Granges-sur-Aube

Location

Granges-sur-Aube lies in the Marne département in the Grand Est region, between Anglure and Méry-sur-Seine on the road to Troyes. Administratively, the village belongs to the arrondissement of Épernay and the canton of Vertus-Plaine Champenoise. At the 2023 count, 180 people lived here. The commune is classed as rural with scattered housing and falls within the catchment area of Romilly-sur-Seine.

Landscape and viticulture

Granges-sur-Aube is not a grand cru or premier cru site. According to the available land-use data, vineyards do not shape the commune either: in 2018, 85.5 per cent of the land was farmed, almost entirely as arable land (85.2 per cent). Woodland accounts for 11.5 per cent, built-up areas only 3.1 per cent. If you want to see Champagne away from its famous vine-covered slopes, this shows another face of the region: wide fields along a river valley.

That river is the Aube. It is 249 kilometres long, rises near Auberive and joins the Seine at Marcilly-sur-Seine. It is one of the four largest tributaries of the Seine and gave its name to the Aube département. Besides the Aube, the Noue du Mesnil also drains the commune.

“For the years 1971 to 2000, the source gives an average annual temperature of 10.7 °C and on average 700 millimetres of rainfall.

Climate

The climate is temperate oceanic with fresh summers. For the years 1971 to 2000, the source gives an average annual temperature of 10.7 °C and on average 700 millimetres of rainfall. The nearest Météo-France weather station is in Romilly-sur-Seine, twelve kilometres away. There, the annual average from 1991 to 2020 was 11.2 °C, with 619.5 millimetres of rain. The extremes: 42.3 °C on 25 July 2019 and minus 25.2 °C on 6 January 1971. Frost and heat are both part of the region's reality.

Name and sights

The place name goes back to the Old French word grange, a building in which sheaves were stored until threshing, also a barn, stable or farmstead. The village is already recorded as "Granges" in 1076, and later appears in Latin form as "Grangiæ super Albam", meaning Granges on the Aube.

Paul Goerg Champagner Trauben

• Church of Saint-Maurice: the only sight named in the sources.
• Eugène Baudin (1853 to 1918): craftsman and revolutionary, a participant in the Paris Commune, later a socialist deputy for the Cher and founder of the Poterie de Monaco. He made a name for himself as an Art Nouveau ceramicist. He died on 11 April 1918 in Granges-sur-Aube.

Granges-sur-Aube is a quiet village with no champagne houses, but with a history of its own. For travellers between Troyes and the Marne, it can make a peaceful stop along the way.