Ruinart and Tadashi Kawamata: A Tower Above the Vines and a Nest Beside a Bottle

The world’s oldest champagne house transforms its Reims estate into an artistic stage for rethinking our relationship with nature

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he world’s oldest producer of champagne has just unveiled the 2026 chapter of its annual artistic programme, and the result is as poetic as it is unexpected: a six-metre timber tower in the inverted shape of a champagne bottle rising above the famous chalk cellars of Reims; a nest clinging to the façade of the historic house building; and a hut perched high in the branches of a garden tree. All of it the work of Japanese artist Tadashi Kawamata, one of the most celebrated creators of site-specific installations in the international art world today.

The initiative sits within the Conversations with Nature programme, which Ruinart has been developing over a number of years in the conviction that art can serve as a privileged vehicle for reflecting on the relationship between human activity and the natural environment. For a champagne house, that relationship is existential: without soil biodiversity, without the particular microclimate of the Champagne region, without the temperature variations that shape the acidity and perfume of the Chardonnay grape, there would simply be no champagne to speak of. Ruinart’s technical team has spent decades monitoring the effects of climate change on its vineyards — soil temperature, water reserves, drought indices, vegetative cycles — acutely aware that shifts in the climate have a direct bearing on the aromatic expression of their principal variety.

The choice of Kawamata as artistic interlocutor for 2026 reflects an underlying coherence that becomes apparent as soon as one engages with his biography. Born in Hokkaido in 1953 into a family of coal miners, the artist grew up surrounded by industrial materials and spaces carved out of the earth. His subsequent work — large timber structures built on site, transforming the perception of buildings, streets and squares across the world — bears the unmistakable imprint of that childhood: a respect for the handmade, an awareness of time passing, a conviction that nothing endures forever. The artist summarises his philosophy with a phrase that carries a distinctly Buddhist resonance: ‘Everything changes. We must not believe that anything is permanent. We simply remain in harmony with nature.’

The three installations created for Ruinart at Reims each carry their own name: Tree Hut, Nest, and Observatory. The most spectacular is without question the Observatory: that six-metre tower designed to evoke, in its form, the inverted champagne bottle resting in the depths of the chalk cellars below. To climb to its upper platform is, according to Kawamata himself, a transformative perceptual experience. ‘The world is not the same when you are five metres above the ground,’ he explains. ‘You feel the wind and hear things differently. It is a way of reconnecting with your surroundings.’ The design holds a conversation with the chalk cellars that open directly below — those cathedral-like spaces where time slows and bottles sleep through their fermentation. Above: wind and light. Below: darkness and constant temperature.

The Nest, adhered to the façade of the historic building, pays homage to the fauna of the vineyard: birds, ladybirds, bats — small creatures of vital importance whose presence or absence tells much about the health of an ecosystem. The Tree Hut, meanwhile, invites visitors quite literally to climb into nature, to recover that childhood gaze which transforms any tree into a privileged vantage point.

The collaboration received its public debut at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, with a ceiling installation in the form of a tornado conceived from the spiralling patterns of spider webs that Kawamata observed in Ruinart’s vineyards. The piece travels throughout the year to first-tier international art fairs: Frieze Los Angeles, Frieze New York, and Art Basel Miami Beach.

For collectors wishing to take a fragment of this world home with them, Kawamata also designed a limited edition of just 22 wooden cases for Ruinart Blanc de Blancs in jeroboam format. Each case is itself an artistic object: one of its corners has been removed, and that extracted fragment has been fashioned into a small nest that rests within the interior. The metaphor the artist sought to construct is unmistakable: even within an object of luxury, there is fragility, poetry, and craftsmanship. Nothing is fixed. Nothing is final.

From a wine tourism perspective, Ruinart’s approach offers a compelling model. To transform a cellar visit into a cultural experience that cannot be replicated anywhere else in the world is precisely what the most discerning travellers seek today. A Kawamata installation in Reims cannot be transported to Tokyo or New York without losing its entire reason for being: it was conceived for that soil, that light, that wind. And in a market where differentiation grows ever harder to achieve, that is worth considerably more than any competition medal.