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The bubbly stuff is the reason most people visit Champagne . The cultivation of vines was already well established in Roman times, when Reims was the capital of the Roman province of Belgae (Belgium), and by the seventeenth century still wines from the region had gained a considerable reputation. Contrary to popular myth, however, it was not Dom Perignon, cellar master of the Abbaye de Hautvillers near Epernay, who then "invented" champagne. He was probably responsible for the innovation of mixing grapes from different vineyards, but the wine's well-known tendency to re-ferment within the bottle was not controllable until eighteenth-century glass-moulding techniques (developed in Britain) produced sufficiently strong vessels to contain the natural effervescence. Away from the vineyards with their serried ranks of vines, the region's rolling plains are an uninspiring sight, growing more wheat and cabbages per hectare than any other region of France, though it seems to bring the villages no great benefit. Some places look so run-down you feel the shutters would fall off if you so much as popped a paper bag - and few are much more than hamlets, with grocery vans doing the rounds once a week, and not a boulangerie in sight. At least the official capital of Champagne, the cathedral city of Reims , is worth a visit in its own right, and it has a reasonably full cultural calendar. For champagne-worshippers, however, Epernay is the place to head for, where you can sample vintages to your heart's content and go on several visits to the underground caves of the different maisons . Across the plains, neither Chalons-en-Champagne nor the smaller, further-flung towns like Chaumont or Langres dotted along the Marne towards its source are much of an incentive to break your journey. The only real attraction in the rest of the region is the town of Troyes , some way off to the southwest, which is easily Champagne's most beautiful city.
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