Ruinart is the oldest established Champagne house, founded in Reims in 1729, and its whole identity rests on a single grape: Chardonnay. The style is bright, chalky and fine, closer to a whispered aside than a shout across the room. Which, this particular winter, happens to be exactly the mood.

The timing is lovely. The UK Champagne market has swung back into growth this year, and the trade reckons roughly two in three British wine buyers plan to spend a little more over the festive table than they did last. When people trade up, they tend to drift away from the loudest labels and towards the ones that feel like a quiet flex. Ruinart has been that bottle for the better part of three centuries.

The House That Came First

Before Veuve, before the Napoleons and the podium sprays, there was Ruinart. The idea belonged to a Benedictine monk, Dom Thierry Ruinart, who moved in the same Reims circles as Dom Pérignon and worked out early that the Paris court had developed a serious thirst for the strange new fizzing wine of the region. He never sold a bottle himself. His nephew Nicolas did, setting up the house in 1729 and, in doing so, more or less inventing the business of Champagne as we know it.

That first-mover status is more than a nice line for the label. It means Ruinart has spent longer than anyone else chewing over a single question: what should Champagne actually taste like?

A House Built on Chardonnay

Ruinart's answer has always been Chardonnay. Where many of the big houses lean on Pinot Noir for weight and shoulder, Ruinart builds from the white grape up, chasing lift and finesse rather than muscle. The result tastes of chalk and citrus and white flowers, all cut glass and cold morning light. If most grande marque Champagne is a velvet dinner jacket, Ruinart is a perfectly cut white shirt.

Cellars the Romans Dug

The magic keeps cool underground. Beneath Reims, Ruinart ages its wines in the crayères: vast chalk pits first hewn by Gallo-Roman quarrymen two thousand years ago, and now listed by UNESCO as World Heritage. Forty metres down, the temperature never shifts and the light never arrives. It is the kind of place that makes you lower your voice. Chardonnay, the most transparent of the Champagne grapes, needs precisely this sort of patient, undisturbed dark to find its poise.

Where to Start

For most of us, the way in is R de Ruinart, the house brut, at £57.99. Pinot Noir leads the blend for body, but the Chardonnay signature still sings through, and it drinks like a very good idea arriving at just the right moment: green apple, toasted brioche, a thread of honey, and that chalky freshness running clean down the middle. This is the bottle to open when you want the house style without remortgaging the spare room.

Climb the range and you reach Dom Ruinart, the prestige cuvée and one of the great blanc de blancs in all of Champagne, though it asks for both patience and a healthier budget. And if you are curious what the same Côte des Blancs chalk does in the hands of a tiny grower rather than a grand house, the grower-made Waris-Larmandier Particules Crayeuses makes a lovely counterpoint at £47.99.

Both belong on a Christmas table, and together they sketch the two directions Champagne is being pulled in just now: the reassuring grandeur of the famous house, and the intimate thrill of a grower working one stretch of chalk.

How to Drink It

Resist the flute. Ruinart's entire appeal is aroma and detail, and a narrow flute throttles both. Pour it into a white-wine glass, serve it properly cold but not Arctic, and give it a minute to stretch its legs. As an aperitif it is faultless. Alongside oysters, smoked salmon or almost anything from the sea, it edges close to perfect.

There is something quietly fitting about the oldest name in Champagne feeling this current. While the market chases the new, Ruinart simply keeps doing what it has done since 1729: making bright, chalky, unimprovably elegant wine, and letting everybody else make the noise. Open a bottle this Christmas and you are not only drinking Champagne. You are drinking the one that started the whole conversation.

For the grapes, the chalk and why vintage differs from non-vintage, see our Champagne region guide. For another of the great houses we stock, read our profile of Moët & Chandon, and for the full case for the small producers, our guide to grower Champagne.