Letter “C”
Crayères
The Underground History of Champagne: From Stone to Wine
In Champagne, almost everything that truly matters happens underground.
Not in cellars as such, but in spaces far older than Champagne itself — in chalk cuttings, caves, and galleries that extend beneath the cities and vineyards of the Champagne region.
Today, these spaces are known as crayères: wine cellars and heritage sites.
But long before bottles of wine were ever aged there, they bore the marks of a very different history — architectural, military, economic, and religious. A history in which chalk was not a romantic backdrop for wine, but a material, a resource, and a refuge.
Champagne learned to use these spaces later. And that is precisely why a conversation about chalk caves is not only a conversation about wine, but about how landscape, human necessity, and chance gradually combined to create one of the most recognizable wine cultures in the world.
👉 Origin of the Term
The French word crayères derives from craie — chalk. Literally, it means chalk excavations or chalk quarries.
► Why is this word left untranslated in major European languages?
• There is no exact equivalent. Other languages have words of similar meaning, but they sound purely industrial, lose their local specificity, and fail to register as part of Champagne’s cultural vocabulary.
• It is a regional term, not a generic one. It belongs to the same family as terroir, clos, or cru — words understood not as general concepts, but as phenomena tied to a specific place. That is why English uses the crayères of Reims, German die Crayères von Reims, and Italian le crayères della Champagne. Crayères is one of those terms that European languages prefer not to translate, because translation too quickly strips it of its historical and geographical meaning.
📜 History
The Romans arrived on the territory of what would later become France very early. In the 1st century BCE, these lands became part of the Roman Empire as Gaul — a strategically important region between Italy, the Rhine, and the Atlantic. Roads were built here, cities were founded, and resources were extracted, including chalk. Reims (known in Roman times as Durocortorum) was one of the key centers — both administrative and commercial.
The chalk excavations that would later become crayères began precisely as part of Roman construction and economic infrastructure, not as a prehistory of a famous wine.
In the 4th century CE, in order to secure sufficient building stone for Reims — the principal city of the Champagne region — the Romans dug some three hundred exceptionally deep quarries into the region’s famous chalk escarpment. These vertical chalk shafts, originally quarry pits, are today used by Champagne houses for the aging of their wines.
They are feats of construction that seem to defy physics, and descending into their eerily quiet, cold, dark, and humid depths is an otherworldly experience that no wine lover should miss.
Because the finest chalk was often found deep underground, many of these excavations reached depths of up to 120 feet (37 meters). They were typically shaped like pyramids: the deepest parts were also the widest, while the openings at the top were narrow. This form limited air circulation and kept the chalk damp and soft, making it easier to cut into large building blocks without crumbling or drying out. These blocks were then raised to the surface by means of winches and transported to construction sites.
Even today, Roman chalk-built structures from this period have survived in these places:
• The Roman triumphal arch Porte de Mars (3rd century CE, Reims). Photograph available at:
• The Roman cryptoporticus in Reims: here
In other words, crayères were never originally intended as wine cellars. They were the direct result of extracting building material for the city. The Romans could not have imagined that this would one day turn into a wine legend. History was not planning the creation of Champagne — but it was already preparing the ideal space for it.
🐚 Where All the Chalk (Limestone) in Champagne Comes From
The territory of modern Champagne is part of the Paris Basin — a vast sedimentary “bowl” formed by marine deposits. During the Cretaceous period (145–66 million years ago), the region remained submerged under the sea for a long time. On the seabed, carbonate sediments accumulated from the remains of microscopic marine organisms, forming massive layers of chalk and limestone.
It is this white, friable chalk that makes up the underground excavations of Champagne, the chalk formations of northern France, the coast of Normandy, and southeastern England. And it was precisely this soft chalk that the Romans adapted for construction purposes.
⛏️ Who Worked the Underground Tunnels in Champagne
► Roman Period (3rd–4th centuries): Slavery and Forced Labor
When large-scale chalk extraction for the construction of Reims began, the bulk of the physical labor was performed by slaves, as well as prisoners of war, convicts, and those sentenced to hard labor (damnati ad metalla — “condemned to the mines or quarries”). Working chalk tunnels was considered dangerous, exhausting, and low-status labor.
It was a typical form of the empire’s “invisible” work: infrastructure was built by the hands of those who had no choice.
🧱 …Voices Underground
Deep underground, in a chalk shaft, several men work in silence. The light comes from a dim oil lamp. The air is damp and cold. The stone is soft, yet still resists.
— If you cut a little more to the right, the block will be cleaner, — one says.
— They’ll trim it above anyway, — another replies. They don’t care how we cut it down here.
— And do you care?
— I care that it doesn’t crumble.
Someone coughs. Dust settles on the skin.
— They say this stone will go into the forum, — a third remarks.
— So people will walk on it.
— They walk on everything.
— Yes… but at least this one is white.
For a moment, it grows quiet. Only the sound of the tool biting into chalk can be heard.
— When we finish this level, they’ll move us deeper.
— Deeper means colder.
— But quieter.
— Quieter is good.
They do not speak of the city above them, nor of gods — and certainly not of wine, which does not yet exist here. They do not know that this space will outlive them and many generations to come. They do not know that wine will one day live here. They simply dig the pit deeper.
► Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages: A Mixed Model
After the weakening of Roman administration, centralized slave labor became less systematic. Some quarries were abandoned, while others came under the control of local communities and ecclesiastical institutions. During this period, labor was carried out by dependent peasants, semi-free workers, and at times monastic communities — especially when stone was needed for church construction.
This was no longer classical slavery, but neither was it a free labor market in the modern sense.
► The Middle Ages (10th–13th centuries): Free, Yet Dependent
When chalk extraction continued or was revived during the Middle Ages, it was carried out by craftsmen, seasonal laborers, and residents of nearby settlements — often within the framework of obligations, feudal duties, or ecclesiastical dependence.
Crayères are not merely an “engineering marvel,” but the result of centuries of hard, dangerous, and largely unfree labor.
🕯️ Crayères and Religion
► Late Antiquity (3rd–5th centuries): Refuge, Not Sanctuary
In the vicinity of Reims, underground chalk excavations were not originally religious structures. Instead, they were used as shelters during periods of instability, as places for clandestine gatherings of early Christians, and occasionally as temporary burial sites — valued for their silence, safety, and separation from the outside world.
Early Christianity gravitated toward such spaces not because of mysticism, but because of vulnerability and the need for refuge.
► The Early Middle Ages: Memory and Asceticism
From the 6th to the 9th centuries, as Christianity became dominant, some underground spaces were preserved as places of memory. They were used for clerical burials and, at times, for eremitic life. Chalk was easy to carve, and in certain caves niches, simple altars, crosses, and symbolic marks were cut directly into the walls.
► The Later Middle Ages: The Underground as an Extension of Monastic Architecture
For medieval monasticism, underground space carried a very clear meaning:
• cold — as discipline of the body;
• darkness — as renunciation of distraction;
• constancy — as a form of prayer.
These underground spaces were not sacred by designation.
They became sacred through function.
🙏 …Monastic Silence
Several centuries pass. The city above changes. Empires fade. Names are erased. Below ground, almost everything remains the same.
The chalk space is cold and calm. The stone is pale. A lamp gives off a soft, uncertain light. A monk stands by the wall and slowly carves a shallow niche into it. Not for decoration — for a lamp.
— This is enough, — he says to himself. — More light is not needed.
Another sits on a stone, copying a text. The ink is thick, the letters slow. Every word takes time — just like this place.
— Do you hear the bells ringing above?
— I do.
— It is much quieter here.
— Here it is easier not to think about what is unnecessary.
— This is good stone, — one says.
— Yes. It does not distract.
— And it holds the cold.
— Cold helps one remember.
They are in no hurry. They have no task to finish as quickly as possible. No long-term plan. There is only rhythm — breathing, gestures, footsteps, pauses between words.
They do not call this place a cellar. Nor do they call it a cave. For them, it is simply a space where the world becomes cramped and silence expansive.
No one speaks of the future. Wine is not spoken of either — not yet as something to be stored in these lands. But it is here that they learn to wait — not for results, not for reward, but for the passage of time itself.
🍾🏺 When Wine Went Underground
The first conscious attempts to use underground chalk excavations for wine storage date not to antiquity, nor even to the early Middle Ages, but to the late medieval period and the early modern era — roughly the 16th to 17th centuries. Thus, centuries lie between the creation of the crayères and their eventual vinous destiny.
The history of Champagne rarely begins with stone. More often, it begins with bubbles, a bottle, a cork, a glass. But if one steps back from this familiar perspective, it becomes clear that before Champagne became a wine that required silence, cold, and time, the region already possessed a space capable of providing all three.
By this point, viticulture had already taken shape in and around Reims — not only for local consumption, but for trade. Wine had become a product that needed to be stored, transported, and protected. And it was precisely then that underground space ceased to be a mere relic of the past.
Chalk excavations possessed qualities that winemakers first noticed intuitively, and later almost professionally: stable low temperatures, high humidity, absence of light, silence, and still air.
Wine behaved differently under such conditions. It retained freshness longer, suffered less from temperature fluctuations, and oxidized more slowly. No one yet spoke of “aging” in the modern sense, but experience accumulated and patterns became visible. This was not a moment of revelation, but a gradual process of adaptation and understanding.
At first, wine was stored underground simply because it was convenient. Then it was noticed that the wine began to “behave better.” And only later did it become clear that the space itself influenced the result. Thus, crayères became part of the winemaking process for the first time — though not yet its symbol.
Champagne — the noisiest wine in the world — was born in absolute silence
🍾⬇️ …Wine and Stone
Late evening. Above ground — noise, smells, voices, movement. Below ground — everything remains as cold and even as ever.
Two bearded men slowly descend stone steps, lanterns in hand. They are neither monks nor slaves. They are men responsible for wine.
— It’s cool down here again, — one says, more to himself than to his companion.
— It always is, — the other replies. — Even in summer.
The stone is damp, but not wet. Along the wall stand several hundred bottles full bottles.
— Last year we kept this wine above ground, — the first continues. — By autumn, half of it had turned sour or cloudy.
— And these?
— These… they’re different.
One of them takes a bottle, opens it carefully, and tastes slowly.
— This is different, — he says after a pause. — It changes more slowly.
They draw no conclusions yet. They write nothing down. They invent no words. Next time, they simply carry more wine underground.
— Let it stay here, — one of the winemakers says. — It’s calmer down here.
They do not yet know that this space will one day dictate the style of the drink. They do not suspect that centuries later millions of bottles will lie here. They have only noticed that stone knows how to wait.
🕯️🍾 Did Dom Pérignon Know About the Crayères?
Dom Pérignon was a Benedictine monk of the Abbey of Hautvillers — a man who lived and worked in a region where chalk excavations were already part of the landscape, used as storage spaces, cellars, shelters, and had existed for centuries before him. For a monk of the 17th century, crayères were not an exotic phenomenon. He could not have been unaware of them.
Did he understand their significance for wine? Partially — at the level of practice, but not of concept.
Dom Pérignon was not the “inventor of Champagne” in the modern sense. His objectives were different: to improve the quality of still wines, to achieve clarity, stability, and precision, and to avoid defects. He worked in an era when secondary fermentation was considered a problem, bubbles were seen as a flaw, and the primary goal was to preserve wine, not to make it sparkle.
Dom Pérignon did not work in Reims, where the network of crayères was especially extensive. His abbey lay higher on the slopes, and he could rely on the monastery’s existing cellars and storerooms — cooler, more stable, and safer for storage. But he neither built nor developed crayères as a dedicated wine infrastructure.
This was intuitive use, not a deliberate strategy
In other words, Dom Pérignon was not the architect of underground wine storage. He did not construct the model of “wine + depth + time.” That model emerged later — through the trading houses of the 18th and 19th centuries.
Crayères as an environment that actively shapes Champagne became significant only after him, when sparkling wine evolved from a monastic product into a commercial commodity — when storage, stability, and aging became economic necessities.
📜 The Later Fate of the Crayères
By the beginning of the 20th century, the chalk underground spaces of Champagne had long ceased to be merely abandoned quarries. They had become part of the urban fabric of Reims — cellars, warehouses, wine storage facilities. Yet it was the two World Wars that revealed their most fundamental, original quality: the ability to protect.
During the First World War, Reims was subjected to almost continuous shelling. The city above ground was being destroyed, and life gradually moved downward. Entire families descended into the crayères. According to various estimates, tens of thousands of people spent weeks, months, and sometimes years underground, without access to sunlight.
Improvised hospitals were established there (Veuve Clicquot and Ruinart), schools operated (Pommery), and religious services were held. People ate, slept, and waited. In spaces where bottles of wine were usually stored, there were beds, desks, and lamps.
The crayères saved lives not because they were wine cellars, but because they were deep, quiet, and structurally stable.
During the Second World War, this experience was no longer accidental — it was deliberate. Underground space was used intentionally as shelter, as survival infrastructure, as a place where the city could temporarily continue to exist even when the surface became uninhabitable. During that period, up to 20,000 people lived in the underground galleries.
And here an important shift in meaning occurs: spaces created for stone extraction, later used for prayer and wine, once again became what they had been at the very beginning — protection against a hostile history.
Champagne survived the war not as a symbol of celebration, but as part of urban life
🏚️⬇️ …Underground
The siren sounds somewhere far away — muffled, as if through water. People descend quickly, but without panic. They know the way.
The chalk hall is crowded. Lamps cast a yellow light. On the walls — inscriptions, dates, children’s drawings.
— We’ll sit here.
— Mom, how long will we be?
— Quiet. Sit down. I don’t know.
Somewhere water drips. Somewhere someone coughs. Above, a dull explosion thuds, but the sound reaches them already weakened, as if from another world.
— There used to be wine here, — a man says in a low voice.
— And now there’s us, — a woman replies.
A child looks up at the vault. The stone is high, pale.
— Will it hold us?
— Yes, — the father says. —This stone knows how to endure and how to wait.
No one speaks of bottles. No one speaks of the celebration associated with them. Here, people simply count the time between explosions — and rejoice in short moments of silence.
When the shelling ends, they will go back up. New destruction will appear in the city. But underground, everything will remain in its place.
🧊 Characteristics of Today’s Chalk Cellars
► Overall Scale and Extent
Beneath the cities of Reims and Épernay lie hundreds of kilometers of underground galleries carved into chalk, used today as wine cellars for the aging of Champagne. The total network in the region is estimated at approximately 110 kilometers (68 miles).
Reims is the undisputed leader: this is where the longest and oldest crayères are located. Many galleries descend 20 to 40 meters below ground, forming what is effectively a subterranean city.
In Épernay, the underground cellars are smaller in scale but denser in function. They tend to be shorter, younger, and more often originally designed for wine or quickly adapted for that purpose. They are more “industrial” and functional in character, closely integrated with the Champagne houses lining Avenue de Champagne.
► Which Champagne Houses Have the Most Notable or Extensive Cellars
• Moët & Chandon
One of the largest Champagne houses and the owner of the longest underground cellar network — approximately 28 kilometers of labyrinths beneath Épernay, carved into chalk and used to age millions of bottles.
• Champagne Mercier
Owner of around 18 kilometers of tunnels beneath Épernay, including guided tours featuring an underground train — among the most impressive and accessible for visitors.
• Charles Heidsieck
Their crayères include more than 8 kilometers of galleries descending to depths of up to 30 meters and holding vast wine reserves.
• Veuve Clicquot
Historic cellars extend deep beneath the Saint-Nicaise hill. When measured as a combined network of individual branches, their total length is sometimes estimated at around 19 kilometers.
• Champagne Pannier
This house possesses remarkable historic underground spaces — approximately 2.5 kilometers in length — where wine is aged at depths of around 30 meters.
At any given time, the underground galleries and cellars of Champagne collectively hold on the order of one billion bottles or more — a scale that makes the region resemble a subterranean city rather than merely a wine-growing area. For comparison, Champagne officially produces around 270–300 million bottles per year.
The total value of the wine stored in these underground galleries is estimated at tens of billions of euros, depending on whether it is calculated at production cost, wholesale value, or potential retail price. In any case, this represents one of the most valuable underground wine reserves in the world.
The most patient wine in Europe was born in spaces created by an impatient history
From Accidental Heritage to Managed Infrastructure
It is important to understand that modern crayères only superficially resemble their ancient prototypes. Over the past century and a half, these underground spaces have been radically reinterpreted and rebuilt.
Where once there were darkness, oil lamps, and intuition, there are now lighting systems, ventilation and drainage, underground roads, rail and electric transport systems for moving millions of bottles, security, access control, and strict temperature monitoring.
The constancy that was once a gift of geology is now maintained through advanced engineering.
Chalk excavations have transformed from accidental historical remnants into managed infrastructure. They still preserve cold, silence, and humidity — but no longer as a matter of fate, rather as the result of precise calibration. Even tourist routes, with their lighting, markings, and safety systems, have become part of this new underground life, where history and modernity coexist.
Today, the chalk underground spaces of Champagne appear almost immaculate: illuminated, protected, precisely calculated, fully integrated into the logistics and economics of the great Champagne houses. Yet beneath all of this lies the same stone, the same depth, and the same silence — created neither for wine nor for beauty.
Crayères have traveled a long path: from forced labor to prayer, from prayer to wine, from wine to survival, and only then to what they are today — spaces of aging and waiting. Champagne did not learn patience immediately. These underground spaces taught it.
And perhaps that is why a wine associated with noise and celebration is, in truth, formed where silence reigns.
🚶♂️ / 🚶♀️ …The Tour
Underground, it is cool, but not cold. A small electric cart moves slowly along an even path. The light is soft and directional. The stone appears almost elegant.
— How many bottles are there here? — a woman in a scarf asks.
— Several million, — the guide replies. — The exact numbers change every day.
— Incredible…
— And all of this is beneath the city?
The cart slows down. On both sides, walls recede into darkness, and endless rows of bottles stretch away. They lie quietly, uniformly, as if they had long ago come to an agreement among themselves.
— Can you imagine, — a man says, — how much time is concentrated here?
— I think more about the people, — his companion answers. — Who built all of this.
Someone takes photographs. Someone simply watches. The guide speaks about temperature, humidity, and years of aging. About how important it is that nothing changes here. The cart moves on.
— It’s funny, — someone at the back of the carriage says. — We came for Champagne and got history instead.
— Maybe it’s the same thing, — another replies.
The light glides over the stone. The bottles remain behind. Upstairs, a tasting awaits.
🏚️⬇️ Underground Beyond Champagne
The use of underground excavations for wine aging is not unique to Champagne, although it is here that this practice became systematic and style-defining. In different countries, winemakers have used former mining spaces — chalk, limestone, tuff, and even gypsum — wherever they provided the essential conditions: constant cool temperatures, high humidity, and protection from light and temperature fluctuations.
Beyond the Champagne crayères, similar underground spaces are used:
• in the limestone and chalk galleries of Moldova (Cricova);
• in former limestone quarries of Burgundy (by some producers of Crémant de Bourgogne);
• in the tuff caves of the Loire Valley (Saumur, Crémant de Loire);
• in the volcanic tuff of Tokaj;
• in the gypsum mines of Bakhmut in Ukraine — a site of intense fighting between Russian and Ukrainian forces — where sparkling wine once aged using classical methods and was known as “Artemovskoye.”
The type of rock is secondary.The decisive factor is always the microclimate
Champagne stands out not because it uses underground spaces, but because it inherited them on a colossal scale and transformed them from a supporting element into a formative one — a core component of its wine culture.
🍾⬇️ Why England Never Developed Its Own “Crayères”?
As noted above, geological formations similar to those of Champagne also exist in southern England, where the production of local sparkling wines has developed rapidly in recent years. So what about crayères there?
In the area around Reims, the Romans built a stone city. Chalk was the primary construction material, required in large quantities over several centuries.
In southeastern England, the situation was different. Roman urbanization was less dense, and construction relied heavily on wood, brick, flint, and reused materials. There was no need for large-scale chalk extraction for urban building. As a result, no network of deep vertical quarries emerged, no “underground city” was formed, and no ready-made space existed that could later be reinterpreted.
Modern English producers of sparkling wine do indeed value chalk soils — for acidity, drainage, and terroir. But their wines are most often aged in modern cellars, former military tunnels and bunkers, repurposed mines, or climate-controlled storage facilities.
Even when older underground spaces are used, they are not systematic crayères: not vertical shafts, not part of the urban fabric, and not inherited from antiquity as in Reims. They are engineering solutions of the 20th–21st centuries, not ancient legacy.
In Champagne, underground space preceded wine. It inherited silence, depth, and slow time.
In England, sparkling wine appeared before underground infrastructure. As a result, the infrastructure became functional rather than formative. This is neither better nor worse — simply a different logic of how wine is born.
The chalk on both sides of the Channel is the same.
But only in Champagne did it become a space of time, rather than merely soil
Conclusion
Crayères rarely appear on postcards. They do not strive to be beautiful and do not seek attention. Their value lies in their ability to remain unchanged while everything around them changes. These spaces were not created for wine, were not conceived as heritage, and were never planned as symbols. They emerged out of necessity — to extract stone, to take shelter, to endure, to preserve.
That is precisely why they proved ideal for Champagne. A wine that requires time found a place where time had long been understood how to wait. Not above ground, amid celebration and noise, but below — in cold, silence, and depth.
Champagne is often associated with joy, bubbles, and the instant. Yet its true form is shaped where nothing happens quickly. In stone that remembers more than any wine, and that continues to wait to this day.
Crayères were not created for wine. Champagne simply found them
To be continued…
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