It is ten in the morning, and I am standing with a sword in one hand and a champagne bottle in the other.
I am as surprised about this as anyone, and yet here I am learning the art of sabrage, or sabering. The trick, in case it comes up at your next soirée, is to hold the bottle horizontally, quickly run the blade along the seam with three firm taps, then strike straight through, shearing off cork and glass collar together in a glorious fountain of spray. Mercifully, nobody lost an eye. Goggles were worn.
This is Canard-Duchêne. A champagne house founded in 1868 by Léonie Duchêne, a wine grower, with her husband Victor Canard, a barrel maker. Today, the blending and grape sourcing are run by Cynthia Fossier, one of the region’s youngest and most formidable cellar masters. Two women, either end of the same story. As I would discover over the next three days, this is not unusual here.
After nearly a decade living in France, this is my first visit to Champagne, and I cannot account for it. After three days, I’m a convert to the region. The high-speed TGV takes under an hour from Paris’ Gare de l’Est to deliver you into rolling hillsides under big skies. From London via train, it is under four hours with a change.
Wine has been made here since the Romans, and for a thousand years the stuff was still rather than sparkling, poured freely at the coronation banquets in Reims Cathedral where 33 French kings were crowned. The bubbles came later, and it was the British who fell hardest for them, starting with Charles II and never really stopping. Which is how the UK ended up the second-largest export market in the world, and why so much of what happens in these cellars still has one eye trained across the Channel.
Rebecca McVeigh at Chateau De Sacy
What is easy to forget, surveying all this bucolic countryside, is how much tragedy it has absorbed. The First World War turned the region into a battlefield and sent locals underground into the chalk cellars for shelter; the graffiti they left is still legible on the walls. Later, Churchill, rallying his troops, reportedly put the stakes plainly: “Remember, gentlemen, it’s not just France we are fighting for, it’s Champagne.” Shelled, frozen and very nearly wiped out by a vine-eating aphid in the 19th century, the region has responded to every catastrophe by adapting and coming back stronger, which tells you something about the particular genius of the people who make it.
Many of them were women and still are. Follow that thread from the nineteenth century to the present, and it introduces you, again and again, to women who tore up society’s rule book on how things should be. In Champagne, girls really do run the world. Allow me to introduce a few. Starting with the Grande Dame, Madame Clicquot, better known as Veuve, or widow, Clicquot.
Barbe-Nicole Clicquot Ponsardin was 27 when her husband died in 1805. She had a small daughter, a struggling wine business and a father-in-law who assumed she would sell up and retire into a life of appropriate mourning. She asked him to let her run it instead.
Her gamble was Russia. Betting the court would be thirsty the moment the Napoleonic Wars ended, she smuggled her best wine to Amsterdam to wait, then shipped it east the instant peace was declared, arriving weeks ahead of every competitor. Tsar Alexander I pronounced it the only champagne he would drink. Demand quickly outran the old methods, so she solved that too, working out that bottles stored at an angle and turned by hand would collect their sediment in the neck to lift out cleanly. Remuage, they call it, and the principle has not changed in two hundred years.
She never left France, since a woman could not travel alone, and never remarried as it would have meant handing a man control of everything she had built. By the time she died in 1866, she was shipping to everywhere, from Lapland to America, the first great international businesswoman of the modern age.
Next, another widow. Draw your own conclusions there. Louise Pommery noticed that the British were drinking champagne with dessert because it was too sweet for anything else and reasoned that a drier style might get it onto the table earlier in the meal and therefore sell rather more of it. In 1874 she released what is widely credited as the first brut. It is now what most of the world means when it says ‘champagne’.
Her other stroke of genius was to buy land she suspected sat above ancient Roman chalk quarries. She was right. There were sixty of them, thirty metres down, cavernous and naturally holding at ten degrees, perfect conditions for storing champagne. She connected this underground world with eighteen kilometres of tunnels.
I ventured down the hundred and sixteen steps to see them. If Madame Pommery had a shrewd sense of business, her sense of theatre was keener still. She commissioned vast frescoes carved directly into the chalk walls, depicting myth, legend and bacchanalian excess. They look like the remnants of an ancient civilisation that knew how to have a wild time.
The story does not stop in the nineteenth century. Charlotte Le Gallais runs a small walled estate at Boursault, above the river Marne. Her family has worked these vines since 1927, and she is the fifth generation to follow suit. Charlotte took over in 2015, aged thirty-five, and converted the lot to organic. A challenging decision, especially given the realities of climate change. Sheep graze between the rows instead of fertiliser, aerating the soil with their feet. Solar panels sit on the roof. She starts at six and does everything herself, from planting to selling, making around thirty thousand bottles a year.
We tasted straight from the barrel, then had lunch in the Champagne Le Gallais tasting rooms between the gardens and the vines. And though we were there for the vines and the vintages, the château on Charlotte’s land is impossible to ignore. Château de Boursault, she tells me, was built by Widow Clicquot herself. The best part of two centuries later, on the same ground, another woman is running a champagne business entirely according to her own rules. Cheers to that.
Where to stay
Domaine Les Crayères, Reims
Unapologetically grand as suits an estate commissioned by Madame Pommery for her daughter, the Marquise de Polignac. Completed in 1904, 20 rooms are named after empresses and queens, there are seven hectares of gardens with Lebanese cedars, and a cellar holding 72,000 bottles. Christophe Moret has two Michelin stars at Le Parc, and pastry chef Rosalie Boucher, who trained under Cédric Grolet has been named the best in the region. Taittinger, Ruinart, Pommery and Veuve Clicquot are all ten minutes away.
Château de Sacy
A boutique hotel treasure. Twelve rooms sit above the village of Sacy, ten minutes out of Reims; interiors are contemporary rather than reverent, and the terrace at sunset is highly recommended. A small spa completes the offering– enjoy a dip in the Nordic bath surrounded by vines in every direction.
What to do
Go underground: Book Maison Pommery for the art and the sheer scale of it.
Visit a grower, not just a house: The grandes maisons are impressive, but the small independent producers are the heart of the region. Ask your hotel to arrange a visit to a domaine like Charlotte’s La Champagne Le Gallais.
Reims Cathedral: One for the Goths. Fans of Gothic architecture, that is. The Chagall windows at the Cathedral’s east end are extraordinary.
Épernay: The Avenue de Champagne invites you for tastings with all the big hitters. Moët, Perrier-Jouët and Pol Roger sit along one stretch of road, with an estimated two hundred million bottles ageing underneath it. Boizel is a charming family run champagne house that supplied Queen Victoria. Well worth a visit.
Learn to sabre: Canard-Duchêne is one of very few houses that will hand you a blade and let you have a go. Book ahead.
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