Champagne

What Champagne teaches: méthode

Champagne's sparkle comes from a second fermentation inside each bottle: yeast, sugar, patience, and years in chalk cellars. The method shapes the taste, all bread and brioche and a texture no tank-made fizz can fake. Champagne teaches you that how a wine is made can matter as much as where.

The wines

From bone-dry blanc de blancs to rich vintage cuvées. The grandes marques deliver consistency; the grower-producers (look for "RM" on the label) deliver personality from single villages.

Where to go

Reims and Épernay split the region between them. In Reims, Ruinart and Taittinger run tastings in chalk crayères dug by the Romans, cathedral-quiet, fifty metres down, UNESCO-listed. In Épernay, the Avenue de Champagne is a single street with cellars holding millions of bottles beneath it; Moët & Chandon's doors are the grandest on it. The smaller villages of the Côte des Blancs reward a slow afternoon.

Eat

Reims does serious tables (Racine, and the Michelin-starred grandeur of Le Parc at Les Crayères). But a planche and a grower Champagne in an Épernay wine bar is the region at its honest best.

Getting there

The TGV from Paris reaches Reims in about 45 minutes. Champagne is one of the easiest famous wine regions to visit from Paris, and it knows it.