The Great Champagne Tour – Lanson and Pommery
After an exciting day at G.H Mumm and Taittinger Champagne houses, it was an early start to walk across to the other side of Reims to visit Lanson!
Lanson Cellar Tour
I thought that the Lanson tour was genuinely excellent. It really covered every base and allowed you to see far more than other tours we went on. You of course visit the cellars, but they go beyond this with a little bit of everything.
Kicking off with a little bit of history dating back to 1760, through to Napolean, Queen Victoria’s granting of the Royal Warrant (now sadly gone) and Wimbledon, you get a good overview of the history of Lanson and the vineyards it owns all over the region. This is followed first by a visit to Clos Lanson, their own small vineyard within the Maison’s grounds, which makes their premium "Clos Lanson" Champagne for over £160 or so.
After enjoying the vines you step into the production room, humming with electricity and hitting you with the smell of fermenting wine. It’s unsurprisingly a vast enterprise, with row-upon-row of huge tanks. They also have a separate room with even more tanks holding juice from Grand Cru villages, which is fun to see how many you recognise. Just next to this is their reserve wine room, hosting a mixture of large oak foudres and smaller barrels. This is where they hold back a portion of wine from each vintage and add it to the reserve wines already ageing in these barrels. In Champagne, this is key as it allows producers to blend these reserve wines of mixed ages and vintages to create the house styles and maintain consistency.
It is only after all this extra stuff in the winery that you then enter the cellar. And it certainly felt like one of the largest we went in. Rows of corridors stretching into the dark, some with very high ceilings and pallets stacked to the top filled with ageing wines. One of the most impressive parts was their little bottle museum with the oldest being 5 bottles of the 1904 vintage!
The Lanson Tasting
Our tour included the two classics, Lanson Le Black Creation and Lanson Le Rose Creation. Lanson’s style is different to many of the other big brands because they do not let the wines undergo malolactic fermentation, a process that converts malic acid into softer lactic acid. Thus, Lanson is a fresher Champagne with higher acidity. The Black Creation I was familiar with but I can’t say I’d tried the rose before. And the style works particularly well with rose, taking the freshness to even greater heights.
The tour guide kindly gave us a bonus glass of Lanson Blanc De Blancs as well, which I’d argue can give Ruinart a run for its money.
Shop Lanson Champagne
Vranken-Pommery Cellar Tour
A quick French Baguette lunch and a whizz round the St-Remi Basilica led us towards our next destination, La Maison Pommery. This was definitely the most commercially geared up tour, and the price reflects that somewhat too. For anyone interested, it was the Henry Vasnier tour.
The Maison itself is very impressive, modelled on an Elizabethan neo-gothic castle with donjons, crenellations and turrets to match, all in a sort of duck-egg blue. The gardens have some interesting art displays including a huge pair of wellies and a fountain made out of their mini POP bottles. Art is really one of the key features of the Pommery tour in fact.
Once you enter the large reception hall and wait for your tour to start, you can admire the large model of one of their vineyards or the ginormous and ornate wine barrel dominating the room. There was even an exhibit of an elephant standing on its trunk!
With the start of the tour you enter through grand cave entrance doors where you are greeted by a large staircase cut into the chalk and a changing light display guiding you down. As you go through the various crayeres, you learn about Madam Pommery’s fortitude and how she turned the business into such a success, whilst in pretty much every other one there’s an art exhibition to admire and even walk through like the butterfly curtains in one area. Each cellar storage area is named after cities, signifying both the ambition and how quickly and boldly Pommery Champagne grew into a premium brand.
Perhaps the most impressive thing, besides the cellar scale, were the numerous bas-relief sculptures carved into the chalk face by Gustave Navlet, a renowned artist of the time. The final one he made, although huge, has less details than some of the others due to the fact he lost his eyesight whilst doing these pieces by candlelight alone.
You wind up at their historical bottle museum in the cellar as well, with the oldest bottle on display dating to 1874!
The Pommery Tasting
The Pommery tasting didn’t mark the end of the tour, as there was still Vranken to come, but after emerging back into natural light they gave us a glass of Pommery Rose to enjoy and have a small sit down. It’s fresh and very fruity with a high proportion of Chardonnay giving a nice mineral undertone. I know it isn’t one you often see, but definitely a Champagne rose worth adding to your list.
The Vranken Tour
Crossing the road from Pommery you come to the Villa Demoiselle, a combination of Art Nouveau and Art Deco that has recently been restored. It was constructed in 1909 by Henry Vasnier but fell into disuse on his death and was occupied by vagrants until now. This is actually a nice little break from Champagne chat – it’s more of a National Trust/English Heritage part of the tour, as you admire the ornate furniture, wallpaper and chandeliers etc etc.
Fortunately there was still some Champagne to go around! Once you’ve toured the house you sit in the large garden kiosk and make use of the bar. As part of the tour, we had a glass of Vranken Cuvée Brut Diamant which I’d never heard of but thought was excellent. It has a rich body yet is sublimely elegant with floral and fruity notes in equal balance. This should really be on everyone’s list.
Vranken are under the Vranken-Pommery Monopole company, hence the connection, who also make the very popular Heidsieck & Co Monopole Champagnes.
Stay tuned for the final part in Reims on Champagne G.H. Martel and Veuve Clicquot.