Reims - walking, eating, and champagne (June 2-3)

[[Vegetarian alert: graphic meat descriptions and photos]]
We'd never been anywhere with so many reminders of World War II and in particular, of the Nazi occupation


Everywhere there are plaques about people who were deported, people who resisted.












The 19th-century synagogue itself is full of plaques.














(Incidentally, everywhere we went, even in small towns, tourist street signs directed us to synagogue buildings. In every case, the synagogues were built in the mid- to late 19th century. They were almost all not in use - and probably had not been in use since the deportations during the German occupation - but were in good shape.)



We did a lot of hoofing around town, as we always do, getting nice and tired. On a trip to France, we view this exercise as necessary to justify the quantity of food we want to eat. We stopped for lunch at a modest cafe, near the music conservatory, which had a fixed price meal starting with a crudites plate which in France seems to mean a large number of different salads, mostly shredded vegetables like carrots and celeriac (personal favorite) and beets and cabbage, each dressed differently; this one also had lentils. In fact, our two salad plates had slightly different selections. Crudites were a very typical first course wherever we went, and always extremely good. This was followed by a very large main course - for me, potted lamb falling off the bone, extremely tasty, with golden navy-like beans; for Jimmy, a piece of salmon in a lot of sauce - not one of our better selections.

Then we tramped down to the part of town with the big concentration of champagne cellars (including Veuve-Cliquot, Pommery, and Piper-Heidsieck). We took the Taittinger tour; some of the others are booked months in advance. Apparently, part of the city's raison-d'etre is its limestone caves; the champagne makers are clustered in an area with these limestone formations. According to our tour guide, the Gallo-Romans dug out limestone for building materials; later, monks (for whom we can thank for so many beverages) discovered that the remaining caves and pits were ideal places to make and store wine.

From what we understand, champagne is expensive for at least two reasons besides the marketplace: the special very difficult growing conditions for the grapes (inhospitable soil that makes them grow extraordinarily deep roots; relatively short growing season; etc.); and the many processes in producing wine by the methode champenoise. There's a lot to know about champagne's cultivation and production, and we met a number of people who knew a lot of it - plenty of tourists come to Reims mainly for the champagne, to enjoy, to sample, and to buy direct from makers. Harvests are very hectic affairs, as champagne has to be pressed immediately and on site, when the grapes are ready, requiring a suddenly much-increased dedicated and somewhat skilled workforce.


After our visit to the St Remi basilica, we walked back to the middle of town to the Beaux Arts museum, primarily to see the Tsuguhara Fujita exhibit. So interesting to discover him, never having heard of him. You can read about him in Wikipedia etc. He hung out in Paris being wild and crazy with Soutine, Modigliani, Leger, and lots of women. Late in his life, after adventures in Latin America and Japan, he came back to France, converted to Catholicism, was baptised in the Reims Cathedral, and created a chapel in the Mumm gardens on the north side of Reims 1966. Alas, we were unable to visit the chapel, but the museum exhibit was a knockout.

The rest of our day included a coup de champagne (that is, a glass) at a cafe, a look at the cathedral to see the setting sun, a walk to the market district, where we ate outside at a sophisticated cafe - quiche, and steak with the best roast potatoes ever. I had the same stupid delayed reaction to the quiche ("oh, it's quiche Lorraine!" - as in Lorraine, the region we were going to next) as I had when we had square, thick-crust pizza in Sicily ("what do they call this kind of pizza at home?").



Most of the small champagne makers are in not in Reims or Epernay but in small villages surrounded by the vineyards where all legitimate champagne grapes are grown. The next morning we drove through some of that countryside south of Reims, getting out of the car a few times to walk along the vines (there are no fences), and to take a look at a sculpture we read about in Guide Michelin.

















We stopped at the Dumenil "cellar" (really, a big house at the edge of a village, facing vineyards) for a tasting (we chose this one because it had a clear welcome sign; we had no idea of protocols and wanted a place that would treat us like beginners) in the village of Chigny-les-Roses. The small companies tend to make champagne from their own grapes; they make some of their money selling grapes to the larger companies, which may use their own grapes only for their more expensive champagnes. It is all extremely place-specific. The villages were designated as (few) "premier cru" or (very few) "grand cru" early in the 20th century; these designations are main determinants of price. Chigny is "only" a "premier cru" village.

At Dumenil we were seated in what was very like a small showroom, and were attended by Audrey, a kind of guide, who spoke very good English and was charming and patient. We sampled (in ascending price order) their basic Brut, their Blanc de noirs (champagne made entirely from black-skinned grapes), and a vintage 2002 (single-vintage champagnes are only made in good years). There doesn't seem to be a limit on how many wines one can sample, or how expensive and exclusive they can be, but when you know you aren't going to buy, you do feel wrong about going too far. We were the first visitors of the day, and Audrey opened the bottles especially for us, and drank along with us (before us, really) to make sure the bottles were fine. We swear, we did not drink three full glasses at 10 in the morning. Ignore the slightly fuzzy look we have in the picture. (From what we saw in France, there is always a kind of a spittoon nearby; and there is never any food, not even a piece of bread.) We liked all three champagnes; Jimmy preferred the blanc de noirs, while I also liked the 2002. But we just bought a half-bottle of brut and went on our way. (We learned more about the protocols much later, on the Route du vin in Alsace).







































As always, you can click on images to see them displayed larger, and you can go to our Picasa album to see more photos.
June 1-2 Reims Cathedral
Intro to our trip

Next post will be on June 3, Madeleine and Stanislas and our trip to Nancy.

June 1-2 Reims Cathedral

The Cathedral of Notre Dame in Reims is widely described as one of the greatest Gothic cathedrals, but we don’t have the photos to prove it. Although we took many photos, and kept going back at different times of day to look at its magnificence, we just never captured it.

The interior is filled with light from clear windows, translucent modern stained glass, medieval windows that didn’t photograph well, a medieval-style modern window on the subject of the making of champagne,and several windows by Marc Chagall. The overall airiness came as a surprise to Jimmy, who was used to the darkness of so many old churches.

We were treated to a choral rehearsal when we first entered. To me, music is a necessary element of experiencing these great and geometric architectural spaces. But then, I think I got this idea in part from my years studying with musical proportions with Prof. Siegmund Levarie, and reading Susanne Langer's Philosophy in a New Key, relating music and architecture.

(This trip would have pleased Prof. Levarie, who opened a bottle of Chateau-Neuf-de-Pape in music history class when we studied the Trecento and the Papal Schism. You could do that in 1968. A moment to honor one of my favorite music professors, who lived so well, and died a few months ago.)

Every bit of the exterior is decorated with sculpture (such as the detail from the David and Goliath scene on the front), some of which we could only see with telephoto lens or binoculars.

This makes one wonder, or be filled with wonder - what were they thinking? Who was the art for? None of the sculptures, however obscurely placed, is not worth looking at.

The cathedral is sometimes called Cathedral of Coronations, because since the early Middle Ages, this is where the French kings came to be coronated (the current building dates from the early 13th century, on the site of an earlier structure, also used for coronations until it was destroyed by fire). Attached to the cathedral is the Palais Tau (for the t-shape) or Bishop’s Palace, now a museum. The museum houses some of the original facade sculptures, which are being replaced by reproductions, including the disturbing blindfolded woman representing “Synagogue,” like the one on Notre-Dame de Paris and other French cathedrals, and an intriguing storeroom of spare parts.

Coronation objects and paintings are displayed, including this robe of obvious great weight.

When we visited, the museum also had a very fine exhibit of the work of someone named Zwy Milshtein, a painter born in Kishinev (Russia, now Moldova, and infamous in Jewish history for its 1903 pogrom) who eventually settled in Paris, whose images are Jewish and Christian and from everyday life. (Click on the crucifixion for a larger version, to read the Hebrew. I'm told it says "Jesu the Nazarite, King of the Jews.")

The cathedral of Reims was firebombed by the Germans during World War I. This is a photo of the reconstruction process.













(One of the other principal churches in Reims, St Remi, was also reconstructed after the firebombing.)







In fact, something like 75% of the buildings of Reims were destroyed or damaged during World War I. Reims, which isn’t far from Verdun, was a battleground for much of that war.

Note that we didn’t know anything about this before we went. Not the coronations, not the firebombings, and not that Reims is the city where Eisenhower was headquartered and the Germans forces capitulated on May 7, 1945.

At home we have Jean Bony's 1961 book French Cathedrals, which had belonged to Jimmy's parents; in the descriptions of the full-page plates, his mother had written in the margin what years they had visited each of the main cathedrals. They visited Reims in 1961.
The next post has some of the other sights of Reims and Champagne...
More of our Reims photos can be viewed in our Picasa photo album.

Other entries: intro to our trip
walking around Reims
Reims to Nancy