Ripening Chardonnay isn't really the problem at Ruinart anymore. Knowing the exact moment it's ready – that's the puzzle keeping Caroline Fiot up at night.
Tasting through the range with Ruinart's chef de caves, it's clear Ruinart is wrestling with its own identity in real time. Chardonnay is Ruinart's whole reason for being, and warmer vintages have given the House riper, more expressive base wines than it's ever had. In a region that has historically struggled for ripeness, it’s by all accounts a gift, but that gift comes with a catch.
"One of the positive impacts of climate change is that we make better base wines," Fiot tells me. "The challenge will be to keep the freshness."
Here's the tricky bit; sugar climbs fast in the heat, acidity drops away just as quickly, but aromatic and phenolic ripeness don't always keep pace. "The two ripenesses get desynchronised," she says. Pick on the numbers and the flavour might not have caught up yet. Wait for the flavour, and you've lost more acid than you'd like. It's a moving target, and Fiot is the one trying to hit it.
What makes this especially delicate for Ruinart is that freshness has always been the House's calling card – but it's never been about razor acidity. Think luminosity, texture and sheer drinkability. That's the DNA Fiot has to protect while everything shifts underneath her.
She spent close to a decade at the side of the late chef de caves, Frédéric Panaïotis, and plenty of what's landing in glass now was set in motion during their years together. I can tell that inheritance sits with her. "I'm going to ensure the continuity of the style, of course," she says, then admits she still catches herself asking, "would we have done this like this? Or would he have thought differently?"
For now, her philosophy is focused on testing and learning. "For the moment, yes," she says of carrying his vision forward, "but I'm already trying to experiment with new things."
Experimentation starts long before a single grape hits the press. Ruinart is working with new rootstocks and massale selections pulled from its oldest, most interesting vines – propagating the best of them and returning that material to the vineyard. It's patient, unglamorous work; a promising vine today won't prove its drought or disease resilience for years.
The agroforestry program is further along, and already paying off. Around 25,000 trees planted over six years are visibly changing the vineyard with more biodiversity, better soil health and resilience. "We really see that we have much more biodiversity than before," Fiot says. "I think it helps to get more resilience from the vineyards. It stimulates more natural defences." The trees decompact soil, offer shade, and cool the vines beneath them – small mercies that add up.
A Riper Blanc de Blancs
Ruinart’s flagship, Blanc de Blancs, is currently built on the 2022 vintage from roughly 35 villages. It's unmistakably Ruinart, but there's more flesh on it than I remember.
Round, creamy, ripe citrus sliding into fresh pineapple with a subtle tropical lift, but none of it weighs the wine down. Fiot calls it "a little bit more round, a little bit more open," and she's not troubled by that at all. Blanc de Blancs was never built to be austere. She reminds me of the old philosophy behind the wine, first made back in 1947, something you could happily drink from nine in the morning to nine the next night, because of ease and freshness, not sharpness.
"We don't want something too tiny, too sharp," she says. "It's just round and fresh." It’s a fair enough comment but the meaning of "round and fresh" is evolving underneath her.
Chardonnay from the Sézannais brings more of a tropical character into the blend now, and Fiot talks about protecting delicate, highly volatile aromatics – some closer to what you'd find in Sauvignon Blanc – that vanish the moment oxygen gets near them. That's exactly why Ruinart's reductive handling matters so much. "The fruit, the aromatic freshness, the silky texture," she says of the goal, with Chardonnay itself supplying the "luminosity" and "fragility" at the very centre of the house style.
The 2022 base tells me Ruinart isn't fighting this new-found ripeness. The real question is how much of it the House can absorb before it stops tasting like Ruinart. Which is exactly where Blanc Singulier comes in.
Pushing Ripeness Further
It would be easy to call Blanc Singulier Ruinart's climate-change cuvée. I'm not sure that's quite fair, especially now that even the flagship Blanc de Blancs is leaning into a riper character.
The latest, Edition 19, is built on 77% 2019, with 23% perpetual reserve folding in 2018, 2017 and a touch of 2016. The village list shrinks right down here – ten to fifteen crus, with Sillery and Dizy leading alongside Vertus, Taissy and a little Vitryat fruit. Selection is blind, but Fiot says the same warmer sites keep making their way back into the blend regardless. "We selected wines which were much more mature and much riper," she tells me.
That extra ripeness changes the wine's whole architecture. Edition 19 carries zero dosage but strip out the sugar and you have to find the texture from somewhere else entirely. Half the perpetual reserve ages in 50-hectolitre oak casks, used here for gentle micro-oxygenation rather than any overt oak flavour, and full malolactic fermentation adds a further layer of softness. "We don't need any dosage," says Fiot, "but we still need an extra layer of texture."
It’s a strange irony that riper fruit makes zero dosage possible, but zero dosage then forces Ruinart to go looking for texture elsewhere. Oak here is structure, not flavour.
In the glass, it is anything but heavy. There's real ripeness, yes, but a chiselled, precise edge too. It doesn't feel like a departure from Ruinart Blanc de Blancs so much as the same conversation about freshness, taken further and pushed harder. Whether Blanc Singulier stays its own thing or ends up telling us something bigger about where Ruinart Chardonnay is headed, that's still an open question. Right now, it's simply the most exciting seat in the house for watching Fiot work it out.
Dom Ruinart: Place and Time
Dom Ruinart is on an entirely different path. Fiot wants a much deeper connection to place here. The blend sits at roughly 70% Côte des Blancs Chardonnay to 30% Montagne de Reims, drawn from a fairly consistent set of crus year to year. "I really want to enhance this part, reconnect a little bit more to the soil, to the subsoil, to the terroir," she says. She's not talking about trimming down the number of plots but she wants to properly understand why the same sites keep earning their place. "I want to understand deeper those plots. Why do we always use them? What are they bringing?"
The 2013 vintage gave me a glimpse of where that thinking leads. It's only the second Dom Ruinart vintage aged under cork rather than crown cap – a call made after years of trials. Cork lets in more oxygen early on before settling into a slower, steadier rhythm, and Fiot says that over long ageing it can actually slow oxidation compared to crown cap. Ruinart is now running lab comparisons between cork and crown-cap-aged bottles, which tells you how seriously they're taking it. The contradiction is that cork can preserve youthfulness and build greater complexity, at the same time.
And the wine itself? Gorgeous. Apple blossom on the nose, pretty and lifted, but it's the texture that really got me with bubbles almost impossibly fine, the palate was precise and nearly weightless. Fiot points out that long ageing softens perceived pressure as the CO2 slowly falls away. Time is doing just as much work here as anything happening in the cellar.
The rosés bring a different angle to that same story. Vintage 2009 gets an extra two to three years on lees, letting the tannin from its red wine component fully settle in. It's broad, textural, generous with strawberry tart, Mirabelle plum and all the warmth you'd expect from that vintage. The 2013 Rosé, right beside it, is completely different; luminous, fresher berries, real energy, a sharper and more chiselled line. Tasted together, it's a reminder of just how loudly vintage speaks, even within one clearly defined house style.
But the real revelation was 2007, tasted two ways. The original disgorgement, from 2013, was wonderfully moreish and dense – roasted pineapple, the first whispers of tertiary character, and a salinity and balance that make it dangerously easy to keep pouring. The late-disgorged version, released in 2024 after considerably more time on lees, is a completely different wine – tinned pineapple, apple pie, but structurally more linear and youthful. Neither one settles the "how long should it age" debate. They're simply two honest readings of the same vintage, shaped entirely by time.
Ruinart plans to keep the late-disgorgement story going with 2010, and Dom Ruinart Blanc de Blancs 2015 is due towards the end of 2027.
Where This Leaves Us
Ruinart's Blanc de Blancs may be getting broader as Chardonnay ripens more easily than it used to, whilst Blanc Singulier embraces that ripeness and runs further with it. Dom Ruinart, meanwhile, plays at the edge of what happens to Chardonnay across decades in the cellar.
It's tempting to connect those dots and predict what Ruinart Chardonnay will taste like in 2050. Fiot won't go there yet – not while she's still trialling rootstocks, propagating massale selections, planting trees, and watching how individual parcels respond in real time. Some of this won't be understood for decades.
"You need to think of the next generations because you need to leave them some patrimony, some heritage, some legacy," she tells me. "If I'm not starting to work on it right now, it's lost time."
Maybe the real question isn't whether Ruinart can make its future Chardonnay taste like its past. It's how much change the House can absorb – and still taste unmistakably like Ruinart.
