To visit Mumm you don't need to prebook. We just went to the reception desk and asked if they had a tour coming up which we could join, and they said the next one would start in 30 minutes. Perfect. I had just enough time to take a few photos for you.
The visitor shop facade:
The main visitor entrance:
At the reception:
Our tour guide spoke English very well (although it takes a while to get used to the French accent) and she was corteous and attentive. However the style in which they conduct the presentation was not as authentic or personal as it was at the Verrazzano wineyard in Tuscany; first there was a short video about the history of the winery and later on we saw another video clip about the cellar master describing his job and the their different wine qualities. Our guide answered our questions with considerable knowledge, but the whole tour just felt more like a "lets get this over with" -kinda thing. At the end we had a tasting and our choice was Grand Cru; we got to taste two different champagnes and the vintage of -99 was fantastic and quite probably the best champagne we had ever tasted before. The tour + the tasting cost 28 € per person and I think it was definitely worth it! Take a look at their wine cellars..
They showed us the types of grapes they are using:
Huge barrels!
All their bottle sizes; the biggest two are only produced on request as even the bottles are expensive to make and the biggest one is also darn heavy to be served from!
Endless corridors with thousands of bottles of champagne:
A part of the production process; the angle of the bottles are being changed so that the sediment (= the leftovers of the grape) will drop towards the cork.
And finally: the shop!
After the tour and the tasting it was time for siesta for the locals and lunch for us. We headed downtown again with burgers in mind and we noticed a restaurant (Le Latin?) that had the Finnish flag on their menu. The contents of the menu looked perfect for our needs so we decided to stay. When the waitress came to take our order, she realised that we are Finnish and said excitedly (in Finnish!) that her husband is Finnish and they had lived in Finland some years ago. After a moment she brought her son to the table next to ours and urged him to talk to us, but he was a bit shy to speak. In a while also her husband came outside to greet us and he seemed enthusiastic to have found some "homelanders" to talk to! We had a really nice chat with our such friendly and welcoming hosts, and we found out that he was a former Finnish icehockey player who had later come to France to play and had there met his wife. It was like bumping to an old friend by accident and he told us interesting things about Reims from a local point of view; things to see and places to visit. And the food they served was reeeaaally good!!!
Afterwards our boys only had enough energy for one more short visit to another winery, Lanson. All of the wineries are only a short distance from the Reims city centre so travelling between them only takes some minutes.
..and straight to the shop, as now we already new how the system works!
"I'll have the vintage brut and the great age rose and the cooler and the glasses and the lovely pink case for my iPhone.. and what was that white bottle in your tasting bar? Ooooh sounds great, we'll take one of those too! ..how much did you say?!"
Now that we've run out of money and had our hearts full of champagne, it's time to go home with our car trunk bursting with wonderful wines to take home with us. Reims is a lovely city with nice restaurants, parks and plenty of shops and I could easily have spent a few more days there. There are a lot of tourists, as one could expect, but the atmosphere is still quite cosy and peaceful and not at all busy.
No comments:
Post a Comment