Ruinart 1926

The bottle

In May 2026, an inventory of the wine cellar at Restaurant Paul Bocuse — the three-star institution at Collonges-au-Mont-d'Or outside Lyon, founded by Paul Bocuse and run for decades as a fixture of haute cuisine — turned up a 1926 vintage Ruinart bottle, a near-century-old archive wine that had survived in the cellar undisturbed.

Significance

1926 was a small vintage in Champagne and surviving bottles are extremely rare; archived examples that pre-date World War II are typically held in maison-owned œnothèques rather than restaurant cellars. The rediscovery prompted Ruinart's œnothèque team to examine the bottle for tasting reference and provenance documentation, and was widely covered in the French wine press as an example of restaurant-cellar archaeology.