It was all very well for old Lily Bollinger. It was she, you’ll remember, who chirped: “I drink champagne when I’m happy and when I’m sad. Sometimes I drink it when I’m alone. When I have company, I consider it obligatory. I trifle with it if I’m not hungry and drink it when I am. Otherwise I never touch it, unless I’m thirsty.”

What she failed to remark on in this breezy and otherwise comprehensive little outburst is what she drinks when she’s skint. Because skint is what we’re all facing at the moment, which means some of us are getting dangerously close to giving up those little luxuries that make each day endurable.

Like the first glass of champagne before breakfast. Where would we be without it? Quite — doesn’t bear thinking about, does it? But in these belt-tightened times of miserly exchange rates and nothing under the mattress, we’re close to desperate (single) measures.

Which is why I was excited to stumble upon the “credit-crunch champagne tour”. The idea is simple. Instead of its regular, uncrunched, all-inclusive champagne tours, which can include learning the art of sabrage (slicing off the cork with a sword), and cost up to £2,699pp, the wine-based tour operator Grape Escapes has come up with a budget version.

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What you get, once you’ve made your own way to Rheims, is two nights’ B&B at a perfectly good hotel in the centre of town, a three-course lunch and an introduction to champagne — its history, harvest and production — with plenty of chances to test your palette with tastings in two very different “houses”: a small, traditional, family-run operation and a big, commercial, corporate one. And all for £179pp.

What you don’t get is a luxury coach with warmed foot and arm rests, a three-piece tasting suit made of Dom Pérignon labels, a butler to hold your personalised diamond-encrusted flute and a vineyard named in your honour, as you might on some of Grape Escapes’ posher, more expensive tours (subject to reality). If my experience is anything to go by, though, you probably won’t need them.

Our CCCT began at 9.30am round the back of Rheims Cathedral with an introduction to Ekaterina LeBlanc, a 28-year-old Russian who married a French winemaker and set up her own company guiding groups in the region.

Ekaterina, or Catherine, as she has taken to calling herself after hearing the French mangle the word Ekaterina once too often, drove us out to a few of the vineyards on the outskirts of the city, such as Vrigny, and schooled us in the basics without any of the down-the-nosery that I was expecting.

We nodded sagely and pretended to know that only three grapes (chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier) are used in the production of nearly all champagne; that the bubbles come from a second fermentation method inside the bottle once yeast and sugar are added; and that roses are planted in front of vineyards, as they are sensitive to diseases that might harm the grapes — the viticultural equivalent of the canary in the mine.

And that a riddler is not, as I must confess I believed, a character in Batman, but a man who every day turns by hand up to 40,000 bottles of champagne a few degrees to the right, to keep the sediment travelling into the neck, where it will be frozen out by a machine.

She was good, was Catherine — so good that my party of four credit-crunched wannabe champagne guzzlers managed to keep the unspoken question unspoken until nearly 11am: where’s the booze?

By then, we’d reached the “house” of Pascal Ponson, in Coulommes-la-Montagne, where Catherine showed us how a traditional press was used to squish (technical term) the grapes before the juice is stored in huge stainless-steel tubs, where a man with a wand casts a spell and it ends up in bottles. I’m sure that was what she said. I might have been distracted by the tray with four glasses on it — three for me, one for the others to share.

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