Champagne Collard Picard
The Avenue de Champagne is the main attraction of the town of Épernay. This is a single street where a lot of the big names in champagne production have decided to set up shop in. The big champagne houses mostly have a presence here and to keep up appearances, they have very nice buildings here, after all, you don’t want to buy champagne from someone who has dull building for an office. This is where the prestige of having a presence here comes in. Because of this, most of the buildings along this stretch are very nice and it has a feeling of exclusivity you might not find elsewhere.
Moët Hennessy
The avenue has numerous champagne houses along its stretch and most of them have names outside so you can identify them. Unfortunately, for me, I am not a big consumer of champagne so I would not be familiar with the names that I would see here. What is immediately clear is that you can’t just walk into these champagne houses because they have gates. I was told that there were only three champagne houses which were open for tours that day but I don’t know if that means that all the other champagne houses are closed for the weekend. I guess I should also count myself lucky that there are ones which are open on Sundays since I never considered it when I planned on coming here.
[xmlgm {http://www.worldwanderings.net/kml/AvenuedeChampagne.kmz} zoom=19]