After a Paris breakfast of cafe and croissant, how about lunch and a glass of bubbly in France’s Champagne region?
Thanks to a new high-speed train line, Reims, the ancient heart of Champagne country, is now just 45 minutes from Paris — less time than it takes to cross the French capital during rush hour.
Running up to 199 mph, France’s network of bullet trains — known as the TGV, or Train a Grande Vitesse (high-speed train) — is shrinking the country. Its newest line, the TGV Est, puts eastern France on the daytrippers’ map, slashing travel times to the line’s 30-plus destinations in eastern France and Germany.
The previous 90-minute trip to Reims has been cut by half. Colmar, a picture postcard town in another famed French wine region — Alsace, on the German border — is now three hours from Paris, down from nearly five hours before.
Though you can’t see the Champagne region’s famous vineyards from the train as you arrive in Reims, the drink’s enormous influence on the city is immediately palpable: More than an occasional, celebratory beverage, bubbly here is a way of life.
Decorative bunches of stone grapes adorn the stately bourgeois mansions in the historic center, and architectural details on City Hall and even the famous cathedral of Reims — where generations of French monarchs were anointed — pay homage to the sparkling wine.
Reims is the headquarters for many of France’s main Champagne houses, including luxury labels Veuve Clicquot, Ruinart and Pommery. Most labels offer tours of their cellars with English-speaking guides several times a day.
Clustered in the residential neighborhoods south of the city center — a good 45-minute walk from the train station — the best way to get to the cellars is by taxi.
I visited Taittinger, founded in 1930 by entrepreneur Pierre-Charles Taittinger. Among the youngest of the major labels, the Taittinger cellar is built on the meandering corridors of a Roman chalk mine and dates from the 4th century. Vestiges of the mine — and an abbey built in the 13th century by Champagne-making monks — can be seen in Taittinger’s 66-foot-deep cellar, which holds about 3 million bottles of sparkling wine.
Alsace
Stay on the TVG Est beyond Reims and you leave Champagne country and head into sweet white wine territory — Alsace.
Just 12 miles from the German border, the town of Colmar is a picture-perfect hybrid of French and German culture, with typical German half-timbered houses and broad French promenades and parks.
It’s about a 20-minute walk from the station into the historic city center. A small tourist bus that stops in front of the station will get you there as well — with running commentary in English, French and German detailing the history of local landmarks.
Most of the region’s vintners are based outside Colmar, amid the endless rows of vineyards that surround the city, but a handful of wine makers do their production in Colmar.
Domaine Karcher is one of them. In a small compound tucked into a side street in old Colmar, Georges Karcher and his family turn chardonnay and pinot noir grapes into seven varieties of wine.
Karcher offers daily tours of his wine cellar, with new stainless steel vats and century-old oak barrels. No visit would be complete, of course, without a tasting. Karcher’s fruity Riesling and his sweet Gewurtztraminer, which both run for about $10 a bottle, are not to be missed.
And after sampling half a dozen varieties of Karcher’s wines, the high-speed train ride back to Paris ought to go even faster.
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