Champagne houses open their doors more often than they used to. Opening them at night is rarer, and opening the crayères at night is rarer still.
On 16, 17 and 18 October, Ruinart is taking part in Les Journées Particulières, LVMH’s group-wide open-doors event, with three separate experiences in Reims under the theme “aux Racines du Rêve”. Two of them you could broadly find elsewhere. The third is the reason to pay attention.
Ruinart by night, 4 rue des Crayères. Photo © Fabian Monchâtre, courtesy of Maison Ruinart.
The practical details first
When: 16, 17 and 18 October 2026, 14:00 to 20:00.
Where: 4 rue des Crayères, Reims, and the Taissy vineyard.
Booking: open now, via lvmh.com or at 4 rue des Crayères directly.
Les Journées Particulières is LVMH’s group-wide event, so Ruinart is one of many houses opening that weekend. Worth booking early rather than late.
Three centuries, and a staircase into the chalk
The visit at 4 rue des Crayères is the heritage one. It starts at the historic Pavillon Nicolas Ruinart and goes down into the crayères, the Gallo-Roman chalk pits that are part of the UNESCO World Heritage listing for the Champagne hillsides, houses and cellars.
The Pavillon Nicolas, 4 rue des Crayères. Photo © Chloé Le Reste, courtesy of Maison Ruinart.
Along the way the house is showing the making rather than the myth: cork, riddling, disgorgement. If you have never watched a bottle being disgorged, it is worth the trip on its own. The pressure in a Champagne bottle is roughly that of a bus tyre, and the neck is frozen before the cap comes off for a reason.
The visit then opens out into the gardens and the exhibition “Échos de la Terre, Harmonie du Vivant”.
The crayères at Maison Ruinart. Photo © Grégoire Machavoine, courtesy of Maison Ruinart.
The vineyard visit, and what the labels actually mean
At Taissy, one of the house’s historic sites, the subject is farming rather than heritage. The parcel is Premier Cru, and the house cites two certifications: Haute Valeur Environnementale and Viticulture Durable en Champagne.
Both are real and both are worth knowing the shape of. HVE is a French state certification with three levels, and level 3, the one usually meant, measures biodiversity, plant protection strategy, fertiliser management and water use at the level of the whole farm. VDC is Champagne’s own regional scheme, run by the Comité Champagne. Neither is organic certification, and neither claims to be. They are environmental management standards, which is a different and broader thing.
What Ruinart describes at Taissy is soil regeneration and the return of fauna and flora, with the visit punctuated by “Habitats”, works by the German land artist NILS-UDO built into the landscape itself.
The Ruinart boundary marker in the historic Taissy vineyard. Photo © Mathieu Bonnevie, courtesy of Maison Ruinart.
The one that is genuinely unusual
After dark, 4 rue des Crayères becomes a free-flow route through the gardens where, in the house’s phrase, heritage, art and light are meant to talk to each other. The historic façades carry an immersive projection by Manon Diemer.
The story it tells is the house’s own: Charlotte Ruinart de Brimont and her father Edgar, who moved production onto this former chalk quarry in 1877. Ruinart was founded in 1729 and is the oldest established Champagne house, so there is a fair amount of material.
Night projection onto historic buildings is not a new format, and plenty of it is wallpaper. What makes this one worth a look is the surface: you are standing in a courtyard above a UNESCO-listed chalk pit, in a city that rebuilt itself after 1918, watching a house tell its own history on its own walls. If it lands, it lands because of where you are standing.
Should you go?
If you are anywhere near Reims that weekend, the night trail is the part we would book. It runs for three evenings only, while the daytime cellar visit is available in some form most of the year.
If you are making a trip of it, the Taissy visit is the more interesting daytime option of the two, because a Premier Cru parcel being farmed for soil regeneration with land art in it is a more specific thing to see than a cellar tour, however good the cellar.
One honest note: we have not been to this edition. Everything above is from the house’s own announcement, and the photographs are Ruinart’s press images, credited individually. We will say so plainly if we get there.
Les Journées Particulières, 16 to 18 October 2026, 14:00 to 20:00, Reims. Booking via lvmh.com.
