Episode Report Card M. Giant: A- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Champagne-ful
By M. Giant | Season 16 | Episode 6 | Aired on 03.21.2010
Jordan and Jeff find the saw player and get their clue in last place. The saw player seems to wonder whether she's supposed to keep playing, now that there aren't going to be any more teams coming to see her. My position is that any reason for someone to stop playing a saw is a good one.
Cord finds his bottle, and when he gets upstairs he slashes the top off while pointing it right at the camera. I hope that was the cameraman's idea. They thank the guide, then run across the street to ask a French chick with a pixie cut where to go next. Reims, she says. Uh-oh, we say.
Michael and Louie are reaching the next destination. "We're following a nice Frenchman in a Porsche, through France. It doesn't get any better than this." Even driving the Porsche? They are led right to the clue box out front. After hugs for their guides, they open the clue. Unsurprisingly, it's a Detour.
"From cultivating the perfect grape to cultivating the perfect presentation," Phil says as he walks through a vineyard, "The work associated with champagne is both exhausting and exacting." So that work is now a choice between "Tower" and "Terra." For "Tower," the teams will have to use exactly 680 glasses to build a fifteen-level pyramid of champagne glasses, with one glass on top. "If they can solve that equation, and build a tower without breaking any glasses, they can fill it with champagne and receive their next clue." Yeah, I don't think anybody's going to be solving any "equations." I couldn't even figure it out myself without building an Excel spreadsheet, never mind during the race. Fortunately for them it's not geometry that's going to make or break anyone, but we're getting ahead of ourselves. For "Terra," they have to search a square kilometer of "barren, wintry land for a tiny cluster of grapes marked with race colors." Namely, another one of those tiny flags. They must have had some left over after cutting up an 8½ x 11 sheet of office paper for them. Then they'll bring it to the harvest foreman to swap for their next clue. Michael and Louie agree to search, on the logic that they are bulls in china shops. They go through the gate to the vineyard, and see a very daunting landscape spread out on the entire hillside below them. "You gotta be kidding me," Michael says. They begin their search, torn between the need to hurry and the desire not to miss anything.
The subtitle on the screen reads "Reims," which I now begin to suspect is French for "Wrong." There's a big white compound building with "Taittinger" painted on the outside wall in big black letters, and Dan and Jordan run inside and find an employee who tells them the place they're looking for is not in Reims, but Pierry. She clarifies that they're at Taittinger, "where we do the champagne," but Marquetterie means mansion or castle. "How did we mess that up?" one of them wonders as they jog back to their car. Back underway, Jordan pronounces, "The lesson in this leg of the race was don't always trust a pretty girl." CBS Cares.