortunately I selected a particularly poor Chateauneuf-du-Pape from the local wine store. Pretty good food though and well priced.

That night I decided that my plan of heading to Bordeaux after Champagne was no good. I had just had two full days of wine-related acitivities and didn't fancy spending the weekend doing more of the same in a city without a backpacker scene, when I could be doing something more social. Instead I decided to catch a sleeper train to Nice the next night and catch up with Julia, a girl I had met on my Europe trip last year. This plan would also allow me the opportunity to daytrip to Monaco.

The next day we visited a forest near Reims which is famous for having a number of beech trees which are mutated in some way - either a genetic variation or a viral infection - that leaves them gnarled and deformed. It's supposed to be spooky or something, but we found it pretty underwhelming. It did provide us with an opportunity to drive around the countryside of Champagne though.




Then I said my goodbyes to Dane and Mike (although I'll be seeing Dane again in Portugal in not too much longer) and hopped on my sleeper train to Nice. I was kind of dreading the 12-hour trip but actually it wasn't bad at all. Trains are much better than planes in so many ways. It isn't just that you have a little bed and can walk around whenever you want - it's things like not listening to the low-frequency drone from jet engines for 12 hours.... and rather than having to breathe stuffy dehumidified air, you have the opportunity at any time to go to the window and get a blast of country air in your face... then you can hang out at the window and look at the blanket of ground fog over rural France, watch little villages with illuminated churches on hills as they fly past and wonder what the lives of the people who live there are like....

And now we're on to Nice... but that's another blog post.