Brasserie du Boulingrin (00 33 3 26 40 96 22), 48 rue de Mars, Reims.VISITING THEREChampagne Jacquesson (00 33 3 26 55 68 11; ), 68 rue du Colonel Fabien, Dizy.. WHERE? WHERE? Bruges is the nearest of the great Flemish cities to the North Sea coast, a 20-minute drive from the ferry ports at Ostend and Zeebrugge, and the same distance from the beaches of Blankenberge and Knokke-Heist. But if reaching Bruges by car is easy, driving around is almost impossible. Bruges is one of Europe's best-preserved medieval cities, and its narrow streets were designed for the traffic of an earlier age. Luckily, five underground car parks provide nearly 4,000 parking spaces for visitors, and these are clearly signposted.Arriving by train is easier, with a service from Brussels Midi station every half-hour, connecting the capital with Bruges in just under an hour The station is a mile south-west of the city centre. This makes Jacquesson a n?ciant rather than a r?ltant.We drove back through Reims to have lunch. G?rd Boyer's magnificent hotel-restaurant Les Cray?s (the name of the local chalk pits that were champagne's first cellars) is a national institution; it is as stellar as Dom P?gnon's first glass of bubbly, and to eat there is to be part of a humming, smooth and lubricated French gastro-commercial process that is unique in its combination of skill, sensuality and lack of personality So we decided to slum it Reims is not a great place to eat.
Violence as well as delight has been champagne's companion in history. To describe the activities in the fermentation, the locals used to say the wine was "en furie".To visit a small producer such as Jacquesson and to see every part of the process of making champagne is to experience man's extraordinary imagination and perseverance in the face of unbending nature. The Jacquesson house is in fact the old gatehouse of a larger chateau. The first vines you see are in the garden (with ugly French bungalows behind to emphasise the suburban queerness of it all), although they would prefer it to be known as a clos. In a wintry March, 0.8 hectares of gnarled, grey vines do not make a promising sight.
Still, as the genial Michael Mackenzie, my friend and the fortunate propri?ire of Jacquesson, explained: "We are very proud that our vineyards look very scruffy. They are not made for Japanese tourists."Besides this garden, Jacquesson owns 26 hectares of other vineyards in the villages of Ay (pronounced, I was grateful to have explained, "Aye-ee" and, incidentally, the home of Madame Bollinger), Avize, Hautvilliers (the home of Dom P?gnon, whose happily fumbled experiments in vinification brought us that original taste of stars) and Mareuil, but also buys in grapes from other growers. It was Adolphe Jacquesson, son of the founder, who invented the muselet, the wire trap that contains the cork. It was Jacquesson, too, who lowered the sugar density in the fermenting wine, thus achieving great benefits for 19th-century working conditions: accounts of life in champagne cellars include harrowing descriptions of eruptions and explosions.