We were scheduled to stay another night at Chateau de Rilly, so we had made arrangements to go on two Champagne tours. We got up early because our first one was at 9:30a.m. in Epernay at Moet & Chandon. We found a place to park and walked in.
We hadn't realized that Dom Perignon Champagne was made here also. We also discovered that all Champagne is made from Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Pinot Meunier grapes. The Dom Perignon is made with Pinot Noir and Chardonnay and only from Grand Cru vineyards and has some of the grapes from the Dom Perignon Monastery added to each bottle.
We were the only ones on the tour....sooooo we enjoyed a private very personalized tour with Barbara! She was very knowledgable and enthusiastic about her job. You could tell she just loved the history of the founders and knew a lot about the making of champagne. We went through the caves....
The first question we had was: "How do you pronounce the name? Is it Moet with a "t" sound, or without the "t"?!? Because the "e" before the t has two dots above it, you pronounce the t at the end......French can be a difficult language! But now we will say it properly!!!
The bottom number is the number of bottles stored just in this small area:
The sediment in the bottle before it's removed:
The old "riddlers" area...where the bottles were once turned by hand. Now days they are turned with machines.
All of the different sizes of bottles available!
We had tastings of the Grand Vintage 2004 and the Rose 2002. Surprisingly the Rose was not sweeter, she said it's made to just be fruitier tasting, not sweet.
And....our purchases! We found a bottle of 2003 Dom Perignon we will drink on Andrew's birthday. That was the year we got married...and since we were here celebrating our 10 year anniversary we though it fitting to buy a bottle! We also bought a bottle of Moet & Chandon, of course!
After our private tour, we walked around a bit and decided to have a simple small lunch in town before our next tasting.
Another war memorial from WWI:
and on to G.H. Mumm for our next tour:
Our tasting:
We were a bit disappointed in this tour, as the tour guide spoke only enough English to do a basic tour and couldn't answer any questions. It was crowded during the tasting also. Maybe we were spoiled with Moet & Chandon. If we were to go to this area again we would definitely see Moet & Chandon, and we would try a small champagne tour also.
We have enjoyed G. H. Mumm Champagne for year, that's why we thought it would be fun to go there. We did end up buying a bottle. We brought it back to the hotel and sat out on the patio to drink it. It was the onlyyyy day during our trip where we had a little sun, so it was nice to sit outside and soak it up!
Later on, we got cleaned up and went downstairs for dinner. We had reservations for 8:00 p.m. What a beautiful place and the food was delicious!!!
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