Lower East

On the Lower East trip to France, we visited Reims to spend a weekend with our dear friends and champagne lovers John & Birgitte. One of the highlights of the weekend was our visit to the champagne house Pommery.

After Mr. Pommery had run the champagne house for only one year from 1857-58, he died. The young widow Louise Pommery decided to take over the champagne business and led it on to success and glory. She invented the champagne as we know it today with a very low content of sugar. She used her fortune to set up the first pension fund and a social security system for her employees. She also founded the orphanage in Reims and its maternity fund. She was also a patron of the arts, and in the champagne cellars of Pommery art exhibitions are shown with different themes.

The exhibition we joined was called “Gigantesque!”. “Playing with the architecture of this estate, the Gigantesque! exhibition seeks to showcase the excess and extravagance of today’s artists: ideas and research that partake of the colossal, but, at the same time, of the unbelievably tiny, the miniscule. Defying all norms. Out of scale. The gigantesque is the unbridled imagination, the exceeding of all measure. For the artists, gigantesque is the desire, the new energies, the challenge to create and invent new utopias. Gigantesque, like art and the immensity of the human being.” Read more about Pommery on the website.

Photo: lower east

 

Photo: lower east

 

Photo: lower east

 

Photo: lower east

 

Photo: lower east

 

Photo: lower east

 

Photo: lower east

 

Photo: lower east