The place#
Champagne begins about 150 kilometres north-east of Paris. Reims has the cathedral, the offices of the big houses and Gallo-Roman chalk pits under the streets that became cellars. Épernay, 25 kilometres south on the Marne, has the Avenue de Champagne, one street of mansions with roughly 110 kilometres of galleries beneath it. This is the corner of France where wine is a business first and a landscape second, and I say that with affection.
The vineyards lie in four main pieces. The Montagne de Reims, a wooded plateau between the two towns, is mostly Pinot Noir, with Aÿ on the river at its southern foot. West of Épernay the Vallée de la Marne is Meunier country. South of Épernay the Côte des Blancs is one east-facing slope of Chardonnay through Cramant, Avize, Oger and Le Mesnil-sur-Oger, with Vertus, a premier cru, at its southern end. The Côte des Bar lies 100 kilometres further south in the Aube, nearer Chablis than Reims.
The slopes, houses and cellars have been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2015. At Hautvillers, above Épernay, Dom Pérignon was cellarer from 1668 to 1715, a blender and careful cellar master rather than the inventor of bubbles. His tomb is in the abbey church.
Terroir: chalk, cold and a thin skin of soil#
Under almost everything here is chalk: Campanian chalk, 100 to 300 metres deep, an old seabed beneath a topsoil a spade goes through in a minute. It holds water through a dry summer and keeps a steady cool temperature, which is why bottles rest for years in the crayères under Reims. In the Aube the ground changes to Kimmeridgian marl, the clay and limestone of Chablis.
The vines sit between 90 and 300 metres. The climate is cool, with a mean of about 11 °C, and spring frost is a real risk. Harvest now runs from late August into September.
The whole region is one AOC, granted in 1936, after the riots of 1911 forced the state to draw a line around who could use the name. Inside it are 319 villages, 17 of them grand cru and 42 premier cru. The ranking is by village, not by parcel.
Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Meunier#
Three grapes make about 99 percent of the wine. Chardonnay gives the tension and the lemon-and-chalk line, and on the Côte des Blancs it stands alone as blanc de blancs. Pinot Noir gives weight, red fruit and length, and rules the Montagne de Reims and Aÿ. Meunier buds late, which is why it fills the frost-prone Vallée de la Marne, and brings roundness and early charm.
The method is the one the region gave its name to: a still base wine, a second fermentation in the bottle, then at least 15 months on the lees, or 36 for a vintage, before the yeast is removed and the bottle topped up. That last step, the dosage, is where a producer shows their hand: brut nature means 0 to 3 grams of sugar per litre, extra brut up to 6, brut under 12. Twenty years ago brut was the whole conversation; now a grower in Vertus will tell you the dosage of each wine before the village.
Growers and grandes maisons#
Two small letters on every label say who made the wine. NM, négociant-manipulant, buys grapes, and every grande maison is one, since no house owns enough vines to fill its bottles. RM, récoltant-manipulant, makes wine only from its own vineyards; CM is a cooperative. Champagne has about 34,000 hectares, over 16,000 growers, some 350 houses and about 130 cooperatives, and of the roughly 266 million bottles shipped in 2025, the houses sent about 192 million. “Grower champagne” as a category owes much to the American importer Terry Theise in the 1990s.
I do not treat this as a contest. A house blends dozens of villages and years so that a wine tastes the same every time, and its reserve wines are a library no grower can match. A grower makes wine from one slope in one year and lets it taste of that. We drink both on one table.
Producers to know#
Larmandier-Bernier is in Vertus, at the southern end of the Côte des Blancs: about 18 hectares in Vertus, Cramant, Chouilly, Oger and Avize, almost all premier and grand cru. Pierre Larmandier took charge in 1988 and runs the estate with his wife Sophie; their son Arthur works alongside them. Organic from 1992 and biodynamic since 1999, early for this region: indigenous yeasts, oak foudres and barrels beside steel, long lees ageing, low or zero dosage. Latitude, from south-facing Vertus, is the rounder wine; Longitude, from a north-to-south line of villages, the chalkier; Terre de Vertus is a single vintage with no dosage at all. Visits are by appointment on weekday mornings, and what the biodynamics means in practice is in biodynamic wine without mysticism.
Jacques Selosse is in Avize, a grand cru ten minutes north. Anselme Selosse came home from wine school in Beaune and took over in 1980: fermentation in barrel, an oxidative, nutty style, and from 1986 a solera called Substance. His son Guillaume has led since 2018, and the family runs Les Avisés, a ten-room hotel and restaurant in the village. The Selosse wines are hard to find, and I do not promise them.
Agrapart, the other reference grower in Avize, has bottled its own wine since 1894 and farms 12 hectares in about 62 parcels of Chardonnay; one cuvée, Vénus, comes from a 0.3-hectare plot called La Fosse, ploughed by horse and named after the horse that did it. Among the houses, Bollinger in Aÿ, founded in 1829, and Ruinart in Reims, the oldest of all at 1729, are the two I most often set against the growers.
What a day here looks like on tour#
We sleep in Épernay or Reims. A grower’s morning starts at 09:30: Vertus or Avize, five or six wines poured with the parcel and the dosage named, then a walk into the vines to see how thinly the soil sits on the chalk. I explain what I ask of guests in visiting a winemaker.
Lunch is in the village or back in Épernay: jambon de Reims, a potée champenoise if it is cold, Chaource and Langres on the cheese board, a biscuit rose to dip in the last glass. The afternoon is a house cellar, 30 metres down in the chalk at 10 to 12 °C, with riddling racks and bottles by the million. Before dinner I put a house brut and a grower extra brut side by side and let the group find the difference.
Champagne shares my Burgundy and Champagne tour with the still Chardonnay and Pinot Noir of Burgundy. The same two grapes with bubbles, three hours north, is the clearest lesson in terroir I know how to give.
Practical#
Reims is 46 minutes from Paris Gare de l’Est by TGV. Reims to Vertus takes about 40 minutes, Épernay to Vertus 25. From Beaune, the tour’s Burgundy base, it is about 290 kilometres and 3 hours. From my base in Brno, fly from Vienna or Prague to Paris, about 1 h 50.
Best months are May and June, and October, when the harvest is in and the growers have time again. From late August through September most small estates are picking and will not open the door; the houses will. Paid tastings are the norm, and the growers are booked weeks ahead. Do not count on a grower posting bottles to Brno; if you find something you love, we carry it.
For longer on the Côte des Blancs or in the Montagne de Reims villages, ask me about a private tour.
