Inside Ruinart’s Crayères and the Maison’s Living Dialogue with Art

There are places that defy expectation, not through spectacle, but through a quiet, magnetic presence. Ruinart’s Crayères have long been spoken about in these terms, yet nothing quite matches the experience of descending into their pale, vertical silence. During my recent visit to Reims, I discovered that Ruinart’s underground world is not simply a cellar — it is a sculpted vision of time, matter and intention.

WORDS BY FILIPE FANGUEIRO

The descent begins in a narrow passageway carved from limestone, where the walls still bear the rhythmic traces of ancient tools. This Chemin des Crayères feels almost like a prelude — a soft erasure of the outside world. And then the space opens. The temperature drops. The light fades to a gentle amber. Ahead lie vast chambers of chalk, 40 metres underground, where the Maison has matured its wines for generations.

The stillness is absorbing. Ranks of bottles stretch into the cool air, stacked using the traditional entreillage technique — each one aligned, wedged, and left to rest with absolute precision. The Crayères, originally medieval quarries, became Ruinart’s silent guardians: naturally insulated, protected from vibration, and carved into sculptural volumes that feel closer to architecture than geology. Recognised as national heritage and listed by UNESCO, they carry not only history, but a certain authority — the kind that shapes the Maison’s identity from the inside out.

Emerging back toward the surface is like moving through time in reverse. The chalk tunnel dissolves into daylight and the new Nicolas Ruinart Pavilion appears — a curved, translucent structure by Sou Fujimoto that seems to breathe with the sky. Inside, Gwenaël Nicolas softens the architecture with pale greens, natural textures and sculptural silhouettes that echo vine leaves and petals. There is a clarity to the space, an intentional simplicity that frames the estate with a contemporary gaze.

Outside, Christophe Gautrand’s garden stretches in soft rhythms: beech, hornbeam, cork oak — a landscape designed for biodiversity, punctuated by artworks that blend seamlessly with the vegetation. Sculpture does not announce itself here; it settles quietly into the environment, waiting to be noticed.

What becomes immediately evident is that Ruinart’s relationship with art is not cosmetic. It is structural. It is philosophical. And above all, it is enduring.

The Maison’s dialogue with artists began in 1896 with Alphonse Mucha, who created the first champagne advertisement — a moment of audacity that set a tone for everything that followed. Since then, Ruinart has continued to invite contemporary artists to interpret the Maison through their own disciplines. This tradition now takes form in the annual Carte Blanche: a residency that allows artists to explore the vineyards, archives and Crayères, and respond with new work.

Walking through the estate, this continuity is palpable. The names form their own timeline: Jaume Plensa reshaping Dom Thierry Ruinart through sculptural language; Liu Bolin revealing the invisible gestures behind champagne-making; Vik Muniz composing images from vine leaves; David Shrigley bringing humour to the rituals of wine; Jeppe Hein placing the viewer at the centre of the experience; Eva Jospin carving entire landscapes from cardboard with the precision of a goldsmith. More recently, Conversations with Nature introduced works by Julian Charrière, Sam Falls and Lélia Demoisy — artists exploring ecology, time and living matter through sculpture, photography and organic installation.

Ruinart does not ask artists to illustrate its story. It asks them to expand it. To question it. To destabilise it just enough that new meaning can emerge.

Ruinart does not ask artists to illustrate its story. It asks them to expand it. To question it. To destabilise it just enough that new meaning can emerge. The result is a Maison where craftsmanship becomes sculpture, chalk becomes architecture, and champagne becomes a lens through which to rethink our relationship with nature. By the time I reached the garden again at the end of my visit, the Crayères had already shifted something in my perception. The contrast between their vast, subterranean quiet and the luminous openness of the pavilion created a kind of internal calibration — as if the experience had rearranged the way the site should be read.

Ruinart’s identity revealed itself not in a single gesture, but in the tension between opposites: underground and sky, heritage and experimentation, precision and intuition. Wine here is shaped by both technique and imagination. Art is not an addition; it is a method of inquiry. Nature is not a backdrop; it is a collaborator and a witness. As I walked past the cork oaks and the discreet sculptures nestled into the landscape, it became clear that the Crayères were not merely a chapter in the Maison’s history — they were the origin of its artistic sensibility. Their monumental quiet seemed to echo across the estate, offering a lesson in patience, observation and transformation.

Ruinart’s Crayères stay with you. They settle into your memory in a way that is difficult to define yet impossible to forget. And once you have stood in their cool, sculpted depths, it becomes clear that Ruinart’s wines are inseparable from the artistic and natural forces that continue to shape them — both beneath the earth and above it.