Dom Ruinart’s nephew Nicolas created
the world’s first champagne house and soon
after, Nicolas’ son, Claude Ruinart, moved
the estate to its current address in Reims with
the ingenious idea of using the local crayères
(chalk pits) to store the champagne. With
a constant temperature of around 10°C and
close to 100 per cent humidity, they provided
the ideal conditions for maturation.
The Gallo-Romans started excavating
the region’s crayères two millennia ago,
using the chalk to build Reims. Today, the
crayères and their connecting tunnels zigzag
for hundreds of miles underground. They
are beautiful and mysterious, with narrow
openings at the surface expanding into vast
white chambers below. They have served
the interests of monks, smugglers and Second
World War soldiers, and their rough white
walls bear religious icons, graffiti and other
marks of this rich history. In 2015, Unesco
classified them a World Heritage Site.
In Ruinart’s crayères, the deepest locally,
several hundred thousand bottles of bubblyage slowly in the dim golden light. Last year
the company decided to renovate a ‘secret’
crayère that had collapsed after the Second
World War, hiring five climbers to reinforce
the walls. It will now be an oenothèque where
VVIPs can taste particularly old vintages.
As well as the crayères, what moved Bolin
about Ruinart was the human element in
its manufacturing processes, the centuries
of expertise behind the employees’ skills.
‘These people are working here, their life is
here, so it was important to have them in
the photographs,’ he says. To symbolise the
‘invisible’ hands behind each bottle of
champagne, the artist posed with several
workers – disappearing into the fields with
the cellarmaster and into the disgorgement
production line with three of its operators
(see previous page). He also posed with
Pablo Lopez, one of the house’s two riddlers.
Lopez practises a rare ancestral craft,
‘reading’ the champagne by hand, tilting
and rotating the bottles in order to draw
the sediment into the neck so that it canbe removed later. In that photograph, he and
Bolin are camouflaged against gyropalettes,
the machines that take over once Lopez has
programmed them to reproduce his gesture.
Ruinart’s previous artistic collaborations
are displayed at the estate in Reims, as is
the first piece the house ever commissioned,
an advertisement designed in 1896 by
Czech artist Alphonse Mucha. As part of
his project, Bolin paid tribute to that original
collaboration by painting himself into
Mucha’s art nouveau poster.
And when Bolin unveiled his Ruinart
photographs during a party in March at the
Grand Palais in Paris, the chic, champagne-
sipping crowd watched in fascination as the
artist disappeared into an oversized version
of Jean-François de Troy’s 1735 painting
Le Déjeuner d’Huîtres (said to be the first in
history to depict a bottle of champagne), only
to become part of another chic, champagne-
sipping party from three centuries ago. ∂
Tours of the crayères, including champagne tasting ,
cost €70 per person. To book, visit ruinart.comPHOTOGRAPHY: JAMES TOLICHABOVE, ARTIST LIU BOLIN IN
ONE OF RUINART’S CRAYÈRES.
ABOVE RIGHT, THE CLOTHING
PAINTED FOR LOST IN BLANC
DE BLANCS BOTTLES, HELD BY
RUINART CELLARMASTERFRÉDÉRIC PANAIOTIS, WHO
ALSO APPEARS IN THE WORK.
RIGHT, THE REMOVAL OF THE
SEDIMENT FROM THE NECK
OF THE BOTTLE, A PROCESS
KNOWN AS DISGORGEMENT242 ∑
Wine & Design