Nicole Bienvenue La France: National Lampoon's Family Vacation

Day 6: Champagne Region – Epernay and Hautvillers

Welcome to the Champagne Region

Sunday morning we got up super early, ate breakfast at the hotel, and drove 4 hours to the Champagne Region. We had a reservation at 3:30 to tour the wine cellars at Moët and Chandon. We ended up making really good time and got to Epernay early so we stopped at a small café for lunch. The food was surprisingly delicious. We still had some time to spare, so we checked into our hotel. Then we were off to Moët. The tour was in English which was really nice because we could understand everything. The tour showed us some of the caves and the tour guide explained the champagne making process and a little bit of background history on Moët, Chandon, and Dom Pérignon. We couldn’t see all of the caves because there were over 100km of caves under all of Epernay. Crazy, right? We did see some caves that had over 42,000 bottles in it! The tour concluded with a tasting of champagne – delicious. When the tour was over we decided to head over to Hautvillers, the next town over, where Dom Pérignon was buried in the abbey. Moët and Chandon had actually purchased Dom Pérignon’s land, so we had a chance to see all the vineyards as well. Across the street from the abbey, a smaller, family owned champagne company was located. We decided to go in and check it out and ended up getting a free champagne tasting. It was pretty fantastic. We actually bought a bottle of their 2002 vintage champagne. For dinner, we found this really cute restaurant in the center of town. My dad and I both had veal marsala accompanied with a nice chianti and it was to die for!