Bike Travels ike and Jo have shipped their BMW 1150 GSA bike to London and are riding it home to Australia. The planned route includes North Africa, Central Europe and the Russian Far East. On the way they will see part of the Rugby World Cup and attend their daughte

A Champagne Adventure
Every year thousands of tourists flock to Épernay, 25 kilometres south of Reims in northern France, to visit the great champagne houses gathered along the avenue de Champagne. We visited the Moët et Chandon cellars on a cool autumn day, paid our $20 and waited in a lavish hall decorated with posters proclaiming the Moët lifestyle. A soft French accent ushered us through a rushed tour of cellar tunnels set aside for tourists and an explanation of how champagne was made emphasising hand turning of bottles and long family traditions.
Not mentioned were that Moët et Chandon has been part of a conglomerate since the 1980s and that champagne is made like any other modern wine; fermented in huge stainless steel vats then turned and purged by machines. Production is a million bottles a year. We tasted our one glass of the wine before being abandoned in the boutique then rushed out into the afternoon chill without looking back.
Épernay is the centre of a French marketing marvel that has sold wine with bubbles as a lifestyle accessory for 90 years but it is not the whole story of this great wine style. While 75% of the vineyards legally able to provide grapes for true champagne lie in the Marne département around Reims and Épernay, the other 25% is situated more than 120 kilometres south in the département of Aube. The Aube growing area is centred on about 20 villages from Les Riceys in the south to Bar-sur-Aube 30 kilometres to the north-east.
The Aube wineries have a long history of champagne production but, when the areas for inclusion in Champagne’s Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée (AOC) were established in 1909, the Aube département vineyards were not included. Eighteen years of crippling conflict followed. By the time Aube was included in the Champagne AOC, the major producers of the north had established market dominance in a new, image driven, wine market and the southern wineries had missed their place in the champagne marketing juggernaut.
The next day, we travelled south and found wine maker Champagne Marcel Vézien at Celles-sur-Ource. There was no charge for tours or tasting, no special areas in the buildings dedicated to tourists and the image of the product or the company. This was a just wine-making business; small, family, proud.
We tasted a chardonnay, and a rosé, made a modest purchase and helped our host packed the bottles. That night we enjoyed our champagne with a simple home cooked meal in the warmth of a rented farm house sure that somewhere between the marketing triumph of the Épernay houses and the small family vineyards of the Aube was a complex and reassuring story. To visit one was to find champagne as a lifestyle accessory prized for its brand name and exclusivity. To visit the other was to get involved with the wine for its own sake. We drank our wine and wondered how sophisticated we could be drinking champagne from kitchen tumblers.