24 Hours Drinking Champagne in France 🇫🇷🍾

Are you ready to unleash the bubbles? Yeah, after two hours this unit already exists. Mmm, I can smell her. It was a beautiful, if long, drive to the Champagne region of France from our starting point in Paris. This was our first stop on the Champagne tour. It's a very state-of-the-art Champagne production. Right at the entrance they had the world's most gigantic bottle. Yeah, that'll definitely fill your whole stomach and then some. For today's surprise, you were supposed to get two tastings, but as you've got a special tour, there will be three tastings. Okay. So here, we start, as I was telling you, with a red label. It's this one, a blue label. Where do you come from first? California. California. Okay, so Americans. You will judge me for my French accent. Not at all. I'm Armenian. And so you, where do you come from? Canada. Okay. Do you speak a bit of French? Oh, after a few glasses, you will be fluent. No worries. And so, for this one, as I was telling you, you've got a mix between the three different types of grapes. It's a non-vintage. So here, as in the midi suite, if I translate, milésine means vintage. So vintage 2018. Because it's a mix between the three different types of grapes as well. But as it is a vintage, you have a longer aging process. Here, you still have the freshness on the Chardonnay. But for me, this one, you've got more, yes, structure, character, in French we say, which is really representative of the Pinot Noir. Are you ready to start it? Yes? Whiteskin grapes. Here, you've got the typical Chardonnay that I was telling you. Minorality, freshness, white flowers notes, which makes it very good for an aperitif as well. But if you love fish, or even more, oysters, this one is perfect. Because in fact, at the end, with this one, you've got kind of a small saltiness. That saltiness with oysters, best match you can have in your life. So Blanc de Blanc, my favorite, but I'm sure it will be your favorite. I hope it will be. And as I was telling you, here for us, in Nicolas Cuyat, in fact, we will keep it for a non-vintage three years minimum. We could stay in our cellar, sorry, because three to five years. And if you have a vintage, it will be from six to eight years. So much more long. And so you can go through to five years, you will get your second alcoholic fermentation, which will be done, but in the bottle this time. In fact, when we did the bottling, we had to have some, oh sorry, some liqueur de tirage. Liqueur de tirage, it's yeast and sugar again, to create the second alcoholic fermentation. And in fact, when you have that liqueur de tirage, it's going to do the exact same process as we had for the first alcoholic fermentation process, but in the bottle this time. And here in fact, in the bottle, your dioxide of carbon, your CO2, is completely caught. And the catch of the dioxide of carbon is what will turn into bubbles, into sparkling. In fact, we can say you've got champagne only during the aging in cellars. Before, it's not. It's only wines, because we exposed the heat and the CO2 before. For your information as well, in fact, after two months, you've got bubbles in your champagne. You can say you've got champagne after two months, but no. As I told you, three years for us. Why three years? First, to not get too much yeast taste, to not get something too aggressive when you've got it in your mouth, because the longer you keep your champagne in cellars, the smoother, the finest, you know, your bubbles will be. Sometimes you've got champagne that kind of attacks you here. I don't know if you ever had that feeling by drinking champagne, but sometimes it's very bubbly. And when it's very bubbly, of course it's champagne, you expect bubbles, but be a bit careful. Try to be careful, because sometimes it hides a very bad quality champagne. If it's too bubbly, if you've got some strange feelings here in your cheeks, it means next morning, headache. So be careful. Sometimes as well, be careful with demi-sec. Demi-sec, you've got some very good demi-sec. We've got one in the range, but demi-sec, for your information, is between 30 to 50 grams of sugar per liter that we add at the end of the process. 30 to 50 grams, it's dilute. Here you only had brut for today. Brut is between 6 to 10 grams of sugar maximum. So you can get much more, I need to say, honest. After our extended morning tasting, we went back to see the vats where the primary fermentation, the creation of the wine that will become champagne happens, and the side of the building where the juice is pumped in. Those big trucks are called in French, and here, in fact, you will get a lot of pipes during harvest. But here, we wanted to show you some of them to explain to you, thanks to those men and to those women, that we were able to produce such a big range. In the Champagne region, you've got 34,000 hectares of vines, so it's huge. In those different, you know, areas, in fact, you've got some specificity for the place. For example, here you've got La Côte des Blancs, at the top of me. La Côte des Blancs, if I translate, it means the white coast. White coast, it gives you an idea. In fact, on that place, you will find mainly Chardonnay, because white-skinned grapes with white cheese. This is more of the back of the facility. They have an incredible industrial process for bottling the champagne. I think they said like 20,000 bottles an hour or something crazy like that. It really just blows your mind how complicated this whole process is and all the different machinery and the processes that are involved. So this bottle is the first champagne you're going to drink. It's made by Richaume. Richaume is the owner of this place. He's also a winemaker. So this is his Chardonnay. It's 100% Chardonnay, blanc de blanc. It's brut, around five grams of sugar. There's 40% Grand Cru and 60% Cezanne. Cezanne is a city 30 minutes down. Grand Cru is a special designation, the highest quality, given only to a few villages in the region. Our lunch was really tasty, various kind of meat pastries, tarts, things like that, to go with all the champagne. Well, I really messed this up. Nico did a beautiful job of savoring the champagne. Another champagne, this one made with Meunier grapes that we enjoyed. It's from a later press of the grapes, like the fourth press. So yeah, it's like a slightly higher alcohol by volume percentage. Like a liqueur? No, not quite. This one was aged 10 years in poker barrels. It's 18% alcohol. All right, we just finished our lunch at the Champagne Théâtre. How drunk are you? Oh, I'm tipsy. I never had so much alcohol in my life. It's the first time. And you had the fortified one too. And we are going more. That's right. Buckle up. Already at this point, I felt that I had had too much champagne, but we had a whole nother stop on our tour. It was an older, smaller champagne house called Volero. The anniversary, the history of the family and how to make champagne. The story begins in 1805. At the beginning, we just produce the grape and sell the grape to the other house to make champagne. So the first step is the harvest. Here in Champagne, the harvest is between August and September, depending on the weather. In Champagne, Volero is during 12 days and we need 120 persons. And in general, in Champagne, it's during two weeks and we need 120,000 persons because the harvest is only by hand. Just like the other house, they had plenty of fermentation vats, but they also had an old-fashioned style cave that we got to tour here, which was really cool. It really was impressive how a certain distance underground and all of a sudden everything was very stable and very cool feeling. The bottles stay minimum 15 months for classic champagne and three years for a vintage. But here, in Champagne, Volero, it's a bit different. And this sediment gives a lot of aromas. It's very important to keep this sediment inside the bottle. So at the beginning, your bottle is in the horizontal position. You put it inside the and every day, during one month, a meter, a quarter on the right and a quarter on the left, your bottle. And at the end of the process, you have your sediment in the neck of the bottle. These are all vintages in the private cellar of the family that are resting. They haven't been disgorged. They haven't had their sediment removed. And they can obviously stay this way for quite a long time. However, once the sediment is removed, then you kind of have a limited time to enjoy them. All right, it's time to get back in the van and go to sleep. I'm like passing out in the sunshine and fully like two and a half bottles of champagne deep. It's been a real day. The drive back to Paris was just as beautiful, but it was a bit over two hours and I was quite sleepy after all that champagne. We got into the city and found this sobering but very beautiful memorial garden. Across the river to the Louvre and look, there's a beautiful rainbow over the pyramid. And now a bunch of buses. There we go. That's better. Now you can get the full effect. Rainbow over the pyramid. Pretty unique. Nice end to the little rainstorm we walked through. This beautiful structure is the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, which is a memorial triumph arc to commemorate Napoleon's victories at the garden of the Tuileries entrance. I thought this statue was so beautiful. It's a lioness bringing, I think, a bird to her cubs. There's some small but beautiful flower beds in the public gardens here. We walked through the beautiful gardens to the Place de la Concorde. There are two fontaines there. This is a fontaine de mer, the fountain of the seas. I really love this exuberant kind of wild almost overgrown area with this fountain. And surprise, surprise, we ended up back here. I regret to inform you that you are hereby banned from going to Zara in France. This is your third visit in two days. You have used up all your quota. That's it? I'm sorry. The first two times was for you. It wasn't for me. That's what you have to tell yourself.