Assemblage

When I was a professor, I told students who were falling behind that their first priority was to keep up with the current reading and assignments; they could fill in the rest as they got time. Today, as I'm a student again, I think it's time I took my own advice. So instead of beginning in December, I'll begin with this Sunday, when Amy and I nipped out of Paris for a day trip in scenic Reims, Champagne.

Yes, that Champagne.

Reims, perhaps the most famous city in the Champagne region, has two main claims to fame: the proprietary beverage which, like Bordeaux or Côtes du Rhône, according to strict regulation, can only be called champagne if produced in that region; and the cathedral, where many French kings have been crowned. The TGV books it from Gare de l'Est to downtown Reims in a scant 45 minutes for 20-30 euros round trip at the student rate, depending on how far ahead one buys the tickets. Amy and I booked less than 48 hours in advance, more or less on a whim.

Millenia of history, minutes on the TGV. Welcome to modern Europe.

Because the cheapest time to book was mid-morning, Amy and I met at the train station at nearly nine in the morning. We're a month out now from the solstice, so the sun was already comfortably settled in the sky by the time we boarded: a pleasant contrast to our trip to Strasbourg. On the train, I gave Amy, who had never before been to a winery, a primer on wine tasting, based on what I'd gleaned from wine country expeditions in California, various wine bars, and a bit of reading. I ripped a ply from the current hand-sized notebook I carry everywhere to write down a few key points. (Amy, who listened with patient and intelligent attention, would comment a few hours later that the way I taught her was "exactly the way I would imagine being taught by an American." I admit that sometimes I do think about the image of America I project, but tellingly, that one never occurred to me.) 

In so doing, with my handy Oxford-Hachette bilingual dictionary app (next to the Robert monolingual and the Becherelle conjugator), I learned the French versions of the terms I'd learned in California--which would prove useful later.

After all, I too was going to Old World wine country for the first time.

Upon arrival, we began by searching for the tourist information bureau for brochures and the telephone numbers for wineries (unlike at California wineries, where, with a few exceptions, one can drop in, here reservations are usually required). Both of us were quite ready for something caffeinated and a bit of food as well, which we figured would be easy to find. But it was Sunday, and while Paris is on the quiet side on Sundays, Reims, at 10:00 am, was almost entirely shut down. It was as though it were six or seven on a summer morning in some city in the States, when the sun is out and only an odd pedestrian is walking, with no hurry, down a street where nature is nearly perceptible beyond the roads and buildings. Amy and I found it strange, but pleasant, peaceful, a respite from the delicious, exhilarating, fatiguing pace of Paris.

After a leisurely breakfast just across the square from the cathedral--a looming monument that dwarfs the modest surrounding buildings--we grabbed some brochures from the tourist bureau (where the woman told us that our French was "very good," which means, of course, that we sounded foreign), we strolled through the touristy square, surprisingly modern and full of chain stores and restaurants--MacDo, Quick, Sephora--while I made appointments at a couple of the wineries--the kind of phone call that would have terrified me two months ago, but now seems ordinary and comfortable. Our afternoon booked, we headed back to the cathedral.

A quiet square, a tourist wine shop, a glorious cathedral... just another Sunday in Reims.

Astoundingly, even at nearly 800 years old (a digital countdown clock in front of it told us that the grand anniversary was but 103 days away), the cathedral is the fourth historic structure to occupy its plot. The first was a Roman bath; the second saw Clovis, first king of the united Francs, baptized by Saint Remy; the third burned down in the XIe century (here I can't help being reminded of a certain castle). Despite the many turnovers that preceded its construction, the cathedral has absorbed the timelessness of its predecessors.

Magnifique.

Amy is a very good sport about posing for me as a size reference--in this case, for the enormity of these columns.

When visiting this type of cathedral, one can't help but imagine the generations of workmen whose children and grandchildren would not live to see it finished. I remember being told this by a lovely docent at Norwich Cathedral when I was eighteen, and in my little mayfly way, wondering how anyone could dedicate so much labor to something that would not pay off for centuries. I still wonder.

What my brother and I used to call God Light. Can you hear the angels singing?

As I have mentioned before, my mother, despite her lack of religion, loves to light a candle in such churches for the ritualistic pleasure of it. I took the liberty of lighting one on her behalf.

An attractive semi-profile.

When you see something so solid, it's hard to remember how old it is. That's the amazing thing about the patrimoine: it's solid, tangible, a living testament to the accomplishments of dead visionaries.

As the main squares began to animate with sparse tourists and pedestrians, Amy and I wandered southeast along the backstreets of Reims. There was an ordinariness, a quietness, that suggested locals eating toasted leftover baguettes with jam, watching television, letting Sunday pass them by, the way I have so many Sunday afternoons in my various homes and frequent stops in the States: baking with my mother or reading the paper with my father, trekking to the local diner with my brother for an enormous brunch with bottomless coffee, drinking wine and playing guitar with my roommates in Palo Alto. I felt a lugubrious kinship with the Western world as we walked toward nothing in particular.

South of the cathedral, near the wineries, we ran across yet another fabulous church: la Basilique Saint-Remi.

Who doesn't love flying buttresses?

Though a bit humbler than its cousin (which can be seen from its flank), laden with moss and a little removed from the main square, Saint-Remi is no doubt beautiful.

A depiction of Saint Remi baptising Clovis.

Inside the basilique.

 In Europe, the kind of church that would stun a State-sider is commonplace, nothing to write home about. After the grandeur of the last cathedral, I felt almost sorry for seeing this lovely place as a bit of an also-ran.

For lunch, we stopped at what ended up to be a glorious wood-fired pizza restaurant. We each ordered a pizza to go and, while we waited, watched in fascination as the pizza-artist worked his magic.

A thing of beauty.

We scarfed down our pizzas from their respective boxes while walking to our first winery: G.H. Martel. I had a special desire to visit this winery after tasting it in the States at a promotional champagne tasting at a huge wine store for New Year's 2010. After tasting several competitors, we'd bought the green-labeled dark horse (I've learned since my return that said chain, Total Wine, is the only place in America where you can purchase champagne from this maison). I was looking forward to making a pilgrimage to the source.

While living in the San Francisco bay area means lots of trips to wine country, I was used to a certain model: drop in to the tasting rooms, generally on-site at the winery, which run the gamut from sleek to quaint: some have architecturally innovative spaces or gimmicky copy; others have a dog who naps on the patio outside. I knew the French model would be different, but I was strangely pleased to see that G.H. Martel was a small family operation. We passed through a side entrance in an unassuming wall and stepped into a modest courtyard, where I could imagine a napping dog if I closed my eyes.

Across the courtyard, with an A-frame sign that advertised it as the meeting point for the cave tours, was a boutique the size of a living room. Inside, crowded among the others scheduled for the tour, we paid and waited as the last few visitors arrived.

A young man led us down a few steps into a cool underground chamber, where we watched a movie in which the winemaking process was compared to a grand opera. Only in France. We also learned that, of course, as in every other wine producing region, Champagne has modernized its production; it has mechanized and moved to nearby Epernay. So it goes.

After the film was over, our tour was taken over by an articulate, no-nonsense man who led us down the steep steps to the passageways that form the underbelly of Reims.

When I was doing research to prepare for the trip (I enjoy it infinitely more that way), I saw the underground network, tunnels that once served as a vast aging cellar for the world's champagne, compared more than once to "Swiss cheese." The resulting mental image is certainly vivid.

En fait, the hollowed-out warren into which we descended did have a more organic feel to it than, say, the more chiseled quarries and catacombs underneath Paris (I haven't yet been to the sewers). It's cool, though not uncomfortably so, and still. The stone is pale and chalky; one gets the sense that it's soft to cut through. The Swiss cheese analogy seemed more tempting.

As poorly behaved children chased one another around his knees, our intrepid guide launched into an expert primer on the cépages, harvest, first fermention, and blending of champagne. It comes from three main grapes--chardonnay, pinot noir, and pinot meunier. But the interesting part is that in order to get a consistent taste in standard non-vintage (NV) champagnes, they put together blends of 50-100 récoltes--harvests from different vineyards and different years--in a process called assemblage.

The mossy, chalky, amazing Champagne caverns.

We followed him as we walked past a rack of champagne bottles pressed against the wall. He picked up a cloudy rosé and explained how, after the assemblage, the wines undergo a second transformation: another fermentation, the tirage, letting off some excess carbon dioxide, and at last, a nice long sabbatical in the racks, aging in their enormous earthen wine cellar.

Getting some R & R.

After the contents gain some nice complexity, one needs to remove the long-dead yeast from the party. This is accomplished by placing the wine in a new rack, opening down, and tilting and rotating the bottles gently to coax it into the neck over time, like the last of the honey out of the bottom of a jar. 

Les pupitres.

 Our guide showed us how they were once rotated systematically by hand and tilted gradually as the sediment made its way down the bottle. Now, machines rotate thousands at a time in windmill-like motion.

One of these kids very nearly pulled a bottle loose not a minute later. Amy and I winced.

After the process is complete, they remove the plug of yeast, add sugar to adjust flavor and aid shelf life--here's where one gets the different sweetness levels: demi-sec, brut, etc--and seal it with the cork. Voilà.

An example of one of the many antiquated, Rube Goldberg-esque machines once instrumental in production. Very steampunk.

After ascending from the caverns, we were ready for our first tasting. We all sat down in a room, where chairs were set in a circle around the perimeter, and sat and chatted as our guide poured and handed out glasses. He gave a short spiel on each, allowed us to enjoy each tasting in peace, and came around with the next bottle to top us off with the next selection, as though he were the host of a dinner party.

Middle class? Don't speak of it. Savoir-faire: we reek of it.

After plotting out our purchases, we hurried to our next tasting: at Pommery.

I'd chosen this one because--well, frankly, because Veuve Clicquot, my absolute favorite, is closed until mid-February. But I had heard that Pommery was fun to visit: trendy and packed with modern art exhibits. A change of pace.

It certainly was that.

The sleek, bar-code regulated entry to Pommery.

It wasn't long after we'd scanned our tickets and walked into the grand hall that our tour guide--a woman in her late twenties with what I've come to think of as Parisian beauty--called the 15h30 French tour to gather around.

We descended into the caves, where, as promised, was a strange-bedfellows marriage of modern art and nineteenth century oenological history.

See example above.

 There is, the tour guide explained, a reason for this beyond the commercialism. Louise Pommery was one of several famous widows: in fact, the title, veuve, is preserved in the brand name Veuve Clicquot. Like her sister-competitors, Mme Pommery was young, but proved a canny and ambitious businesswoman. Her goal, the tour guide confided, was to pommeriser le monde. She did pretty well, exponentially increasing the sales and production during her reign in the mid to late 19th century. As notable marks of this ambition, she commissioned several reliefs carved directly into the cavern walls (we'll see examples soon), and ordered plaques on various wings with the names of worldwide cities, countries and regions. Voilà: the marriage of art and winemaking chez Pommery.

Behold and see: the virgin Mary... and a hippopotame.

Yes, you heard me right.

 As we passed racks with dust-coated bottles of varying sizes, our guide gave us a primer on different sizes of bottles. I knew demi and magnum, but the world is so much bigger than that. The bottles by which our lovely Amy poses, for example, hold the equivalent of five or six ordinary 750 ml bottles of champagne. And they're far from the biggest.

Once again, Amy obliges me as a size reference.

Our lovely and captivating tour guide.

 In some rooms, the art overwhelmed the wine. This was such a room.

This is taken more or less at eye level. The statue is enormous.

 Other times, the original spirit prevailed.

Oslo: consider yourself pommerisé.

Our guide explains the process of rotating the bottles in their pupitres.

 And sometimes--as in the case of this relief (a depiction of Classical wine-induced revelry) and this weird carousel entitled "Donkey Roundabout"--it was anyone's game.

(By the way, imagine hearing "Donkey Roundabout" in a French accent: the only English words our guide spoke during the tour.)

You have to give her credit, that wily widow, Louise Pommery. The guide assured us that this carving was only a symbolic representation, but I kind of like to imagine her this way: winsome and timeless.

A Maenad of industry.

 Finally, our guide drew our attention to the historical collections. She assured us that while some of these were kept for historic purposes, others were quite drinkable. Another guest asked what year was the oldest she had ever tasted. A champagne from the 1950's, she said. We asked what it was like, and she considered the question. It had lost a certain liveliness, she conceded, but it had gained rich color and complexity. She remembered and described it with such honest enthusiasm that Amy and I were charmed, rapt with attention.

Special occasion, anyone?

 Our tickets allowed us two tastings of our choice from among six or so varieties; we chose and enjoyed our tastings at leisure.

Left to right: blanc de noirs, millésisme 2002, blanc de blancs, Amy.

 The boutique carries on Mme's colonial ambitions. Ici, tout est pommerisé. And I wouldn't be the daughter of a family of which three out of four are in the marketing game if I didn't admire the sleekness, creativity and variety of Pommery's empire.

Be it bags, boxes, books, bottles: color is key.

Pens? Umbrellas? Votive holders? Why not?

Mini bottles (1/4) are sold in all sorts of clever combinations, often with straws, for the trendy crowd.

 In the end, we opted to buy our champagne from the family operation. We headed back, made our purchases, and chatted with our tour-guide-turned-cashier, as the shop was now empty and the sun falling.

On our way back to the main square to settle down and eat somewhere before catching the train home, we walked around the cathedral, whose well-installed lights had switched on as the sunlight disappeared. Maybe Pommery has it right: the modern and the historical can make lovely combinations.