The Heart Of The Bubble

Moët & Chandon’s latest ‘money-can’t-buy-experience’ is a luxurious chateau that evokes the daily life of the great families of Champagne in the 19th and 20th centuries

- Monica Bathija

It is early evening, the last day of harvest in the vineyards. As we go up a row of vines, picking grapes that are at the perfect ripeness for the champagne that Moët & Chandon plans to use them for, someone yells out, “Panier!” One of the two people assigned to be basket carriers comes over to pick up the basket full of grapes and replaces it with an empty one so that the grape picker can continue. It’s the exact procedure followed during harvest except that in our case it is rounded off with a glass of champagne that is sitting ready on ice.

Expectedly, champagne flows freely when you are a guest at the Chateau de Saran located near Epernay, in the Champagne region of France. Moët & Chandon is one of the biggest champagne houses in the world—reportedly one bottle of Moët & Chandon champagne is opened every second around the globe and its old cellars in Epernay, 28 km of them spread over several levels, are testament to the number of bottles of champagne the House makes. Each batch is marked in a special code by the winemakers, all the bottles housed and aged in cave-like niches in the cellars where time stands still, where the conditions, light, and temperature have been the same—at 10-12°C—since 1743.