Montagne de Reims

Hautvillers

Remuage by hand at Taittinger's Comtes de Champagne Cave

May Bank Holiday Champagne

5 - 7 May 2012

As on all our wonderful original champagne weekends, we are based in the lively city of Reims and over the weekend. Our aim is to introduce you to a wide spectrum of Champagnes, to visit a good cross section of Houses, from those that forged Champagne’s reputation such as Taittinger, Pol Roger and Veuve Clicquot as well as to search out quality growers and rising stars in the villages.

You will taste around 25 Champagnes over the course of the weekend, starting at breakfast. You will receive a special welcome and generous tastings at houses that we have been visiting for many years. These are some of the many advantages of choosing to travel with Arblaster & Clarke on our original champagne weekends. Our successful formula has changed very little since 1987 – it was totally ground breaking then and remains the market leader now.

Our Exclusive Comparative Tastings

Each evening, as always on Arblaster & Clarke Champagne weekends, our Wine Guide will show you a selection of Champagnes in order to introduce the various styles and different Houses or Growers in two tastings, one each evening. No two of our tastings are alike and no two Wine Guides have the same approach to presenting them. We like to choose some unusual Champagnes for you to taste not just the famous names. Most will be to your liking though perhaps some may not. You can normally learn more from these than those you liked, but hopefully you’ll find one or two that you think are fabulous! These tastings are arranged personally by our office in the UK, with our team of experts choosing the Champagnes purely on the basis of giving you a fascinating experience. These tasting are totally exclusive to Arblaster & Clarke Wine Tours and our clients (not something that we just book onto locally and have absolutely no control over). Our champagne loving clients often tell us that they find these tastings to be the most enjoyable and informative part of these special Champagne weekends.

Our Wine Guide

Our Wine Guide is UK based and will travel out and back on the journey with you. The Wine Guides are wine experts, wine journalists, consultants or Masters of Wine who have been specially selected by A&C for their ability to communicate their great knowledge in an approachable and enjoyable way. Being UK based they understand the British approach to Champagne and what is available on the UK market and can help you choose which champagnes are the “best buys” on tour without any local bias or lack of understanding of the global wine market.

Buying Champagne

We select a good range of Champagne houses to visit so that you have a great choice of Champagnes to buy! The vintages and special cuvées from the top houses can be much better value when bought on location and the top quality smaller Champagne producers that we visit have excellent quality, great value Champagnes from very little over £10. You can bring back up to 36 bottles per person, plenty to keep you going over the summer months – or for your Jubilee party.

Travelling by coach

We are not a coach company and like many of our regular clients, had not previously considered this as a chosen method of travel. However, there are lots of advantages – especially when you are wine touring! Someone else is doing the driving and navigating so you can sit back and enjoy the view and the journey being the most obvious! It is the most convenient and comfortable way to get to Reims (which is only 175 miles from Calais on uncluttered motorway) and as you can see from the Buying Champagne section – you can bring back lots of champagne with you which you obviously cannot do if you are travelling by train or plane. If you prefer to meet us in Reims you may do so, and you can even choose to meet us in Reims and travel back with us with your purchases!

Evening Meals

Reims has a wealth of wonderful restaurants, brasseries and bistros from two Michelin double starred restaurants (early booking essential!) to more reasonably priced gourmet restaurants and traditional style brasseries. We provide a list of all our tried and tested ones before the trip with phone numbers, so you can book ahead if you wish. However, we will make a reservation at two of our favourite (reasonably priced) brasseries and you are very welcome to join our Wine Guide or Tour Manager for dinner where they will select some interesting wines.

This again is one of the great advantages of an Arblaster & Clarke fully escorted tour. We give you the flexibility to dine alone if this is what your prefer, or the fun of being part of a lively party who generally all get on together really well, especially after the Champagne tasting has broken the ice! This is especially appreciated by those clients who travel alone with us.

Champagne Breakfasts

Breakfast is served each morning at the hotel. The A&C Tour Manager is on hand to exclusively serve our clients with a glass of Champagne to go with their buffet breakfast (much to the disappointment of other hotel guests who have not had the good foresight to book on an A&C Champagne Weekend!)

Champagne Taittinger

We visit the beautiful cellars of Champagne Taittinger, which weave for kilometres under the city of Reims. They were carved out of the chalk by the Romans and now house the prestige Cuvée of Taittinger, the ‘Comtes de Champagne’. This is the perfect introduction to Champagne; we see how it is made and then taste a couple of champagnes in their elegant tasting room.

Champagne Quenardel et Fils

We first visited this small house back in the 1980s and are delighted to be able to include them once again in the programme. They are based in the small Grand Cru village of Verzenay and own eight hectares of mainly black grapes on the Montagne de Reims. The Cuvee “Faucomprez”, named after the Winemaker, is a wonderfully flavoursome and rounded champagne that has a lovely long finish and comes in a very unique blue glass bottle.

Champagne Ployez-Jacquemart

Champagne Ployez-Jacquemart, in Ludes, is where we have dinner in the cellar dining room beneath the family home. Situated in the village of Ludes in the Montagne de Reims, this House has a small high quality production of about 100,000 bottles. Laurence Ployez, the charming daughter is now the wine maker. She is also an accomplished cook and prepares a delicious gourmet dinner for us. Every dish will be accompanied by a Champagne from her range of Champagnes, including her excellent non-vintage, rosé and a vintage.

Champagne André Jacquart & Fils

André Jacquart & Fils own around 24 hectares, including a substantial vineyard around the famous Grand Cru village of Vertus. They are one of the larger ‘grower producers’ in Champagne and without doubt one of the best. Chardonnay is their main cépage and their new range of Champagnes display a richness and complexity that comes from the base wines having been largely fermented in oak barrels. Over lunch Marie Duval-Doyard presents the wines that her sommelier/winemaker husband Matthieu Duval.