Champagne, serendipity: a happy pair

By the middle of last month, my sister and I had seen “Sideways,” the Alexander Payne film about two guys on a weeklong debauch in California wine country. The main characters, we agreed, were insufferable losers who gave a bad name to wine-tasting tours. We could easily do better on a getaway in the Champagne country of northeastern France.

Since I moved to Paris a year ago, I’ve met my sister Martha, who lives in Brussels, in many interesting places around Northern Europe. This time, she found a destination close to home for both of us at a chateau near the town of Fere-en-Tardenois, about 30 miles west of Reims and 70 miles northeast of Paris. The Chateau de Fere was built near the ruins of a 13th century castle, on a 175-acre estate, and has a highly regarded restaurant and 20,000-bottle wine cave.

A special promotion cut the nightly rate of a superior double from $250 to $170, so I took the train from Paris to Reims and Martha drove from Brussels. Our rendezvous point was inescapable: the front portal of the city’s great Gothic cathedral, the coronation site for a long line of French kings. It was all but destroyed in World War I, but it was lovingly rebuilt and became the scene of Germany’s surrender to the Allies on May 7, 1945.

It seemed to us all medieval flying buttresses and sculptures of smiling angels, one of whom bore a striking resemblance to our late mother. Inside, sunlight streamed through the cathedral’s stained glass, including a set of deep-blue panels depicting the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, designed in 1974 by Marc Chagall.

One of the best things about these getaways with my sister, I’ve found, is that they’re never too intensely planned. We simply land in a likely spot, collect brochures and sightsee as the spirit moves us. In my Michelin Red Guide, I’d read about La Table Anna, a restaurant a few blocks from the cathedral, that sounded promising for lunch.

There, we celebrated our reunion with Henri Abele Champagne and salads, followed by a shared serving of fresh fruit fondue dipped in thick, hot melted chocolate.

From Reims it was about a 45-minute drive west to the chateau, through lovely, rolling country where the Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier grapes that mostly compose genuine Champagne are grown in chalky soil, on well-watered hillsides. It had snowed there the week before, so the vines were still gnarly brown and leafless. But the weather was mild, and violets and crocuses bloomed along the avenue that led to Chateau de Fere, a dignified white stone edifice with gables and turrets that sits like a French king’s crown on the crest of a promontory.

It was a pleasure to settle into the Constable room, which had a fireplace and a sumptuous bath with a whirlpool tub. We ate breakfast -- yogurt, pastry, orange juice and coffee -- in our chamber and evening meals in the dining room.

These were masterfully served, many-course affairs, starting with foie gras, oysters or a green salad, followed by fish or veal. We rarely had room for dessert but tried many Champagnes, including Brut Rene Geoffroy, Premier Cru, a delectably bubbly rose.

As it turned out, many of the Champagnes we sampled during our “Sideways” tour were unknown to us, because only the biggest labels -- Dom Perignon, Taittinger, Veuve Clicquot -- make it out of France, or the Champagne region, for that matter.

We spent the next day driving through wine-producing villages along the Marne River, south of Reims, where farms and houses bear signs for their own Champagnes. When we knocked at a door in the hamlet of Cumieres, a homemaker with a vacuum cleaner answered, saying, sadly, that she had no more bottles of the family vintage to sell and that her husband was pruning the vines.

In Chatillon-sur-Marne, we took in the sweeping view of the river valley from a hilltop park pinnacled by a 100-foot statue of Pope Urban II and then ended up in the town of Epernay, where many of the most famous Champagne houses, such as Moet et Chandon, have their headquarters.

We devoted the day after that to the Montagne de Reims Regional Park, a wide, wooded plateau north of Epernay whose flanks are covered with neat rows of vines. There, we traveled between pretty little villages, stopping in Villers Allerand for a picnic lunch in the churchyard, followed by coffee at a nearby restaurant where the patrons’ boots were clotted with soil from the vineyards.

Martha and I meandered on foot through the vineyards, toured a small wine museum in a lighthouse near the hamlet of Verzenay and finally found a Champagne house open during the busy pruning season in Verzy, the next village to the east.

At Louis de Sacy, we tasted Brut Tradition and Brut Grand Cru, distinctively buttery and well worth buying for about $25 each.

When it comes to the lingo, that’s about as far as I go, unlike the pompous Miles in “Sideways,” who used wine connoisseurship to justify excessive drinking. A wine tour, I now know, should be far more civilized -- especially in the land of Champagne, the French princess of vintages.

Susan Spano also writes “Postcards From Paris,” which can be read at latimes.com /susanspano.

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‘Sideways’ tour

Chateau de Fere, Route de Fismes, Fere-en-Tardenois, Champagne 02130; 011-33-3-

23-82-21-13, www.ila-chateau.com/fere. Doubles from $180.

La Table Anna, 6 Rue Gambetta, Reims; 011-33-3-

26-89-12-12, www.latableanna.com. Lunch for two with Champagne about $50.