Sun, 02 Nov 2003

author Liz	location Hamburg, Deutschland
posted 09:43 CET 13/11/2003	section Europe2002/Europe/France/France 2 ( all photos )

Épernay ( 27 photos )
The weather looked pretty awful outside, but we rugged up and went to make our way outside to explore Épernay and maybe even a champagne house.
On our way out of the hotel, the nice owner lady came up to us. We did our best to understand her French, and in the end we worked out that we had ordered breakfast by accident when we had arrived the evening before. It was a bit annoying as the breakfast added more to the room price, and it wasn't exactly the biggest breakfast to pay for. But it was nice to sit in the dining room and enjoy our croissant, baguette and hot drinks.
After breakfast we went outside and found a junk market on a nearby street. We spent a while looking at various bits and pieces, but didn't find anything of real interest.
We walked through the town and made our way to ave de Champagne, the long street lined with impressive old mansions and a number of champagne houses.
The first one we spotted was the famous Moët & Chandon, so we chose to go on a tour there. It was actually very interesting, and quite different from wine making. We learnt a lot about the history of the buildings and the champagne making, had a walk through the cellars which were suprisingly large, discovered the whole champagne production process and of course had a glass of the stuff to drink at the end of the tour. We learnt heaps and now we can appreciated what champagne is and know a lot more about the different types and what the names mean. For example, brut champagne has more reserve wine added so it has a stronger flavour which is more appealing to men than to women.
After the tour the weather was bad, so we went back to our hotel.
In the afternoon we went for a walk, first to the train station to try and work out where we would go to next and how much it would cost us. Then we walked a long way along ave de Champagne. We checked out the prices of tours in a couple of other champagne houses, but decided that the one we had done in the morning was enough, so we made our way back to the town and had a walk around the town centre. We found a place to go for dinner after looking at some different menus, but as it was still quite early, we went back to the hotel to be lazy again.
Later on, we went to the little pub we had chosen to have dinner in, only to be told that they didn't serve food on a Sunday night. We had a beer each and then wandered through drizzling rain to find somewhere else to eat.
To cut a long and slightly miserable story short, quite a lot of places didn't serve food on a Sunday evening. Quite a few more were way out of our budget and the remaining ones were unappetising fast-food. So, feeling defeated, we bought a baguette from the bakery (we are sick of eating baguette!) and a couple of small things from the expensive supermarket. Dinner was an un-enthusiastic picnic in our hotel room, but at least we were out of the rain and cold. We finished off the evening watching a DVD.

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