A Century in the Glass: Ruinart Opens Its Cellars for a Landmark Vertical Tasting

What happened

On 15 June 2026, Decanter's Champagne correspondent attended a vertical tasting at Ruinart, one of France's most storied Champagne houses. The occasion brought together eight wines spanning a full century, with the oldest bottle representing a hundred years of cellared history. The tasting offered an unusually broad chronological sweep through Ruinart's archive, culminating in the opening of a bottle that had lain undisturbed for a century.

Why it matters

Vertical tastings are a familiar instrument of serious wine assessment, but one that reaches back a hundred years is a genuinely rare event. To encounter eight distinct expressions of Champagne across so long a timespan is to observe not merely the evolution of a single house's style, but the broader shifts in how the region's wines have been made, kept, and understood. A bottle of this age, drawn from a prestigious cellar, carries within it the conditions, techniques, and ambitions of an era entirely removed from the present. For those seeking to understand what Champagne can become given sufficient time, such an occasion is without parallel. Decanter's correspondent was present to record that perspective, lending the event a degree of critical documentation that extends its significance beyond the room in which it took place.

Context

Ruinart is among the most historically prominent houses in the Champagne region of France. Vertical tastings — in which successive vintages or years of a single producer's wine are assessed together — are a recognised means of tracing stylistic continuity and change over time. The inclusion of a hundred-year-old bottle places this particular tasting at the furthest reaches of what is practically achievable with Champagne, a wine not conventionally associated with extreme longevity in the way that some still wines are. That such a bottle existed in a condition suitable for tasting speaks to the quality of its original storage. The event was reported by Decanter, a leading international wine publication, whose Champagne correspondent attended in a professional capacity.