Val du Petit Morin

Val du Petit Morin sits southwest of the Côte des Blancs and northwest of the Sézanne escarpment, following the upper valley of the Petit Morin river as it drains west toward the Marne. Unlike the single south-facing chalk slope of the Côte de Sézanne, this is valley country: the land is lower and more broken, cut by the river and its tributaries, and the vineyards climb the gentle slopes above the valley floor. Its northern edge, around Val-des-Marais, Villeneuve-Renneville-Chevigny and Voipreux, is really the chalk tail of the Côte des Blancs, planted almost entirely to Chardonnay; the valley floor and shoulders further south and west, where clay-limestone soils mix with flint and marl and no vines grow along the wet Marais de Saint-Gond, lean instead to Pinot Meunier, which tolerates that cooler, damper ground better than Chardonnay does. That span from chalk escarpment to clay valley makes this the most evenly balanced of the seventeen areas: across its 21 villages Chardonnay just edges out Meunier, with Pinot Noir a distant third, a near-even split no other terroir comes close to matching. One of those 21 villages, Mondement-Montgivroux, was the site of decisive fighting in the First Battle of the Marne. On 9 September 1914, French forces under General Georges Humbert, spearheaded by the Moroccan Division, recaptured the Château de Mondement from German troops after heavy fighting that left the château largely in ruins; the position stood on high ground above the Marais de Saint-Gond and controlled the route south toward Paris, and its recapture was part of the action that forced the German retreat ending the battle. The village today holds the Monument national de la Victoire de la Marne, a 35.5-metre reinforced-concrete monolith designed by architect Paul Bigot and sculptor Henri Bouchard, built between 1931 and 1938 and formally inaugurated in 1951 after a second war delayed the ceremony. It stands on the hill above the château, overlooking the marshes and the vineyards of the valley below.