Finally made it to some Champagne houses, first stop was G.H Martell & Co. more of an old museum set up and the old cellars were 30m below ground. The tunnels were from the old Roman days where it was an old quarry where chalk was mined. We toured part of the tunnels and then tasted 4 lots of bubbly afters (although it was supposed to be only 3 but Li blagged another one), we came out buying 12 bottles of bubbly.

We proceeded on to Pommery – another Champagne house which from the outside was very elegant and impressive. Inside was a 1000 bottle oak barrel with spectacular intricate carvings on the front. Lady Pommery who took over from the business after her husband died, loved art and kitted out the cellars with carved chalk pictures and modern art. The cellars contained 20 million bottles of champagne (Tony wanted to nab a few bottles but not possible). The house champagne is kept in the cellars for a minimum of 2.5 years. Each cellar was labelled with the City name they were selling to including Liverpool and Manchester. Didn’t see much apart from the cellars. We met a couple Americans and they suggested going to Lanson as they did a tour around their processing plant.

The evening, we decided to find the jazz bar advertised in a café we went to the previous day and it turned out to be the same place . Had a lovely meal and live music, taxi was expensive (about 35 euros round trip). We got back to the hotel and found a double decker coach had parked up with what seemed like the women’s 5th Battalion (as Tony puts it) has checked in. Was rather noisy as you can imagine.