France's Bottoms-Up Approach

Inside the atmospheric medieval cellars of Pannier House, an elite champagne maker in northern France

- Lakshmi Sankaran

I check my smartphone for the time—11.40 a.m.—before my attention wheels back to the pressing matter at hand: drinking champagne. Six flutes of the finest chardonnay from Champagne Pannier, a prestigious house in the scenic Marne Valley of France, have been placed in a shapely cluster on a white tabletop. Standing on one side of that table, in an understated white-walled tasting corner in Pannier’s head office in Chateau- Thierry, Eve Masselaert, the brand’s guest relation manager, is setting the stage for the bubbly.

She tells my group of five travellers, all of us on a four-day visit to northern France, “This champagne is best had before breakfast... before you even eat anything.” Mildly surprised looks are exchanged. It is nearly time for brunch and I muse silently, “Champagne in the morning is my cup of tea indeed.”

The tasting is a coda to our 45-minute tour of Pannier House and its historic underground cellars, limestone quarries dating back to the 14th century that were built to facilitate local construction. In 1937, the son of Louise Eugene Pannier, to whom the Pannier line of champagne started in 1899 is originally credited, purchased these quarries and used them to store and age sparkling wine.