Bar-sur-Aubois

The Bar-sur-Aubois is the northern of the Côte des Bar's two terroirs, centred on the market town of Bar-sur-Aube and following the Aube river and its tributaries through 30 villages. Like the rest of the Côte des Bar, its soils are Kimmeridgian limestone and clay related to Chablis rather than the chalk of the Marne, but the Bar-sur-Aubois sits slightly further east and higher in the Aube valley, and two of its villages, Colombey-les-Deux-Églises and Rizaucourt-Buchey, actually lie across the départemental line in the Haute-Marne, making this the easternmost pocket of vineyard in all of Champagne. Plantings run heavily toward Pinot Noir, an even stronger tilt than the Barséquanais shows in several of its villages, and every village here carries the autre cru classification. The resulting wines are typically fruity and round, softer and faster to develop than Pinot Noir from the Montagne de Reims. Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, a small village at the eastern edge of the area, is where Charles de Gaulle chose to live outside of public life. He and his wife Yvonne bought the house known as La Boisserie in June 1934, and it became his retreat between government postings and, after his 1969 resignation from the presidency, the place where he wrote his memoirs. De Gaulle died at La Boisserie on 9 November 1970 and, at his own request, was given a simple funeral in the village rather than a state ceremony in Paris. He is buried in the small cemetery beside the church, next to his wife and their daughter Anne. On the hill above the village stands the Cross of Lorraine, a 44-metre pink granite monument inaugurated on 18 June 1972, the anniversary of his 1940 radio appeal to the French Resistance. La Boisserie remains open to visitors, and a memorial museum built at the foot of the cross has stood there since 2008.