Épernay and Hautvillers: The Avenue de Champagne and the Abbey of Dom Pérignon

Required Activities

• Walk the Avenue de Champagne from the Place de la République to the edge of town and learn to read its one repeated plan — a main block with two wings round a paved courtyard opening to the street, built to be a house, an office and a cellar at once — then pick out the two listed monuments on it, the town hall and the Château Perrier. The slope you will climb at Hautvillers is part of the same UNESCO inscription of 2015 as this street

• Go into the abbey church at Hautvillers — the one part of the abbey that is open, the rest being Moët & Chandon's private estate — and find Dom Pérignon's slab in the nave, with Dom Royer's beside it. Read what is actually cut into it: forty-seven years as cellarer of this house, praised for his management and his care of the poor, dead in 1715 in his seventy-seventh year. Not a word about inventing champagne

• Follow the waymarked walk through Hautvillers counting the wrought-iron signs hung on the house fronts — there are about a hundred and forty — and work out from the pictures on them what trade each house once carried on, finishing at the old lavoir

• Go into the Château Perrier on the avenue, reopened in 2021 after twenty-three years closed, and work through its champagne rooms — the presses, the glass, the lithographs and the old advertising signs — then look for the lift, one of the first private lifts installed in a French house, in a building that was British, then German, then American army headquarters in turn