Les Riceys: Three Appellations in One Commune

Required Activities

• Taste a rosé des Riceys at a grower here — a still pinot noir rosé whose appellation covers this commune and no other, and which was on Louis XIV's table — and taste it for what the Champenois themselves admit about it: that it drinks like a Burgundy, not like anything from Reims

• Taste the same grower's champagne beside the rosé and work out how much of the difference is the bubbles and how much is the ground: of the vines here, 716 hectares are pinot noir against 26 of chardonnay and 7 of meunier, and the right to call any of it champagne is barely a century old

• Walk the whole length of the commune, downhill along the Laigne from Ricey-Haut to Ricey-Haute-Rive to Ricey-Bas, and go into all three churches of what were three separate parishes until 1790 — Saint-Vincent, the 16th-century Saint-Jean-Baptiste whose choir and transept were listed as long ago as 1914, and Saint-Pierre-ès-Liens — then find the old market hall at Ricey-Haut, listed in its own right

• Stand in the vines and take in the 866 hectares that surround the three villages

• Drive over to Essoyes, fifteen kilometres away as the crow flies, where Renoir's wife Aline Charigot was born and where he bought a house in 1896 — the first property he ever owned — and go through the Maison de Renoir, a museum since 2017, out to the studio he had put up at the bottom of the garden on the rue de l'Extra in 1905

• Find the Renoir graves in the cemetery at Essoyes and count the family in them: Auguste, who died at the domaine des Collettes at Cagnes-sur-Mer on 3 December 1919 and was buried at Nice before being brought up here on 7 June 1922 as he and Aline had wanted; Aline Charigot beside him; and their sons — Jean the film-maker, Pierre the actor and Claude the ceramicist