Winery · Reims

Ruinart

Founded 1729 by Nicolas Ruinart (the first Champagne house, period), it capitalized on Louis XV's 1728 edict allowing wine transport in bottles—Ruinart's 40-meter crayères & historic cellars (listed 1931, UNESCO 2015) craft refined fizz from chalk caves beneath Reims.

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TourRuinart: A Chalk Pit as Tall as the Cathedral NaveOn 1 September 1729, Nicolas Ruinart, a Reims cloth merchant and nephew of the Benedictine monk Thierry Ruinart, opened his first account book for "wine with bubbles" and sold it first to the customers who bought his cloth. The house came to this chalk hill later: in 1760 or 1768 by the State's and UNESCO's reckoning, in 1877 by its own history page. Some of its pits first rose almost 50 m; the tallest now measures 38 m, the height of the nave of Reims Cathedral. You can walk the free garden to Sou Fujimoto's pavilion, go down to some twenty pits on a two-hour visit, find the racks where, the house says, its bottles are still riddled, and end under the cathedral's vault.

Ruinart

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