An amazing night spent on Le Calife, Paris. 
 The breathtaking 'City of Lights' on display while enjoying excellent food and wine on a boat of true character. 
Perfect for a very special occasion, proposal, anniversary....
An ultimate, intimate experience, the dreamy romance of Paris.  

As a champagne lover, I was very excited to visit Reims,
 the capital of the Champagne-Ardenne region for my Birthday last week. 
 Reims is a wonderful city with a lot of history, much of the city was destroyed in WWI and restored in Art Deco style. 
 My husband and I stayed in the city for one night and had time to tour two champagne houses,
 Lanson and Vranken Pommery.

Lanson was a very informative tour in the lengthy process of making champagne. 
 It is the only champagne house in Reims to have a vineyard on site.  
The tour allows you to see the consecutive steps and thorough process in making champagne 
within an operating factory.  Although there seemed to be a lot of health and safety risks for the visitor
  wondering through this workplace, it was a special inside view as to how their bubbly is created!  
I was amazed by the fact that after all this time and technological advances, the internationally famed company
 still relies on the human palate for the consistency of taste in their champagnes. 
 And although the machines have taken over the majority of the processing, there are still many operations 
that are necessary to do by hand, in particular for the larger, Magnum, or irregular sized bottles, labels are put on by hand, they are also manually positioned and turned over time resulting in the sediment falling to the neck of the bottle
 (a necessary step in the process so that in the following step, the sediment can be removed by degorging the bottle).
  After all that information, I was ready for the tasting and in the realisation that the glass of champagne I was now drinking had taken a process of over four and a half years, I found myself appreciating the taste even more!  

Pommery was the better of the two tours.  
The guide was more engaged and the house created in consideration of it's many visitors. 
 I found the history of Pommery very interesting as Mme. Pommery was widowed only just after her husband began
 the business.  She decided to take over the company at a time when women entrepreneurship was not at all common.  
She was very interested in contemporary art and this tradition has been carried on through the years.
  A few of the exhibits included an elephant upright by his trunk- the artist calculated
 an approximate location in space where an elephant could be positioned in this way..
An exhibit 'Shelter' in which there is constant water flowing through a wooden cabin 
to observe the effects of deterioration over time…
Another, a line of boots that took me by surprise!  These boots are imagined to be of the many men
 throughout the years who worked in the cellars, they are motion activated and methodically stomp
 in the otherwise quiet of the cellar.  
Other highlights of the tour included the houses' oldest bottles, the earliest dates from the year 1874 and a visual display of the sediment which must be eliminated from the bottle after the second fermentation in a fascinating process called degourgment.... and OF COURSE the tasting afterwards,
which included a seasonal champagne and one of the houses' best vintages! 

Visiting the Catacombs of Paris was more than just an eerie experience.  
After descending the long (19 m) dark, narrow spiral staircase into the Paris underground,
 the mood was set for a chilling but interesting look into existing remains of Paris history. 
This ossuary is one of the largest in the world, holding the bones of an estimated six million deceased. 
 These skulls and bones are meticulously stacked and sometimes arranged in intricate designs.  
The underground tunnels twist and turn creating an unnerving maze under the bustling streets of modern-day Paris.