Our New Champagne Tour

If it isn’t already a Tour Operator maxim, never to let anyone look behind the curtain, then it probably should be. So let’s have a little peak together!

I’m very proud of our new Champagne tour. I thought it was our best week of last season, but that comes with a slight confession.

We ran Champagne tours for the first time in 2022, and I wasn’t very pleased with it. I’ve been toying with baring my soul about what went wrong, but it’s embarrassing, because of course there were Chain Gangers on the two tours in ’22, and I fear they were let down a bit.

What went wrong in 2022?

The worst thing of all is that it rained! Just one day, on the first tour, in June. But we were in the Montagne de Reims, lots of hills, a picnic was no longer an option, so we had to find a restaurant to eat – even more hills! And I got us lost on the way into Reims. A long, hard day in the rain!

 

But there was more to it than that. The tour in 2022 was a bit too hard. The hotel on our 2nd night was under new ownership, following the Covid pandemic – the worst hotel owner I’ve met in the history of The Chain Gang.

I say to my guides ‘stuff goes wrong, so we must get everything right when you can, especially at the beginning of the week. If there’s a problem on Thursday after a wonderful 5 days, we’ll be forgiven. If there’s no dinner on the first night, we’re not forgiven, and we don’t deserve to be!’

What about lunch?

It’s a feature of the Champagne region that it’s not highly populated. You can’t just decide ‘after about 20 miles, we’ll start thinking about lunch’. There isn’t anywhere. So lunch needs to be planned more carefully than in Dordogne, for example, or the Loire Valley. Or Tuscany, or Alsace, or Provence or Languedoc, come to that! When I look on a map, as a rule-of-thumb if I see a village with a population of 500+ there will be a bar, perhaps a boulangerie. Anywhere with a population of over 1,000 there will be a choice of places to eat. But not in Champagne! And this caught us out on our first day of cycling. We found a solution, and it was quite fun in the end, but it doesn’t look good.

What, more hills?

The wine growing area around Champagne is basically based around three areas of high ground – from North to South they are the Massif de Saint Thierry, the Montagne de Reims and the cotes des Blancs.

There are very few hotels to the North of Reims, almost none. In the Dordogne, or Provence, there are always alternatives. If one of our regular hotels is full, we stay down the road – sometimes literally next door! North of Reims, there are no alternative hotels. One of the hotels we’d chosen before Covid was bought, by an absolute clown. The hotel for our Sunday night was transformed from the gastronomic highlight of the week, to the most chaotic hotel we’ve used in 27-years of The Chain Gang. We couldn’t stay there again.

Add that lot together, and it was back to the drawing board for an all-new Champagne Tour.

My first epiphany was that we couldn’t do anything to the North of Reims – for two reasons. Firstly, the lack of hotels. But secondly, in the area around the Massif de Saint Thierry there are lots of significant First World War sites – the Chemin des Dames, the Plateau of California, the very earliest trenches from a war that became defined by trenches. But on reflection, everything north of Reims was about the French and Germans. Interesting, but not the same frisson as we get in Normandy on the landing beaches – sorry Pierre, sorry Fritz!

I don’t want to regurgitate the route in detail here – you can find out about our newest tour in great detail here.

We start and finish in Châlons-en-Champagne

, the administrative capital of Champagne. And a prettier city, frankly, than Reims or Épernay, because it didn’t get razed to the ground in the First World War.

We spend 2 days in the Côte des Blancs, the range of hills west of Chalons and south of Épernay, where Chardonnay grapes are grown.

 

We explore the Marne Valley, upstream and downstream from Épernay, where most of the pinot meunier is grown (pinot noir and chardonnay won’t ripen in this valley downstream of Épernay). We cycle over the Montagne de Reims, where most of the Pinot Noir is grown, spend a day exploring Reims, which really is an extraordinary city, and finally make our way back over the Montagne de Reims, through some of the most prestigous champagne growing villages of all (pinot noir, obvs!) and back to Chalons.

So how did the changes work out? It was fantastic, though I say it myself. We had some fabulous visits. We drank an ocean of Champagne at interesting places (I hasten to add we were tasting, not guzzling, but an ocean’s an ocean when all’s said and done). Exploring blanc des blancs, blanc de Noirs, rosé champagnes, vintages, house blends, older champagnes, low-sugar and even no-sugar champagnes. It was great. So we had a virtuous circle of a big group, an interesting itinerary, nothing too arduous, but enough to ‘earn’ a good meal in the evening.

I think I started off, in 2022, with the mindset that champagne was a bit of a con – all marketing and not a lot of substance. I’ve changed my mind completely. The champagne in our local stores probably is about marketing more than wine-making – even the well-known names – but we have a much better time of it in Champagne itself.

And we had time to explore Chalons, Épernay and Reims, with some great dinners and great company. Everything a Chain Gang holiday is supposed to be.

We have two tours planned this summer, one in June and one in August (we learnt another lesson last September – the smaller growers are family concerns, and when it’s harvest time it’s all hands to the pumps. So avoid September!). The June tour is almost full, so think on!