La Villa Eugene Épernay

... were walking out with carts full of Cases of wine, not to mention all the cheese, fois gras, ham, mushrooms, and other french goodies that were up for grabs. We spent a piddly 5 hours drinking wine, and now have a much better "education" of French wine. But after a couple hours, food was definitely in order. Istead of opting for the 9 euro fois gras sandwich, we got the pate en croute, which we soon found out is not supposed to be eaten ...

... beautiful as the wine, Reims boasts one of the most amazing Gothic cathedrals ever constructed. Like so many cathedrals and basilicas throughout Europe, the stories of Catholic spirituality are told through the architecture, paintings, and sculptures because during the Middle Ages, people couldn’t read. This is how they learned the stories. For me, time and time again throughout all the religious buildings I have visited, I couldn’t care less what the ...

... br>The bus was.... well it was a bus. A little crowded but a very short ride dropped us off at the base of the St. Remi Cathedral which was huge. It seemed much larger than that of Notre Dame. Since we had a reservation at the Pommery however we did not stop.

The Pommery label is one of the oldest champagne labels in the region so we were very excited when we saw the place. It consisted of multiple buildings, some clearly older than others. We bought our ...

... entrance to France is not the most scenic but it gets better as you get on the motor way and start to see some of the countryside. It helped that it was a gorgeously sunny day with only a crisp wind. You could see that Autumn was on the way as every now and then trees and bushes had a sprinkling of light gold and orange, making the drive seem more beautiful.

By lunchtime we had reached Reims our destination for the weekend. Reims ...

... on. It was already getting quite late in the day considering we still had more than five hours of driving ahead of us. We stopped only for food and in Rheims to check out the cathedral. We had planned to make a few trips along the route but we had also planned on being out of Paris a lot earlier in the day, and I have to work tomorrow, so we didn't get to have much fun driving through France.

... and towed to Paris for the International Exhibition of 1889; unfortunately he only got second prize, because someone called Eiffel had come up with the idea of a big tower! Mercier sounds like quite an entrepreneur, because he also had a hot-air balloon in which he took people up for champagne tastings. We then entered lifts to go down to the cellars. We soon discovered that the lifts had glass backs, and we descended past illuminated scenes of wine growing and ...

... extremely helpful and spent some time on the phone trying to solve the problem. Finally she said that she had found us a vehicle at Europcar and that we could book that one then get a refund from Sixt. (The problem was complicated by the fact that we wanted to collect the vehicle in France and drop it off in Germany.) We agreed to do this, so she rang back Europcar - and then found out that their car was no longer available! All this discussion ...

... racks upon racks of champagne just sitting and aging. As it goes through this aging process sediment is formed inside the bottle. The process by which the sediment is removed is perhaps the most fascinating. Once the wines are aged enough, the bottles are put in racks on an angle. Each day the bottle is rotated between an eighth and a quarter turn, sometimes by hand but also by machine. This process is called Riddling and causes the sediment to ...

... trees in order to build a greenhouse. Yes, we spent many hours cutting down trees... by hand... with a hand saw. As the days progressed, we accumulated more WWOOFers. By the end of our stay (and all at once), we had a grand total of 12 WWOOFers plus the family. Yeah, it was a lot of people. It was kind of like summer camp. Except the food was fantastic. Since we had at least 5 vegetarians all the meals were meat free and amazing. Lady is from Peru and can make the ...

... gentle and appeared to go on forever. The King of the Mountain was the only one to make it out alive, the rest of us had to walk it, which made it seem three times as long. The cycling notes were certainly interesting, they were supposed to guide us along our route between each destination but we did find that they seemed to get very obvious left turns and right turns mixed up sometimes. Luckily they gave us maps as well so we always found our way. Our reward for the ...