At this precise moment in Reims, France, the fields are striated by vines growing on wooden trellises. The chalky earth silently works to compost leaf mould, the weather systems boil above and send down sheets of rain or crisp sunlight. This is Champagne, where Ruinart’s champagne has been created since 1729, when Maison Ruinart uncorked its very first bottle – an effervescent drink born from a time marked by widespread radical ideas about art, culture and society.
Ruinart has long nurtured its links with artists, and every year since 2008 has run its Carte Blanche programme for which it offers artists a chance to respond to the House – its landscape, culture and of course, product – in a creative collision: bringing their own practice to the grounds of the vineyard to create a time-specific response to its processes and people.

This year, Danish artist Jeppe Hein has created a project that extends that participatory spirit as part of his long-standing interest in art not as an object to be looked at but, as he told TANK, “a tool for communication and dialogue”. For Ruinart, he has created Right Here, Right Now, an exhibition space that will tour art fairs and galleries (as well as existing online, accessible to all). He has also designed a limited-edition wooden box that encases a jeroboam bottle of Ruinart Rosé, which turns into a rose-coloured mirror sculpture when the bottle is removed, matching the pale-pink champagne. Right Here, Right Now responds to the immediacy and urgency of champagne: the process that begins from the moment the grapes are scythed from the vine and results in the sparkle of the bubbles hitting the back of the throat. The entire process of champagne-making from field to glass involves the five senses, which Jeppe exercised in Reims in his explorations of the open airy fields, the chalk cellars in which the wine ferments and the smell of the tiny early flowers that he found on the Chardonnay vines. Sensitivity is a key quality for artmaking and champagne production – for Ruinart, reading the weather and the grapes themselves helps to find the precise moment to harvest, creating a product of minute subtlety; while Jeppe uses artistic encounters to recalibrate the fine instruments of the senses in order to better apprehend the world and to respond more fully to its lushness and vitality.

The champagne matures in chalk cellars deep underground, the only ones in the city of Reims to be both listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site and classified as a historic site. Jeppe whitened the jereboam box with chalk taken directly from the walls of the pits and put it too in the hands of the audience who will participate in the event, inviting them to draw on the gallery walls. “They get something very precious,” Jeppe says, “because they get a culture, they get history – the piece of chalk they’re getting is millions of years old.” The chalk disintegrates into soft dust as it is used – the perfect symbol of a project that looks to capture the present ineffable moment in all its complexity and beauty. ◉

Drawing by Jeppe Hein on a bottle, 2022. Photograph by Mathieu Bonnevie