Courtesy of the author
I have long been a wine and spirits writer and frequent wineries, breweries, and distilleries when I travel. While on various trips with our now 5-year-old daughter, we have visited many different craft breweries, and she's even been to a distillery or two.
But wineries are often different with kids. My extended family lives near Napa Valley, California. Almost every time I make a reservation, there is a strongly worded note on the confirmation email and website about how a winery doesn't welcome kids on-site.
So when we traveled to France in March of 2024, I admit I was a tad nervous. We traveled to Paris, where we would dine at wine bars in the evenings, but it was the three days in the Champagne region where I felt a mix of excitement and anxiety.
I very much wanted to visit Champagne. I was ready to taste everything as long as my daughter could tag along.
The Champagne region's main city, Reims, is a 90-minute drive by car from Paris's city center. Reims has several hotels, restaurants, and a famous Gothic-era cathedral, Notre-Dame de Reims, to visit, making it both a wine production and cultural hub. We were really there for the wine.
When we arrived at the hotel I had booked, we realized it was so kid-friendly. In addition to the playroom I had seen online, there was a pizza oven for kids to snack on any time the restaurants weren't open. There was also an outdoor playground, pool, shop with supplies for children, and even room service.
I was quick to note that many guests had families in tow, kids coloring or working on a maze book, while the parents sat with a bottle of Champagne chilling in an ice bucket in the living room area of the lobby. We even took our drinks to the playroom where my daughter crafted an elaborate imaginary adventure with a stuffed giraffe.
I was equally delighted when booking our visits to the Champagne houses. Champagne Ruinart markets itself as a family-friendly winery. When we arrived, my daughter had a choice of specialty fruit juices to try as we tasted wines.
On the tour of the awe-inspiring chalk caves, a defining characteristic of the Champagne region's geography, she learned all about how the caves were used by children to walk safely to school during World War II.
At Champagne Ayala, a winery in village Aÿ, my daughter played tour guide with our actual tour guide. Upon greeting, she was handed her own notebook and pen to "doodle" what she saw and a flashlight to assist our guide through the immense and cavernous wine cellar, which runs 24 miles underground. She earned applause for her work from the group, which were all fellow adults.
The hospitality team at Dom Perignon toured her through the historic Abbey of Hautvillers, where the house's namesake in the 17th century, and then served her her first glass of Coca-Cola as a treat in a guest room filled with paraphernalia from the brand's various collaborations with Lady Gaga and Lenny Kravitz.
We visited a small grower Champagne house, a word for wineries run by those who own the vineyards. There, at Champagne Michel Gonet's Villa Signolle, she was given orange juice and played a game with the host while my husband and I participated in a blind-tasting competition of their Champagnes.
The entire experience reminded me of "Bringing Up Bebe," the best-selling book that's become a must-read for plenty of millennial moms. In the book, American author Pamela Druckerman tackles the cultural differences she observed between American and French parents. Some elements of the book lean toward infrastructural differences — childcare is more accessible and less expensive than the United States — and others are very societal: in France, the author gleaned, children are simply a more welcome part of society.
When we returned to Paris, we spent a day with an American friend who recently moved to Paris. Many of her observations about life in the French capital and her own visits to French wineries mirrored our own.
Our daughter, however, didn't feel one bit of my motherhood anxiety. To her, it was all an adventure. She still talks about the playroom at the hotel, wandering through the caves, and the big church where the choir was singing during our visit. She saw stained glass visits for the first time and ate her weight in croissants. And, of course, the time she got the special Coca-Cola drink.
