champagne

In early November, three girlfriends and I went on the ultimate girls weekend (in my opinion). We rented a car for the weekend (see the sexy Nissan picture below), and I drove (was nice after not driving for such a long time!) for our little weekend getaway. We left on Friday night after work and the drive to Reims, France took about 5 hours, so we got in really late Friday night/early Saturday morning.

 

 

Saturday morning, we woke up and walked the 20 minutes or so into the heart of the champagne region.

 

Our first tour was at Taittinger champagne "maison". Our guide's English had a heavy French accent, so between the 4 of us (me being the only native English speaker), we got the gist of the champagne making process. The caves were really neat to see as well. 

 

 

But we all know the reason I went to champagne for the weekend was not to discuss champagne-making and tour caves, it was for the tasting! 

 

Claudia, Jelena, Jenna & Daniela

 

After a successful first tour and tasting at Taittinger (we concluded champagne tastes better in the champagne region of France), we walked to lunch with a random stop at this beautiful basilica on the way.

 

For the afternoon, we had a tour booked at Pommery.

 

The tour of the caves was much the same as the first one, but our guide's English was much more understandable this time, so we caught on a little more.

 

Champagne bottles as old as 1874:

 

 

With two tours under our belt and three glasses of champagne in our bellies, we were now considering ourselves champagne experts and changed our strategy to skip the tours and go directly to the tasting. Our next stop was Demoiselle. Here we enjoyed a glass of bubbly on the outdoor patio.

 

 

 

Our final stop and tasting of the day was at Veuve Clicquot.

 

After our exciting day, we walked back to the hotel and were enjoying girl talk and relaxing in PJ's so much that we decided to call it a night and got pizza and cheap wine for dinner and ate it in our room.

 

 

The next morning we toured the city a bit more. We walked through the beautiful cathedral and had brunch at a really cute café.

While we were at breakfast, everyone wrote a postcard (or 2). Of the 5 postcards we were mailing (some were being sent to the US and we only had EU stamps), they were written in 5 different languages. I obviously contributed the English one, but pretty cool!

 

After brunch, we drove around to a couple of our favorite maisons and made some large purchases for our own champagne inventory/upcoming new year's eve parties.

 

Then we drove back to Zurich. Daniela didn't think this trip was do-able in one weekend, but as shown, and as I've recommended to several other since we went, this is the perfect weekend getaway!