Champagne + Alsace

Champagne's cellars are older than champagne itself. The Romans quarried chalk here, cutting vast pyramidal shafts called crayères to build their city; nearly two thousand years later those same voids became the coldest, stillest, most perfectly humid cellars in Europe — now UNESCO World Heritage, and still full of bottles. Above them stands the cathedral where the kings of France were crowned, which is precisely why the region's wine acquired its association with ceremony.

The sparkle, famously, began as a defect. Cold Champagne winters halted fermentation early; spring restarted it in the bottle, and the resulting pressure burst the glass — cellar workers wore masks. For decades the region tried to eliminate the bubbles. The seventeenth-century Benedictine cellar master at the abbey of Hautvillers, remembered now as the father of champagne, spent much of his career trying to make still wine better and blending across villages to do it. The blend, not the bubble, was his true invention. Only when English glassmakers produced bottles strong enough to hold the pressure did the fault become the point.

Alsace has a stranger history: the same vineyards, four changes of nationality between 1870 and 1945, and a wine culture that absorbed both traditions. It emerged with something no other French region has — labels that name the grape rather than the place, a Germanic clarity of variety wrapped in French sensibility. Its Route des Vins, opened in 1953, is among the oldest signposted wine roads in the world.