Home Again, Home Again

Lynne Kiesling

Today the KP Spouse, the KP Dad and I are flying home from Paris, so this the the content du jour … a fitting glimpse of our weekend activities. I know that the flowers will not yet be out in Chicago, so I will be sad to leave behind scenes like this one from the Palais Royal:

palroytulips

We walked through the Palais Royal on our way to one of my must-go places in Paris: Galerie Vivienne, and more precisely, the tea salon A Priori The and the wine merchant Legrand.

This weekend we also went to Epernay to visit a couple of champagne houses. We started at Castellane, where friends told us to expect a friendly and thorough tour. We were not disappointed. Furthermore, the building is a late-19th century style with glazed insets etc., so the architecture weenie in me was happy too. Then we went to Moet & Chandon, where the atmosphere was glitzier and the marketing budget is huge! But they’ve also been around for 250 years. This is the Orangerie of the Moet grounds:

moet

I prefer the style of the Castellane tour and the product; Moet is too yeasty for my taste, and you don’t get any true sense of the grape flavor like you do in the Castellane brut. But the grounds were lovely.