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Philipponnat | Veuve Clicquot | Vilmart | Jacquesson | Ruinart | Goutorbe Part 1
Goutorbe Part 2 | Henri Giraud | Chartogne-Taillet | Introduction

For almost 3 weeks in June my wife and I headed off to Europe for business and pleasure. While I tried to argue that all the pleasure should occur in the motherland (aka Champagne), she had other ideas. As I do not make the rules, we decided on spending 4 days each in Paris, Champagne, & Nice/Eze with the final week being a business trip to Graz, Austria. While we drank lots of bubbly throughout our trip to Europe, the real fun occurred in Champagne, where we visited with the following producers:

We gave ourselves up to half a day at each winery. Most of our visits were with the winemakers and we got to not only really dive in and better understand the vines and philosophies behind the wine, but the people too. The only visits where the winemakers were not involved were Jacquesson and Krug. As part of our time in Champagne collided with VinExpo in Bordeaux, these two planned visits didn’t flow as smoothly as originally scheduled.

As I mentioned above, we also drank a lot of bubbly outside of these visits. I was in heaven as each day started and ended with a taste of the magic juice. Unfortunately, while my wife enjoyed all of the Champagne, she was always happy when a still wine presented itself and made sure that our meals were accompanied by some unsparkling beverages.

Our visits with each of the producers will be shared in the reports below and will be hyperlinked when they are up on this site. I’ll also talk about some of the other wines we sampled and weave in a few tales of an American lost in Champagne. First stop - Philipponnat!