Dom. Ruinart
Blanc de Blancs
Champagne
2004

The producer

The oldest Champagne house of all is now the rather quieter, and unpretentious member of the LVMH portfolio. While it’s situated behind more illustrious-looking Champagne Houses it sits above some of the deepest and stunning crayeres in Reims. A quiet achiever perhaps.

The house style is delicate and reductive with a purity and crispness of structure throughout the range that is very distinctively Ruinart particularly in the LVMH collection. And makes the range perfect for ageing further – from non-vintage through to the prestige vintage Blanc de Bancs.

The wine

The pinnacle of the Ruinart range is draped with the named “Dom Ruinart”, named after Thierry Ruinart, a native of Champagne who became a renowned scholarly monk and was the uncle, and a great inspiration to Nicolas Ruinart, the founder of Champagne Ruinart.

Drawn from only Grand Cru vineyards on both the best villages of the Cotes-de-Blancs and parts of villages of the Montaigne-de-Reims that are better suited to Chardonnay than Pinot. The wine spends the best part of a decade or more on lees before disgorgement, showing beautiful integration and maturity balanced by a core of refined minerality. Further bottle age only adds to the complexity and beauty of Dom Ruinart as it has the structure and integrity to age for many years.

We choose our wines based on a range of criteria (see how we choose our wines) of which critic scores is just one. Rather than simply highlight the best score to promote a wine, our average critic score is calculated from the scores provided by several respected wine critics, who we follow for specific regions. They do not represent all critic scores and, wherever possible, we try and give more weight to more recent reviews. Where appropriate we consider market-based scores like Global Wine Score or Wine Searcher Average scores.

As a rule, we look to offer wines that achieve a 92/100 average critic score or better and frankly a lot of very good wines simply don’t make the cut. As a high-end provider we want to reflect that positioning in the quality of wines we offer. Such wines are only a tiny fraction of those generally on offer in the market. We believe that an average score is a more conservative and representative approach, but it is still subjective and only offered as a guide to our customers, who will (and should) do their own research. We will add individual critic scores to our website in the future.