The classroom is the atelier at the privately owned Hautvillers Abbey where the florid-faced Benedictine monk worked as cellar master and perfected his "bubbly" and his methods for blending chardonnay and pinot noir.
On this "exclusive" VIP two- to three-day, $1935 to $4080 tour of the world's great Champagne houses, you learn how the use of a sword to open a champagne bottle was made popular by Napoleon's light cavalry hussars. This party trick was a means of impressing the young, attractive and very rich widow Madame Clicquot.
A modern sommelier or amateur adept can open a bottle of posh fizzy with a quick and tellingly placed "coup". Apparently, it's all about basic physics, thick bottle necks, slim shoulders, glass density, carbon dioxide, secondary fermentation, 620 kilopascals of something or other and 160 newtons of effervescent and famously explosive upward pressure thrust shooting up the slim neck and out of the 18mm diameter opening. Which is why Formula One drivers get soaked so easily.
As you will learn in "the cradle of Champagne", if you bang a bottle at just the right point along the seam and into the lip, the stress of the glass is reduced by half and you don't waste a lot of your very expensive $490-a-magnum Champagne. It's wise to practise on something cheaper.
The wine tour operator Grape Escapes is offering the Dom Perignon Experience, staying at the five-star Château les Crayères and dining in its double-Michelin-starred restaurant Le Parc. You get the underground tours and all the in-bottle fermentation lowdown, the tips on storage, and the serving demonstrations from Chef du Cave Richard Geoffroy.
It all sits somewhere between an art and a science. Dom Perignon is best kept at 10C to 12C and, ideally, poured into authentic corpulent Spiegelau glasses.
You get to taste - but thankfully not spit - the single varietals from 2003 and 2004. Including a Dom (Pierre) Perignon rosé. You are taken to leading houses that include Champagne Taittinger, Mercier, GH Mumm, Pommery, Ruinart and Veuve Clicquot.
Visitors get to taste 19 different Champagnes and are taught to appreciate their "amplitude", "plenitude", texture and their seductive toast and coffee bouquet. As well as aftertaste. As long as someone has removed the glass shards. And most of it has not ended up dripping from the chandeliers.
CHECKLIST
Grape Escape's Dom Perignon Experience tours will be held June 24-26, July 10-11 and October 9, 2015.
