BENEATH THE VINEYARDS
The Chalk Cellars of Champagne: Crayères and UNESCO
Kilometres of Gallo-Roman chalk quarries beneath Reims and Épernay, repurposed for ageing wine, and the 2015 UNESCO listing that recognises the whole landscape.
See Champagne trips on GetYourGuide ↗What a crayère actually is
A crayère is a chalk pit — originally dug not for wine but for building material, quarried from Gallo-Roman times through the Middle Ages to supply stone for Reims's cathedral and its townhouses. Once the chalk was exhausted, the resulting cavities were left as deep, bell-shaped or corridor-like voids beneath the city and its surroundings. From the nineteenth century, Champagne houses began adopting these existing quarries as cellars, since they offered exactly the conditions Champagne needs to age well, rather than digging fresh tunnels purely for wine storage. Many of the crayères beneath Reims today are, in that sense, borrowed spaces — centuries old before a single bottle of Champagne was ever laid down in them.
Why chalk is the perfect cellar material
Chalk turns out to be almost ideally suited to ageing Champagne: it holds a stable temperature of around 10–12°C year-round, keeps humidity high enough to stop corks drying out, and is porous enough to breathe gently without letting in light or vibration. Those conditions matter because Champagne can spend years, sometimes decades, resting on its lees before release — any swings in temperature or humidity over that time would show up in the finished wine. The same chalk that gives the vineyards above their distinctive, well-drained soil is, a few dozen metres down, doing an equally important job underground — which is part of why the cellars and the hillsides are treated as one connected landscape rather than separate attractions.
Some of the most storied cellars
Several houses have crayères worth knowing by name: Ruinart's, beneath the former Abbey of Saint-Nicaise in Reims, rank among the oldest and deepest, with some sections reportedly Gallo-Roman in origin; Pommery's are known for artworks carved into the chalk by a past owner and for a spiral staircase said to run over a hundred steps down; and Taittinger's occupy cellars linked to the same abbey site. In Épernay, Moët & Chandon and Mercier maintain some of the longest cellar networks in the region, reportedly running to many kilometres beneath the Avenue de Champagne. Exact figures vary between sources and houses tend to round generously, but the scale in every case is genuinely vast.
UNESCO's 2015 listing
In 2015, UNESCO inscribed "Champagne Hillsides, Houses and Cellars" as a World Heritage Site — not a single building or cellar, but a whole cultural landscape: the vineyard hillsides, the historic Avenue de Champagne, and the network of cellars and crayères beneath Reims and Épernay. The listing recognises Champagne-making as a complete, centuries-old system rather than just a product, tying the vines above ground to the chalk workings below. It's a useful frame for a visit, too — the cellars, the avenue and the vineyards are really one continuous story, and a day that only shows you one piece is missing how the others connect to it.
Visiting the cellars: what it's actually like
Underground, it's cool — genuinely cool, even on a hot afternoon — dim, and often surprisingly vast, with corridors of racked and riddled bottles stretching further than the lit sections suggest. Most tours involve some walking and a set of stairs down and back up, so it's not the easiest stop for anyone with mobility concerns, and a light layer is worth having even in summer. The pace is usually unhurried: guides tend to let the space itself do some of the talking before the tasting at the end, which after twenty minutes in the chalk tends to feel very well earned.