The world capital of Champagne — where the Avenue de Champagne holds 200km of underground cellars beneath 10km of surface boulevard, Moët & Chandon, Perrier-Jouët, and Pol Roger press shoulders along the most expensive street in France by subsurface value, and the region produces 300 million bottles a year
Épernay (25,000) in the Marne is the undisputed capital of Champagne wine — a small city whose modest surface hides 200 kilometres of chalk cellars beneath its streets, holding over 200 million bottles of ageing Champagne at any given time. The Avenue de Champagne (UNESCO World Heritage Site 2015) is a 2km boulevard of Belle Époque Champagne house palaces — Moët & Chandon, Perrier-Jouët, Pol Roger, Mercier — where visitors can descend into cave systems carved from Cretaceous chalk by Benedictine monks from the 17th century onward. Dom Pérignon (1638–1715), the Benedictine monk who pioneered t…
Sparkling Champagne as a wine category was not invented by Dom Pérignon (the legend of him 'discovering' champagne while crying 'I am drinking stars!' was a 19th-century marketing invention) — secondary fermentation in sealed bottles was happening in English glassmakers' experiments by 1662, before Pérignon entered the Abbey of Hautvillers. What Pérignon did contribute, from 1668, was the systematic blending of grapes from different villages to produce consistent flavour, the use of thicker English-style glass bottles to contain fermentation pressure, and the adoption of cork stoppers. The mo…