The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
ESSENTIALS
harm’s way, I decided to fill the hour before aperitifs not with more drinks (despite being keen to continue sampling from a vast menu of local bubbles) but by having an espresso on my balcony, breathing the icy air deeply, and then heading to the spa.
I arrived at a pre-dinner champerstasting feeling lean and rosy. It was a novelty. I marvelled, too, at how much more sparingly I sipped my bubbles than my dinner companion. Feeling on a roll (for once, not literally), I handled dinner in the hotel’s “casual” restaurant, Le Bellevue, with French aplomb, shunning the bread; ordering fish, and – zut alors! – declining A three-night stay at Royal Champagne Hotel & Spa (0033 3 26 52 87 11; royalchampagne.com) starts from €1,505 (£1,350). This includes a visit to Maison Leclerc Briant biodynamic winery, with a wine tasting and complimentary use of the hotel’s electric bikes.
Royal Champagne Hotel & Spa is a 35-minute TGV train journey from Gare de l’Est, Paris, a 30-minute TGV journey from Charles de Gaulle airport and a 15-minute drive to the hotel from Champagne-Ardenne train station.
Eurostar (03432 186186; eurostar.com) operates up to 19 daily service from London St Pancras to Paris Gare du Nord, with one-way fares starting from £29, based on a return journey. dessert. Waking up the next morning actually hungry for breakfast caused me to do an air punch of victory. Remembering my bible, I ate sparingly – a bit of wholewheat baguette and half a bowl of muesli. A meeting with Monsieur Baillet, the baker, reaffirmed the need for extreme selectiveness since he explained his own ruddy trimness through eating only the best baguettes, made with stone-ground flour, of which 80 per cent is wheat.
Next I returned to the spa, for a Biologique Recherche facial and an intriguing “draining” fat-buster called Booster Slimness. This involved a very slim spa assistant brushing and pummelling my thighs and hips to get them to fall into line, which left me feeling both chastened and rather vigorous.
The rest of the day, however, got incrementally more challenging.
There was the lunch at the chef ’s table inside the kitchen, where Jean-Denis Rieubland, formerly of two-Michelinstarred Le Negresco in Nice, provided me an exquisite repast that was – without a doubt – the sort of thing Guiliano had in mind when she wrote about Frenchwomen dining properly. To drink, there was a mango and spinach smoothie finished with chia seeds (along with a glass of champers). Then there was a small, fragrant avocado salad, with parmesan, Cajun nuts, clementine and flaxseed; silky squash soup; scallop carpaccio with beetroot purée and Granny Smith apple, sea bass with olive oil and spelt, and an astonishing persimmon, yogurt and ginger sorbet. I noted keenly how my lunch companion, a petite Frenchwoman, ate everything up.
In the afternoon, I went to see the “biodynamic” winemaking facility at Leclerc Briant. Perfectly interesting was the state-of-the-art machinery – fermentation vats that connected in novel ways to the earth; wine stored in terracotta eggs, and one barrel with a gold interior designed to jive with “the moon”. Fascinating, however, was my guide Leonie, a saleswoman at Leclerc. Trim, curvy, clad in a leather miniskirt and close-fitting but sober polo neck, with impeccable brows, perfect skin and clearly in supreme health, she was the best endorsement I’d seen yet of the Why French Women Don’t Get Fat concept. Here was a woman whose job revolved around imbibing and selling the finest luxury drink (and the food that goes with it) – and yet who managed to make it look as though she worked on a health farm. When we sat down to (another) tasting, I saw why: she poured herself a half-glass, and barely had a sip. Neither of us touched the plate of salty snacks she’d put out either. The next morning, I skipped breakfast and headed out into the freezing blue skies on an (electric) bike, making my way through the vineyards to Hautvillers, where Dom Perignon is buried in the abbey. I whizzed up and down over gravel and dirt, at times perilously, getting lost several times. Ultimately, frozen nearly to death, I found the right hill and hurtled past the Taittinger vineyards right up into the pristine village, past a troupe of elderly German tourists and into the beautiful old abbey (first stones laid in about AD 650).
By the time I got back to the hotel, having once more scrabbled madly up and down the labyrinthine vineyards, I was both freezing and pleasantly tired. I wobbled momentarily, wondering if I ought to have had breakfast after all, then held firm, downing one more espresso before jumping into the taxi to Épernay. Here again, there were temptations, a tiny Sunday market with cheese and meats en croute (in pastry); locals pouring from boulangeries, their arms full of baguettes. But I imagined how I wanted to feel when I got back: light, refreshed, good – not heavy, faintly ill and tired. So I strolled past the shops and into the Épernay cathedral, which was vast and sombre and just what the doctor ordered.
A few hours later, I arrived back in London, for the first time ever in my personal history of travel, hungry.