Patience, Grasshopper

Our guide through the Champagne region had once been the Grasshopper.

Patience, young Grasshopper

If you grew up within shouting distance of a television in the 1970s, you know the name. In Kung Fu, blind Master Po called young Kwai Chang Caine "Grasshopper," and the boy who played him was Radames Pera. Half a century later he is based in Reims, guiding visitors through the vineyards, and one April weekend in 2022 he guided Yvonne, Tori and me.

He was also, it turns out, on Little House on the Prairie, in a recurring role as John Jr. It is right there on his IMDb page. I mention this because of what happened in a vineyard.

The Carrie Ingalls incident

At some point on the tour, for reasons I cannot fully defend, I broke into a random, goofy, childlike sprint down the vineyard.

I thought nothing of it. Then, on our last night, Yvonne told me what Radames had said about it: that my sprint looked exactly like Carrie Ingalls in the opening credits of Little House.

If you have seen those credits, you know the shot. The littlest Ingalls girl races down a hill through the grass toward her family, and halfway down she goes over. That tumble was a real accident, and the producers kept it.

Being compared to a television toddler by a man who actually worked on that show is a very specific honor. It had us both in stitches.

Robes, three floors down

The rest of the weekend kept the same energy. There were breakout dances. There were culinary delicacies. Tori and I took in French sunsets from a balconied windowsill, and all of us learned just enough French expressions to embarrass ourselves on the regular.

And our shower was too hot. Too hot to use, which left Yvonne and me one sensible option: sprint through the hotel in our robes to the alternate shower three floors down.

I would like to tell you that was the only sprinting I did that weekend. You already know it was not.

The bubbles everybody gets wrong

Then there was the champagne. The best bubbles.

Sooner or later every visitor to Champagne hears the story: a monk named Dom Pérignon tasted the first sparkling wine and called out that he was drinking the stars. It is a lovely line. It is also, as far as historians can tell, made up.

Dom Pierre Pérignon was real. He ran the cellars at the Abbey of Hautvillers from 1668 until his death in 1715, and he did a great deal to improve the region's wine. But the wine he was improving was still. In his day, bubbles were a fault: wine that stopped fermenting in the cold of winter could start again in the bottle when spring came, and the pressure blew bottles apart. The idea that he invented sparkling champagne traces back to a later cellar master at the same abbey, Dom Grossard, writing about a century after Pérignon died. The stars line arrived later still, by way of advertising. Meanwhile, in 1662, an English physician named Christopher Merret had already described to the Royal Society in London how wine coopers added sugar to wine to make it sparkle.

So nobody tasted the stars. What actually puts the bubbles in the glass is a second fermentation, done on purpose:

1. Still wine first. The grapes are pressed and fermented into ordinary still base wines, which are then blended.
2. Bottle it with a snack. The blend is bottled with the liqueur de tirage, a dose of sugar and yeast, and sealed with a cap.
3. Trap the gas. Inside the sealed bottle the yeast eats the sugar and makes carbon dioxide, which has nowhere to go and dissolves into the wine. The French call this the prise de mousse, the taking of the foam. A finished bottle holds about 6 bar of pressure, which is why the cork wears a wire cage.
4. Wait. The bottles rest on the spent yeast for at least 15 months for a non-vintage champagne and at least 36 for a vintage.
5. Evict the yeast. The bottles are slowly tipped neck-down (riddling) until the sediment collects in the neck, then opened so the pressure shoots it out (disgorging). A final top-up of wine and sugar, the dosage, sets how dry it tastes. Then comes the cork.

The waiting is where Reims comes in. Under the hill of Saint-Nicaise, on the edge of the city, are the crayères: chalk quarries first dug in the Gallo-Roman era and worked for centuries to build the city above them. From the late 18th century the champagne houses moved in and turned the empty quarries into cellars, because chalk gives you what aging wine wants: a steady temperature, no vibration and the right humidity. Some of the chambers are more than 30 meters high. UNESCO added them to the World Heritage List in 2015 as part of the Champagne Hillsides, Houses and Cellars.

Which means Reims was built out of the holes its wine now sleeps in.

Sparkling crowns, rolling fields

And sparkling crowns. Ours were rhinestone tiaras, worn by all three of us out in the vineyards, which felt correct in a region that used to crown actual kings. And sunshine on rolling fields. And art. And cathedrals.

Reims has history with crowns. In the cathedral, 25 kings of France were crowned. The ritual reached back to Saint Remi, the bishop who baptized Clovis, the Frankish king, and the anointing oil was kept in the Holy Ampulla at the Abbey of Saint-Remi across town. The French Revolution smashed the ampulla, and the coronations were revived only once more, for Charles X in 1825. The cathedral was badly damaged in the First World War and restored, and some of its windows are now by Marc Chagall.

If you go

• Getting there: Reims is about 45 minutes from Paris by high-speed train.
• Let someone else drive. The vineyards are hard to reach without a car, and you will be tasting. Many guided tours leave from the tourist office in front of Reims station; small groups tend to include family growers as well as the big houses.
• Bring a layer. The chalk cellars hold a cool, steady temperature all year, around 11 to 12°C (low 50s°F), whatever it is doing outside.
• See the cathedral from the west first, for the full facade. Look for the Smiling Angel by the north portal and the Chagall windows in the axial chapel at the far end. The Palace of Tau next door holds the coronation treasures.
• Hautvillers, in the hills near Épernay, is where Dom Pérignon is buried, in the old abbey church.
• Check the hotel shower before you unpack. Know where the backup is. Pack a robe you are willing to run in.

Fifteen months in the dark

Every glass we drank that weekend had sat in the dark for at least fifteen months, waiting. That is the whole trick. Champagne is patience with a cork in it.

Paris got a cameo, too, by the Seine under the Eiffel Tower. Then I headed out humbled by my life, my friendships and that wondrous weekend. And somewhere along the way it occurred to me that the Grasshopper's entire education was a lesson in patience, delivered to a boy who kept wanting to skip ahead.

Nobody sprinted in those cellars. I am still working on that part.