Touring Champagne

We woke up in Épernay, France and had both a whole new region and new beverage to explore: Champagne!

Our first champagne-related order of business was a tour of Champagne Météyer Père et fils in the town of Trélou-sur-Marne.

Part of this tour that was fun was all of the antique farm implements that they had on display. This was a couple of tanks and sprayers that fit on a horse's back. These contained pesticides.

They had some of the older version of champagne cork holders. They reminded me of giant staples.

I learned some of the rules. Grapes must be handpicked to be used in champagne.

There's also like a cartel that decides when each grape can be picked and how much. I think that they're sometimes just let grapes rot in the fields in order to control prices.

This lady had a screen mask thing on to keep from getting her eyes poked out by exploding champagne bottles.

It was around this time that Le Ern decided he had mastered the art and history of champagne production and left the tour early.

We did a lot of rock throwing and yelling "beep beep" at passing cars. Ernie's version is more like "bap bap".

I learned that Champagne is generally a blend of three different grapes: Pinot noir, Pinot meunier, and Chardonnay. This particular one was a bit more rare then because it was only made with Pinot meunier. I liked it a lot.

We took turns watching the big man while we toured.

After the tour we did a little stroll around the little town.

There was a bread and a fresh flower vending machine.

During pruning season they'll push along a burn barrel like this. I guess they'd rather just get rid of the material rather than let it spread disease around.

We had a late lunch at Brasserie le Jardin, one of the restaurants at Domaine Les Crayeres, a luxury hotel in a a seven hectare park in the centre of Reims. Reims and our home base of Épernay are two of the biggest cities in the Champagne region. Maybe Reims is sort of the "capital". To this day I'm not really sure how to say it.

This restaurant was pretty classy about keeping the sun off you head. They even had hats available! Now that's fancy.

Later I spotted a roadside fruit stand and made an emergency detour. I bought some Mirabelle plums for a delicious first.

Next we did a tour at Taittinger. It is a very large operation and so a fun contrast with the mom and pop type place we toured earlier today.

It was also fun to hear about the same process but from a different point of view. A fun part of the process is that the freeze the neck of the bottle to make the sediment into an ice cube and easy to remove.

The quality of the bottle glass used to be worse so some would explode and cause chain reaction of explosions among the other bottles. That actually sounds like it would be kind of awesome to watch.

I suffered a pretty big loss today. I posted a few clips of the Olympics games that we watched onto Youtube, as I do after pretty much every cool event that I go to. They occasionally have copyright claims against them due to music featured in the video or that type of thing. Usually this means whoever the rights owner is keeps the ad revenue from the video and no harm is done. I didn't get ad revenue anyway so it made no difference to me. Well the Olympics chose to go the fascist route and file "official" copyright takedown requests. You get three strikes in that situation within a certain time frame and then Youtube kills your account. Well the Olympics issued a group of these claims at the same instant and I had no time to react. So they killed my Youtube account. I had over 1,000 videos posted many of which I had no other copy of, believing they were safely stored. It was pretty devastating honestly. I tried several avenues of trying to get my account restored to no avail. The account just ceased to exist too so I couldn't download anything to save it.

On one hand I know it's kind of stupid because it's just some social media account but I've been working on it since maybe 2002? I embedded countless videos into this blog to give it a little multimedia spice. All of those links are now dead. It felt like a betrayal because we've spent so much time and money to be physically present at the Olympics and obviously fans of the whole thing, and then they turned around and murdered this creative outlet of mine. I have one more Olympic event to go to on this trip which will be fun, but in the time that's passed since I've come to the conclusion that I'm done with the Olympics. I will never give them another dollar, I will not watch another Olympic match, and they've made me their enemy for life.

They even had Chardonnay grape juice for my lil buddy.