• The French didn’t seem to mind that my child accompanied them everywhere in Champagne.

• Compared to Americans in their homeland, locals were more relaxed about dealing with children in “adult” environments.

• It reminded me a lot of Bringing Up Bebe, the bestseller about raising children in Europe compared to the USA.

I have been a wine and spirits writer for a long time and often visit wineries, breweries and distilleries when I travel. On various trips with our now 5-year-old daughter, we have seen many various craft breweriesand she even went to one or two distilleries.

But Wineries are often different with children. My extended family lives near Napa Valley, California. Almost every time I make a reservation, there is a clearly worded notice in the confirmation email and on the website that children are not welcome at the winery.

So if we traveled to France In March 2024, I admit, I was a little nervous. We traveled to Paris, where we dined in wine bars in the evenings, but it was the three days in Champagne that left me feeling a mixture of excitement and fear.

I very wanted to visit Champagne. I was willing to try anything as long as my daughter could come along.

There were so many families in the hotel

The Champagne Capital, Reimsis a 90-minute drive from Paris city center. Reims has several hotels, restaurants and a famous Gothic cathedral, Notre-Dame de Reims, making it both a wine production and cultural center. We were really there for the wine.

When we arrived at the hotel I had booked, we discovered it was so child friendly. In addition to the game room I had seen online, there was a pizza oven where the kids could grab a bite to eat when the restaurants weren’t open. There was also an outdoor playground, a pool, a kids’ supply store, and even room service.

I quickly noticed that many guests had families with them, whose children were coloring or working on a maze book while the parents sat in the living room area of ​​the lobby with a bottle of champagne in an ice bucket. We even took our drinks into the playroom, where my daughter made an elaborate fantasy adventure with a stuffed giraffe.

The champagne houses were also child-friendly

I was equally delighted when I booked our visits to the Champagne houses. Champagne Ruinart markets itself as a family-friendly winery. When we arrived, my daughter had a selection of special fruit juices to try while we tasted wines.

While visiting the impressive chalk caves that are a defining feature of the Champagne region, she learned all about how the caves were used by children during World War II to get to school safely.

At Champagne Ayala, a winery in the village of Aÿ, my daughter played tour guide along with our actual tour guide. She was greeted with her own notebook and pen to “doodle” what she saw and a flashlight to help our guide through the vast, cavernous wine cellar that runs 24 miles underground. She earned applause for her work from the all-adult group.

Dom Perignon’s hospitality team gave her a tour of the historic Hautvillers Abbey, which gave the house its name in the 17th century, and then treated her to her first glass of Coca-Cola in a guest room filled with paraphernalia from the brand’s numerous collaborations with Lady Gaga and Lenny Kravitz.

We visited a small Champagne house, a term 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 contest of their champagnes.

My daughter had a lot of fun

The entire Experience reminded me of “Bringing Up Bebe,” the bestselling book that has become a must-read for many millennial mothers. In the book The American author Pamela Druckerman looks at the cultural differences she has observed between American and French parents. Some elements of the book relate to infrastructural differences—childcare is more accessible and less expensive than in the United States—and others are more social in nature: in France, the author says, children are simply a more welcome part of society.

When we returned to Paris, we spent a day with an American friend who had 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, did not sense the slightest of my fear of motherhood. For her, everything was an adventure. She still talks about the playroom in the hotel, the hikes through the caves and the big church where the choir sang during our visit. She saw stained glass windows for the first time and ate croissants that did not exceed her body weight. And of course, about the time she was given the special Coca-Cola drink.

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