Easter Weekend in Champagne

This past weekend Nick had a holiday for Easter, so after much debate and other plans falling through, we decided to head to Champagne for a short get-away.  Champagne is only a little over 90 minute drive from Paris, so it was perfect!  We could've taken the train, but we decided we needed an excuse to use the car for the first time.

Driving through the Champagne countryside is a lot like driving through southwest Wisconsin....rolling hills and lots of fields.  The only difference is that these fields are filled with vineyards instead of corn.  And instead of random farms, there's random tiny villages scattered throughout!  We stopped at a little town for lunch, and Nick summarized it best:  The "small town" feel is very similar in Wisconsin, it's just that these towns have about 400 years on the ones in Wisconsin, so it feels more quaint.

Our only proof of visiting Pierre Legras

After driving along "la route touristique de Chamapgne" we finally arrived at our first "champagne house"--Pierre Legras.  We knew we wanted to visit one big, well-known champagne house and one smaller one in the countryside.  After reading amazing reviews on TripAdvisor about Pierre Legras, I decided it was worth a shot.  The owners were so nice and we had a free tour of their facilities--we were the only ones on the tour!  They explained the entire champagne making process and showed us the machines and where they do everything in the champagne-making process.  They were incredibly welcoming, generous, and spoke great English!  Although we did try to practice our French with them, it got a bit complicated with all the technical terms.  After the tour they let us taste about 3 of their champagnes, which were all wonderful.  Sadly, we didn't take any pictures while we were there, but we did buy 3 bottles of their champagne.  At 15 euros a bottle, how can you go wrong?  (Actually, after tasting the champagne at the "big" house Sunday, we thought Pierre Legras champagne was way better!)  If you're ever in the Champagne area and have a car, I'd highly recommend visiting!

We spent the night in Reims, which is the biggest city in the Champagne area, exploring the beautiful Notre Dame (yep, that's it's name and it looks a lot like Paris's, just without all the tourists) and eating dinner.

Profiteroles--may be my new favorite desert!

Easter morning we visited a local patisserie (pastry shop...I try to limit these visits to travel or I'd go crazy!) and then an Easter church service in an old cathedral.  It was our first ever church service in French, and combined with that fact that is was Catholic (which we are not used to), it was a little difficult to follow at times.  Next, we toured the "big" champagne house, Pommery.  Since we planned this trip pretty spur of the moment, we arrived without tickets, but were able to purchase ones for a tour leaving 10 minutes after we got there....in French.  We didn't want to wait 2 hours for an English tour, so we decided to go for it!  And, we did pretty well!  It helped that we had a base understanding of the process from the day before, but we understood the just of what he was saying.  I'm sure we missed some details, but hey, we really just wanted to see the caves and taste the champagne anyway! :)

Joyeuses Paques!

All in all, it was a good little weekend get-away!  It was the perfect amount of time and very relaxing.  We probably won't go back unless some visitors really wanted to go, but that's mostly just because we're not huge champagne people! :)  Check out the rest of our Champagne pictures here.