If the idea of tasting various French champagnes at an extremely shiny table in a marble Georgian library sounds appealing, well, here you go. There’s also lunch involved. Lunch is an excellent concept. So is champagne. By the end of this, you’ll know quite a bit about the concept of champagne—if you can remember anything after the fourth tasting glass.
If you enjoy champagne, shiny rooms, and shiny people, you’ll be right at home at here.
Pommeray’s Champagne is a French wine from one of the smaller houses in the business. During the fringe, they operate a pop up shop near the Signet Library at the City Chambers. This event is mostly to encourage the attendees to buy a bottle of their favourite from the tasting menu. Even if you aren’t planning to spring for a full bottle, it’s still an experience. Pommeray’s UK representative delivers an impressive (and impressively long, they certainly know how to make a fuss over what’s essentially just fermented grape juice) lecture on Pommeray’s history and bottling process. You learn a lot about various grapes, French villages, and quite a lot about sediment. Apparently sediment is a bad thing. Pommeray’s gets the sediment out of their champagne by running the bottles through an ice-cold brine bath, which freezes the sediment at the top of the bottle for easy extraction. In addition to baths and regular hand turning, Pommeray’s champagne also gets to mature surrounded by art; the company’s founder, the widow Madame Pommeray, commissioned a sculptor to cover her cellars in carved bas-reliefs. You’ll learn this and many other fascinating, trivial facts as you sip your way through a seasonal tasting course.
There’s a springtime champagne, (green notes, grassy), summertime, (a rosé, but not terribly pink), an autumn champagne, (flavours of baked apples), and the golden wintertime champagne, (very crisp). There’s also Pommeray’s staple blend, the Brut Royal. You get a glass of that to start with and another one to go with lunch. It all tastes like champagne and is generally excellent.
If you enjoy champagne, shiny rooms, and shiny people, you’ll be right at home at here. You’ll probably leave a bit dizzy and possibly muttering to yourself about sediment, (at least this reviewer did). Solid A, Four Stars, would review again.
