Champagne on the Seine? The phrase suggests sipping the pale bubbly beverage from a crystal flute on a river cruise. In fact, it is a lush, little-known, and underappreciated grape-growing region en route to Paris from the source of the Seine. Under French law, not just anyone can produce Champagne. The French adhere to classifications and hierarchies as their way of defining excellence. The only sparkling wine in the world that can be labeled authentic “Champagne” must be made from grapes grown on officially designated plots of land in France. Since the early twentieth century, government-appointed experts have drawn and redrawn Champagne country. The designated vineyards enjoy a status denoted by Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée, or AOC, a coveted, convoluted certification that authenticates the content, method, and origin of production of a French agricultural item. Champagne topsoil must be light and not too rich, its subsoil chalky, its fields neither too vulnerable to frost nor too close to forests. Most designated vineyards are on slopes that face south. The Champagne industry now pulls in $6 billion a year, and land designated to grow Champagne grapes can be two hundred times more valuable than ordinary French farmland.
Jean-Claude is one of France’s most respected food writers, and when he offers to take me along on a trip, I never say no. Early one frigid January morning, the two of us went looking for a different kind of Champagne in the Côte des Bar, the main growing area of the Aube region. We traveled southeast from Paris by train to Troyes, then rented a car and headed several miles farther southeast to the hamlet of Villeneuve. After we drove past an abandoned paper-making factory and a church closed years ago, we crossed a tiny bridge. A narrow, fast-moving stream with stretches of rapids flowed underneath. It was our first glimpse of the Seine, still a young river and far from Paris.
In antiquity, the Gallo-Romans drained the marshlands bordering several rivers around Troyes, including the narrow Seine. In 1115, a mystical cleric, Saint Bernard, founded an abbey at Clairvaux, in the Aube region to the east. It became a center of learning—and a pioneer in agriculture. Its monks were the first in the region to develop a sophisticated system of vineyards and to produce wine in a serious way; according to a seventeenth-century text, although it couldn’t be determined definitely, the wines were probably “effervescent.”
In the Middle Ages, the Aube became the wealthiest of the Champagne regions. Its wines were sought by the area’s dukes and counts. There was easy transportation to the trade fairs of Troyes, where merchants from as far away as the Rhône and Italy came to buy.
Fortune did not smile on the Aube, however. In 1911, the big houses to the north, in the Marne Valley, excluded the Aube from Champagne designation. The vignerons—cultivators of grapes to make wine—of the south rioted in protest. An unhappy compromise was reached: the Aube Champagne makers were granted a designation as Basse-Champagne or Champagne 2e Zone—“Low Champagne” or “Champagne of Second Rank.” It took another sixteen years before the National Assembly passed a law that defined the Champagne regions according to growing conditions like climate and topography, allowing the vineyards of the south to qualify. Nevertheless, the second-class reputation clung to the region. No southern vineyard received the highest designations of grand cru or premier cru. The Aube vignerons found it more profitable to sell their grapes to the big production houses up north.
But in recent years, as the global thirst for Champagne has grown, the southern vignerons have asserted themselves and created their own identity. The Champagne makers up north rely on sophisticated blending, produce massively, and evoke big-name luxury. Champagnes from the south have become desirable for their artisanal, creative feel. The southerners tend to be small and independent, making Champagne in their own way, from grapes they grow themselves. They focus on terroir, an elusive concept that involves soil, sun, rain, region, and authenticity.
Only about 25 percent of Champagne acreage is located in the south. A tasting tour of southern Champagne houses does not rank on the scale of visits to the huge houses up north, where Champagne domains are lined up one after another, and many are open only by appointments made months in advance. In the south you are more likely to find yourself driving on little-traveled back roads to modest vineyards where you might get a private tour and a tasting conducted by the vignerons themselves. You might pass through the village of Celles-sur-Ource, whose entrance is marked by an enormous sculpture of a Champagne bottle made from empty bottles of the wine. Or you might stop in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, where French president Charles de Gaulle spent the last years of his life and is buried. Then there is Essoyes, where Auguste Renoir and his family lived for many years; a tour of the village includes a tasting in which different Champagnes are matched with images of Renoir’s paintings.
Jean-Claude and I first stopped at the Champagne estate of Château Devaux to meet its current owner, Laurent Gillet. The château is a large, eighteenth-century manor house with a tower, a dovecote, and a centuries-old well. A large tasting table with built-in metal spittoons dominates a futuristic white tasting room. As we sampled the vintages, Gillet explained how he came to own the domain, which the Devaux family created in 1846. Jean-Pol Auguste Devaux, the most recent family owner, had no children, and sold it to Gillet, his distributor, in 1987. The manor house was included for free—almost; the condition was that every year, the Devauxs would receive sixty bottles of Champagne.
We tasted several vintages. Among them was a Devaux Grande Réserve Brut made mostly with pinot noir grapes. “Powerful, alive, eccentric,” said Jean-Claude. “Very much an acquired taste.” It was stronger than much of the Champagne up north, with a distinctive mineral taste. This was not subtle, fruity elegance.
The middle of winter is not the best time to wander through vineyards; the vines have been pruned and look stunted, naked, and gnarled. But Gillet had something special to show us. He led us through the side door and along a path that cut through the garden. We found ourselves standing in front of a long iron railing. Below us was a fast-moving stream. The Seine! We were fifty miles north of the river’s source. Here, the Seine is about thirty yards across and only a few feet deep, too shallow for a boat, except perhaps the puniest rowboat. The water was so clear that I could see bright green ferns and reeds and gray and brown stones on the sandy bottom. On the opposite bank was an untamed jungle of trees, bushes, grasses, and shrubs competing for space.
A view of the Champagne estate Château Devaux, which has been on the banks of the Seine since 1846. COLOMBIER MANOIR CHAMPAGNE DEVAUX © OUTSIGN DELAFLOTTE.
“This is the only Champagne house in France that borders the Seine,” said Gillet. “I have friends in Paris who come here and see the water and they ask, ‘Is it really the Seine? The same Seine?’ For Parisians the Seine is artificial, a regulated flow of dark, murky water channeled into a canal. I tell them here the Seine water is so clean that my father drank from it when he was a boy. I tell them I spent my childhood swimming in the Seine.”
Jean-Claude and I traveled deeper into Champagne country with Jean-Pierre Fleury, a friend and neighbor of Gillet’s. Unlike Gillet, who bought his way into Champagne, Fleury was born into it. With his ruddy complexion and callused hands, he retains the look of a man who is close to the soil. We hopped into his Audi and followed the curves of the Seine, passing an old grain mill once powered by water from the river. We stopped at the ruins of a lavoir, a nineteenth-century outdoor version of a laundromat, where laundresses came to wash clothes and linens by hand. Modern for its time, it was built with a pulley and chain to draw water from the Seine and a stove to heat it.
A serpentine path led us past fields where beets, sunflowers, and corn grow and brought us to the family’s thirty-seven-acre Champagne estate near the village of Courteron. The estate stands next to a twelfth-century stone church, closed years ago, but with its bells still programmed to ring loudly on the hour.
For four generations, the Fleury family has grown grapes in the Seine Valley. In 1894, Fleury’s grandfather Émile beca
me the first farmer in the region to plant grafted pinot noir vines after phylloxera, a ravenous aphid-like parasite accidentally imported from North America, wiped out almost all the vineyards of France. The grafted vines brought the French fields back to life. Then, in 1911, when the Aube vignerons demanded full recognition for their Champagne, Émile Fleury played a key role as the secretary of the movement. “My grandfather was a pioneer and a rebel,” Fleury said.
Fleury led us through the main entrance of his “château,” an unlit garage furnished with one oak barrel, and into a starkly bare tasting room that held one long table, chairs, and a bar. A refrigerator stood in the corner, and a translucent rock crystal as big as a honeydew melon sat in the middle of the table. On one wall was a photograph of the Fleury family’s harvest in 1895. A horse was pulling a plow. “The horse was rented,” said Fleury. “We didn’t have the money to buy one. Poverty was a way of life for the nineteenth-century Fleurys. It was a time when dinner was three potatoes and a bit of lard.”
I later learned more about the poverty of this region in those days from my close friend Julia. Her late husband’s Parisian parents retired in the early 1960s to a tiny village not far from the Seine. It was a poor community. “People lived on small plots of land in primitive houses with dirt floors and no appliances or central heating,” said Julia. “Every house had a barnyard full of hens, ducks, and rabbits. Some people had a horse that could pull a cart or pull a plow in the vineyards. The region was called La Champagne Pouilleuse—which means ‘the lousy Champagne region,’ because the soil was so poor and chalky that most crops couldn’t grow.
“The big surprise,” she continued, “is that you would go into their houses and they’d open a bottle of Champagne. That was the wine they produced and drank. It was such a contrast to the poverty of their lives.”
The farmers’ fortunes changed when they formed a cooperative to market their grapes. “By the late seventies they were buying refrigerators and washing machines,” Julia said.
Fleury had wanted to escape rural life. He dreamed of becoming an astronomer, and at first he refused to go into the family business. But his father ordered him to quit his formal education after high school and stay on the farm. “I was truly upset, truly unhappy,” he told us. “But I was the only son. I gave myself over to the vines.”
Eventually, he poured his curiosity and love of science into the vineyard. In 1989 he transformed the Fleury vines into a biodynamic enterprise—a first in all of Champagne country. Biodynamic farming, based on principles developed by the philosopher Rudolf Steiner in the early 1900s, centers on respect for the earth’s ecosystems, and Fleury has incorporated some of his own theories. He has abandoned the use of horse-drawn plows in the vineyards, instead turning the soil over with hand tools. The grapes are cut by hand. He extols the importance of using cow dung to create “horn manure,” which enhances the microbiological life of the earth, and explains that finely ground rock crystals will produce “horn silica,” which improves photosynthesis. He does not bottle Champagne when harsh local winds blow or when the moon is full. “There is a connection among the earth, the vines, the sky, and the planets,” he said. “It must be respected.”
By now, Jean-Claude and I had been tasting Fleury Champagne for more than an hour. Each vintage was better than the one before. All of them held the mineral taste of the land.
Fleury’s passion has intoxicated his children. His sons, Benoît and Jean-Sébastien, have joined the family business. His daughter, Morgane, has opened a retail shop in Paris’s Marais neighborhood where she sells wine—as well as the family Champagne. His wife, Colette, operates a gîte—a vacation dwelling for rent—that can accommodate twenty-five people. Its garden is a stone’s throw from the Seine. The location offers a place to picnic—and to swim.
I asked Fleury if I could come to the gîte and swim when the weather was warmer. I expected him to give me a look that said, “Who is this crazy American woman of a certain age who lives a sophisticated life in Paris but wants to swim in a river?” Instead, he gave me a broad smile and replied, “Tout à fait!”—“Absolutely!”
His son Benoît stopped by at that moment, and I asked him if he ever swam in the Seine. “Ah, yes, in the summer,” he said. “I often go down for a swim when it is hot and I am done with work. I have it all to myself. The Seine is my private swimming pool.”
I knew I would be back.
The Seine begins to grow in earnest at Châtillon-sur-Seine. The Romanesque Saint-Vorles Church is visible in the background. ANDREW PLUMP.
SEVEN
Paths to Paris
I forgot everything I was running
away from . . . on the edge of
the Seine and the forest of
Fontainebleau. . . . I felt completely
different there, exclusively in love
with navigating the river. I honor
the river.
—STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ,
letter to Paul Verlaine in 1885
FROM HER SOURCE until she reaches Paris, the Seine eludes all suitors. Try to follow her course by car, and you’ll be lost almost as soon as you start. Set out by boat, and you’ll find her early stretches too narrow and shallow to pass through.
You can bike alongside her banks, but this is not the Loire, where devoted cyclists enjoy a 540-mile trail along the river and its surrounding valley, with well-marked itineraries, organized tours, and hotels and campsites nearby. Bike paths line only half the length of the Seine, and many of them are disorganized, badly mapped, and in need of repair.
What about walking? Despite the long arm of French bureaucracy, no agency or travel book has mapped the river’s entire pedestrian length. The best guide to walking the Seine is an official trail called GR2. There are more than 150 GRs in France—grandes randonnées, or “great hikes,” maintained by the French Hiking Federation. You must consult several books to piece together the Seine trail. Through research and walking parts of the trail myself, I discovered that GR2 occasionally gets lost in the countryside and forests.
Andy and I set out by car from the Seine’s source in the springs of Saint-Germain-Source-Seine, hoping to track the river’s early flow. We found a back road, but it veered away from the water. In other places, trees, farms, and private property kept us at a distance.
Outside the village of Chanceaux, about two and a half miles from the source, a small stream flows under a thirty-two-foot-long stone footbridge. There is a park with tables for picnickers and a walking path. We followed the path, which crossed the river, moved away from it, then closer, then out of the river’s view. We gave up and decided to find the Seine’s path to Paris in the towns spread along its banks. Road connections are easy, and the elusive river reappears in each town, expanding as Paris gets closer.
That’s how we discovered Châtillon-sur-Seine, thirty miles from the source, and home to one of the most unusual archaeological treasures of Europe: the Vase of Vix. The Seine flows through the village, splits around a tiny island, and gets bigger—three feet deep and thirty-six feet wide in some places. Along one bend, the Seine meets the river Douix—not really a river but a hundred-yard-long spring that gushes from beneath a limestone plateau dating from the Jurassic period. Italian aerial attacks early in World War II burned down the historic city center, but it is a pleasant place, and the town has decorated the bridges over the narrow waterways with pots of bright flowers. You can climb a small hill to visit the Romanesque Saint-Vorles Church, which offers a panoramic view of the town. Behind the church is a cemetery built on the ruins of a twelfth-century castle.
Few American tourists visit Châtillon-sur-Seine, but more should. The local museum, once a medieval Cistercian abbey, holds the sixth-century b.c. tomb of an unidentified Celtic princess who would have been about thirty years old when she died. It was discovered in 1953 five miles away from Châtillon-sur-Seine, near the small town of Vix on Mont Lassois, the highest navigable point on the Seine as it flows downstre
am.
The princess was buried with a carriage, bronze kitchenware, ceramics, and a heavy, skillfully crafted gold diadem. The tomb also contained a bronze cauldron fit for a giant’s cave: the Vase of Vix. At nearly five-and-a-half feet tall and weighing more than 450 pounds, the vase would have held about 300 gallons of wine. It is the largest object of its kind from the ancient world. Stylized Gorgons—with menacing grins, bulging eyes, and snakes for hair—anchor the handles. A line of Greek soldiers and their horses ring the vase’s neck. Lions show their claws and muscles. The Vase of Vix is the centerpiece of the museum, and a room has been built around it, with a balcony so that visitors can see it from above. Researchers deduced that the vase, the crown, and other objects were not locally made but originally came from Greece. Their presence in France indicates that the Gauls had rather sophisticated taste and imported goods from the Mediterranean centuries earlier than previously thought.
Later came another blockbuster discovery. In 2007, a team of French and German archaeologists announced that after several years of excavations, they had found a vast, twenty-five-hundred-year-old Celtic fortress town covering 150 acres beneath the Mont Lassois plateau five miles from Vix. There had been a main street leading to an immense palace, houses for hundreds of people, grain warehouses, and water pipes. Panels and photographs in the museum tell the story of the excavation work, which continues every summer. One of its goals is to determine whether Vix was the oldest continuously inhabited community in France and perhaps even the earliest example of urban life in western Europe.
We could have lingered in Châtillon-sur-Seine, but there was so much more to cover. Resuming our drive along the course of the river, we arrived in Troyes, the largest city on the Seine between the source and Paris, and the first one on the route with a significant history of navigation.
The Seine Page 5