Mumm Day Out

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This is one of the days we had been waiting for and it didn't disappoint.

In the morning we walked up to the Information Center in Epernay and turned up just as the Tourist Train was about to leave, so we hopped on the tour. The tour took us up the Avenue de Champagne, where every building was a stunning who's who of the Champagne world and many have tours & tasting. After having lunch at the apartment, we headed for the train to Reims and then headed to the home of Mumm.

On Arrival at Mumm we waited for the rest of the tour to arrive (of course we were 30 minutes early was not going to be late to this one). After a 10 minute video on Mumm we descended 10 meters to the first floor under ground for a look at the original barrel room and the the recently retired concrete vaults. After this we descended to 20 meters underground to a cold 10 degrees and 80 percent humidity, the walls and handrails where damp and the air was thick with moisture.

We had a wonderful guide who showed and explained all of the rituals of champagne making. At the end of the tour we were ushered into a tasting room for the obligatory tasting where we were explained that the colour of the stamp on your ticket defined what level of tasting we had purchased. Rose sighed with disappointment as we had no colour on the ticket, as we had been gifted our tickets by Andrew (my brother) but when our tour guide asked us to come this way and ushered us into a private tasting room where we were plied with a number of full glasses of various levels of their champagne culminating in their unreleased RSRV (short for Reserve) Blanc de Noir 2012, a white champagne made solely from Pinor Noir grapes - very wonderful drop.

The champagne went straight to my head as I left our camera behind (found and collected the next day) and it took 10 minutes to get into the apartment (fingers and keypad not connecting) this did not stop us, as we then went and had 2 glasses of champagne with our lovely dinner. This is the life.

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