Pommerey

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One of our most anticipated parts of our holiday was the tour of the Pommery Champagne Winery. It fulfilled all our expectations and more! Arriving just on time, we were taken into a movie room where we were shown the history of the Pommery winery and how the Champagne is made. For a bit of a background - The pommery winery was started by Mr Pommery and one other fellow, but when Mr Pommery died just 2 years later, his daughter took over the company. It was unheard of in those days for women to be in business, but in just 20 years, she made a tiny winery into a mass producing huge success.

Her key to her success was her inovated decision to use chalk caves under the city that were left by Romans from roman times (they used chalk for building etc and left big hollows in the ground when extracting the chalk). She took on 200 kilometres of chalk caves that she linked together to create the cellars that today store 20 000 000 bottles of champas. These chalk caves were perfect because no matter the weather above ground, these were consistently 10 degrees. Plus, it was dark and humid, so fulfilled all the requirements to age great champas.

After the movie we walked down 116 stairs down into the chalk caves. What was fantastic was whilst we were doing the tour, they had a modern art exhibition throughout the chalk caves - so we got two for one, the tour and an art exhibition. You can see by the photos that the addition of modern art peices themed around the wine and the history of the company, plus light effects, movie projections on walls, sounds and voices and music echoeing through the cold halls added an eary, and yet beautiful atmosphere that made this a really unique experience.

The pictures speak for themselves.

After the tour we were given a taste of their famous Brut to top off the morning. It was such a great experience. We learned so much about the process, and got to taste too!

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