I do not drink wine regularly and champagne even less so; I’m fairly sure I could count the occasions on my fingers. Therefore, I was not particularly looking forward to this site and tacked on a tour of the Taittinger wine cellars to a daytrip to Reims from Paris. The tour begins from the Champagne House 2.5 km southeast from the main station of Reims. If walking, the route has a very gentle incline up Saint-Nicaise Hill and goes right past the Cathédrale Notre-Dame and the Palais du Tau. It is easy to divert to Basilique Saint-Remi to complete the set for the Reims site on the way there or the way back. Unlike some of the other manufacturers, which resemble grand mock castles, the Taittinger buildings above ground were unremarkable. I was a little afraid I would be the only one on the tour and my lack of knowledge about wine would lead to an awkward experience but I was, for once, grateful to see a reasonably large group gather in the reception/waiting room before the tour began. Decorative champagne bottles adorned the walls with a model of the old abbey that once stood upon this hill in the centre of the room. The cheapest ticket (as of late 2022) was 27€ including a single glass of champagne at the end. More expensive packages were available with additional glasses for the connoisseur. There was an option for a tour without tasting for 13€ but the website said this was for six- to seventeen-year-old children and I wasn’t bold enough to try and book that as an adult.

The tour began with a ten-minute video about the history of champagne with a heavy focus on Taittinger. I imagine tours from other producers are similarly slanted to claim their stuff is the best. We were then led on a guided tour of approximately one hour around the caves that act as wine cellars. As one might expect, it was notably cooler twenty or so metres underground than on the surface. There was no shortage of interesting information provided about the history of Reims and champagne manufacture but the seemingly endless details about grape varieties and the intricacies of the process went right over my head. The scale of the industry is truly impressive, with stacks of up to 100,00 bottles containing up to six bars of pressure in every direction in a maze of chalk tunnels. The potential release of pressure between all those bottles down there must rival the explosive magazines at a small military base. These caves were used by the Romans first, with some carvings from that time faintly visible towards the end, then as the basement of the Abbey of Saint Nicaise. Original Medieval doors and arched ceilings are still present in some places as is a statue of John the Baptist (see pictured), the patron saint of winemakers apparently, although most of the complex was destroyed in the French Revolution. One last interesting tidbit was that the tunnels then served as a useful hiding place for the French Resistance in World War II.

We were offered the option of exiting the tunnels via a spiral staircase or the elevator but everybody chose the steps. It is a long way up and, after a week of going up and down the many steps of Paris, my legs could barely make it to the top before giving out. My reward was a single glass of Brut Reserve, which I now knew meant a limited amount of sugar had been added after the second fermentation step. However, my education in the history of champagne had done little to improve my palette and, to me, there was little difference between this and a supermarket prosecco. Other, more refined members of the tour group seemed to enjoy their quaffing and I was left to inspect a row of champagne bottles that had been decorated by some famous artists, a sculpture of Saint Nicaise himself, and a board showing the names of the many, many Taittinger distributors all around the world. It took a little while for me to realise the exit to the building was next to the staircase we had climbed up and, once I had seen it, I made a quick getaway back out into Reims. There was more to see of the champagne industry in Reims and much more beyond, including the vineyards of course, but my brief time on the tour was enough for a champagne philistine such as myself. People ask me why I base my travels around World Heritage Sites and this visit is a great example. There is no way I would have gone for a tour of a Champagne House and its cellars were they not inscribed but it nevertheless proved an interesting diversion in a holiday otherwise full of cathedrals, museums, and palaces. Whilst I may still not be a champagne fan, the significance of the site is obvious and, for some, will be as important a place of pilgrimage as the cathedral I had visited on the way there.