Viry and Lolo France Style

We packed up our base in Epernay and made one last stop in Reims on the way to the highway.

One of the local treats are various pink cookies. They were colored pink to hide the black speckles of vanilla in the batter. I think this is hilarious because people use so much fake vanilla these days that those little black things have become a mark of high quality.

Big Ern is a mark of my high quality.

I figured France was a good place for Ernie to have his first driving lesson. Nothing too important here to worry about hitting.

I love this train tracks with grass thing they had going on. Really invites a picnic.

We had lunch at Canard Street, which specialized in everything duck. I ordered the duck. Canard is French for duck. Chance is French for luck.

Speaking of delicious meats, Zoe has been vegan for like a decade. It was especially annoying at restaurants because it made ordering such an ordeal. Numerous times even after a long conversation about this the food would arrive with a bunch of cheese on top or some other vegan religious crime. Well I'm proud to announce that we finally broke Zoe in France and she's now doing... at least dairy products. I think the allure of croissants plus the greater difficulty of eating anything at all was just too much for her. It is a great day indeed.

We made sure there wasn't a single corner of Reims that we hadn't traversed.

Once satisfied we got back in the car and headed out.

We have a good friend Viry who works at Purina in St. Louis. All of the Purina people we know are very fancy and go on exotic business trips to some cat food factory in Asia seemingly whenever they want. They also seem to be able to live wherever they want due to the company having offices all over the place. Well I guess Viry and Lolo used to live in Amiens, France and that's where they decided to return. I was going to say that they betrayed us but I think we may have moved to Washington before they left so perhaps we've been the villains all along. WELL since we were in the neighborhood we popped into their town and had a hangout.

"A central landmark of the city is Amiens Cathedral, the largest Gothic cathedral in France."

"The author Jules Verne lived in Amiens from 1871 until his death in 1905, and served on the city council for 15 years."

We stopped at a confectionary and picked up some macaron d'Amiens. It's quite different from the classic, apparently Parisian, macaron. The most obvious difference is that it's just one thing, no sandwiching happening and no filling.

Viry and Lolo had a party at their house to celebrate my glorious arrival to their town. Luckily I had several monster sized bottles of Champagne to share.

They have a pool and Ern took a dip.

One interaction I remember was that a couple of their friends stopped by and joined us. I expressed my dismay that they would even consider making new friends, and that they should stay friend celibate to honor our memory. Then Viry told us that they knew this other couple first, when they lived here before. I realized that we had been the temporary seat warmers all along. Everything I thought I knew crumbled and I've never felt so betrayed.

Last Champagne Pop Off

We continued our deep dive into the Champagne region and the bubbly juice that takes its name.

We started with a mom and pop tour at Champagne Lamiable in Tours-sur-Marne, France.

By this time we'd hit a good rhythm of taking shifts entertaining his highness while the other two adults enjoyed the bubbly.

They had a little pond out front so we had fun throwing rocks in and sticking our hands in and... really whatever might make the biggest mess.

We walked around the mostly deserted neighborhood and entertained ourselves as best we could. I invited a game called "ding dong" where you hit things with a stick to see what sound they make whilst saying "ding dong". I should really send my resume to Parker Brothers.

Ernie likes his mama a whole lot and sometimes wants to see her real bad. Even if he's in the middle of an engrossing game of "ding dong" in the middle of the French countryside.

Phew back with mama.

Our guide said that these blue tanks date back to the 70s. Someone has to crawl in here to clean it. Sounds like an actual nightmare, no thank you.

One barrel is 300 bottles.

I think this was the first time we got to see a place's complete current day machinery operation. Some of my notes from the outing:

The press they use has a balloon inside that inflates from the inside and is meant to more uniformly squish the juice out of the grapes. It's a delicate process because if you crush too hard you release the pigment in the skins. You can also squeeze the nasty tannin flavors out of the grape seeds if you press too hard. 

The amount of juice from the grapes is regulated for quality control.

First press cuvée. Second press is darker. Third press into alcohol for pharmaceutical industry and for brandy. Fortified wine is sweet wine from bad juice with alcohol. Throwing juice away is not allowed because the government wants it all accounted for so no fake champagne is made.

Their big aluminum tanks hold 20k bottles worth of champagne. They wait to label the bottles until after they sell because the label differs depending on which country they're headed to. Climate change is good for them. They aren't allowed to irrigate because this increases the amount of water in the grape juice, lowering its quality.

Where the village defensive wall used to be.

This place had a good taste to price ratio and Zoe and I bought a case and had it shipped back to Seattle.

In the local shop windows there's been a TON of carrying cases, cool things to hang on your wall, maps, etc. with the purpose of collecting and displaying these champagne bottle caps. NOT TODAY SATAN. These days I collect only cash, passport stamps, and the dreamy gazes of female champagne tour guides.

We saved the biggest boy for last: Moët & Chandon in Épernay.

They made us wait a while but it was in a pretty cool area.

If you were wondering "did Moët & Chandon have a series of beaded embroidery pieces created to show the company's history?" well then I can put your mind at ease.

A small gripe I had was that the tour guides on the big company tours were never French. This doesn't make any difference to me other than the fact that there were a lot of words that I would've liked to hear the correct pronunciation of but the guides didn't know any better than I did.

 Napoleon named Moët the official champagne supplier to his imperial court and armies. Before every military campaign, he famously stopped at the Moët estate in Épernay to stock up. The product that most people associate with the company is called Moët Impérial. Impérial was named after the late Emperor in 1869, and the house has continued to produce it under that name ever since.

“Champagne is like vampire. He hate light." Foreshadowing!! We'll soon be in Transylvania.

At the tasting at the end of the tour Ern got another bottle of his favorite vintage of chardonnay grape juice.

He didn't drink it so much as swish it around in his mouth, spit it out, then make dismissive comments regarding terroir.

I was glad we bought our wine at the smaller operations. The gift shop at this place was very unfortunate. These bottles of pink Dom Perignon were 410 euro.

One of the things on this list was 12,000 a bottle.

Back at headquarters we watched some more olympics.