Champagne Country

As you head toward Reims, the landscape loosens and undulates, and the hills tantalize with vineyards that—thanks to la méthode champenoise—produce the world's antidote to gloom. Each year, millions of bottles of bubbly mature in hundreds of kilometers of chalk tunnels carved under the streets of Reims and Épernay, both of which fight for the title "The Champagne City."

Champagne, a place-name that has become a universal synonym for joy and festivity, actually began as a word of humble origin. Like campagna, its Italian counterpart, it's derived from the Latin campus, which means "open field." In French campus became champ, with the old language extending this to champaign, for "battlefield," and champaine, for "district of plains." Today this vast, endless plain—in the 19th century the famed writer Stendahl bemoaned "the atrocious flat wretchedness of Champagne"—has been the center of Champagne production for more than two centuries, stocking the cellars of its many conquerors—Napoléon, Czar Nicholas I, the Duke of Wellington—as well as those of contemporary case-toting bubblyphiles. Yet long before a drink put it on the map, this area of northern France was marked by great architecture and bloodstained history.

Picardy's monotonous chalk plains are home, in fact, to many of France's greatest medieval cathedrals, including those of Amiens, Reims, and Laon. These great structures testify to the wealth this region enjoyed thanks to its prime location between Paris and northern Europe. The "flying buttresses" and heaven-seeking spires of these cathedrals remind us that medieval stoneworkers sought to raise radically new Gothic arches to improbable heights, running for cover when the naves failed to stand. Happily, most have stood the test of time (though you might want to hover near the exits at Beauvais, the tallest cathedral in France—it still makes some engineers nervous).

But the region's crossroads status also exacted a heavy toll, and it paid heavily for its role as a battleground for the bickering British, German, and French. From pre-Roman times to the armistice of 1945, some of Europe's costliest wars were fought on northern French soil. World War I and World War II were especially unkind: epic cemeteries cover the plains of Picardy, and you can still see bullet-pocked buildings in Amiens. These days, of course, the vineyards of Champagne attract tourists interested in less sobering events.

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