1. A Decade of Recognition: 2015–2025
2. Champagne as a Cultural Landscape
3. Understanding UNESCO Criteria
4. Criterion (iii): A Tradition Perfected Criterion (iii)
5. Criterion (iv): A Model Agro-Industrial System
6. Criterion (vi): The Symbolic Power of Champagne
A Decade of Recognition: 2015–2025
The heritage value of Champagne has deepened through ecological stewardship, urban planning coherence, and continued community engagement.
The Champagne nomination was thoroughly evaluated by ICOMOS (International Council on Monuments and Sites), the official advisory body to UNESCO for cultural heritage.
Its expert mission conducted on-site inspections and historical-technical analysis before recommending inscription under three criteria.
ICOMOS plays a crucial role in safeguarding cultural properties worldwide, ensuring that each site meets the standards of Outstanding Universal Value, Integrity, and Authenticity.
Champagne as a Cultural Landscape
Champagne was inscribed as a “cultural landscape” under Article I of the World Heritage Convention and Paragraph 47 of the Operational Guidelines.
This category refers to sites where the combined works of nature and humankind express a long and intimate relationship between people and their environment.
The Champagne region exemplifies this balance: the chalky hillsides have been terraced and cultivated over centuries; the underground cellars—many former Gallo-Roman quarries—have been adapted to support fermentation; and the towns have grown organically around wine-related commerce.
Champagne is thus not a backdrop but a palimpsest of human action and ecological adaptation.
Its cultural landscape is readable in space and time, from Hautvillers to Saint-Nicaise to the Avenue de Champagne.
Champagne Cultural Landscape
Understanding UNESCO Criteria
When UNESCO inscribes a site on the World Heritage List, it follows a set of internationally agreed criteria that define why a place is considered to have Outstanding Universal Value. These criteria serve as a checklist to evaluate the cultural, natural, or mixed significance of a site.
For cultural sites like the Champagne Hillsides, Houses and Cellars, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS)—UNESCO’s expert advisory body—assesses the site against specific criteria to recommend its inclusion.
Each criterion highlights a unique aspect of the site’s importance on a global scale.
In Champagne’s case, the inscription is based on three main criteria:
Criterion (iii): The site bears a unique or exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or civilization.
Criterion (iv): The site is an outstanding example of a building or landscape illustrating a significant stage in human history.
Criterion (vi): The site is directly associated with events or traditions of outstanding universal significance.
Criterions for World Heritage
Criterion (iii): A Tradition Perfected
To bear a unique or at least exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or a civilization.
Champagne represents a rare continuity of expertise, where generations of growers and houses adapted to the region's harsh climate and nutrient-poor chalk soils.
Overcoming these constraints, they invented a globally iconic method of re-fermentation in the bottle—a technological leap that involved Britain’s expertise in glass and Germany’s role in financing and trade networks.
The ICOMOS evaluation highlights this interplay of traditional knowledge and external innovation. The region’s success was also institutional: Champagne pioneered early forms of inter-professional collaboration still active today.
From Dom Pérignon to Fort Chabrol, the evolution of knowledge in Champagne is not static tradition but a dynamic legacy of trial, adaptation, and solidarity.
Criterion (iv): A Model Agro-Industrial System
To be an outstanding example of a type of building or technological ensemble which illustrates a significant stage in human history.
Champagne is not just a viticultural zone—it is a full-scale agro-industrial system.
Its spatial organisation maps perfectly onto its production chain: vineyards as raw material supply, cellars as production sites, and houses as marketing hubs.
This logic extends underground, with quarry-cellars adapted for stable temperature and humidity, and above-ground in the architecture of Reims and Épernay.
What makes this criterion particularly powerful is the visibility of transformation.
The Avenue de Champagne embodies the commercialisation of terroir, where brand, space, and narrative converge. As ICOMOS affirmed, this is one of the most coherent serial nominations ever submitted, representing both technical functionality and symbolic identity.
Criterion (vi): The Symbolic Power of Champagne
To be directly associated with events or traditions of outstanding universal significance.
No other wine carries the cultural symbolism of Champagne.
From 18th-century royal courts to Olympic podiums, Champagne has stood for festivity, diplomacy, and excellence. While UNESCO does not inscribe products, ICOMOS recognised that the Champagne region’s spatial organisation materially embodies this symbolic value.
Saint-Nicaise Hill, with its monumental cellars and houses, and the Avenue de Champagne, with its architectural grandeur, project the aesthetic and ceremonial identity of Champagne to the world.
Art, literature, photography, and cinema have further entrenched this image, turning Champagne into a universal metaphor for joie de vivre, reconciliation and triumph.
Celebrating the first ten years of UNESCO recognition is more than an anniversary—it is a reaffirmation of Champagne’s global responsibility.
As climate change, biodiversity loss, and urban pressure mount, the Champagne community is called to preserve not only its vines and buildings but the intangible equilibrium between innovation and tradition that earned its inscription.
The Champagne Hillsides, Houses and Cellars do not commemorate a bygone era.
They exemplify how a cultural landscape can thrive in the 21st century when values, practices, and place are aligned.
Ten years in, the heritage of Champagne is more vital than ever.
Source
ICOMOS Advisory Evaluation Report No. 1465: Champagne Hillsides, Houses and Cellars (2015)
UNESCO, Operational Guidelines for the Implementation of the World Heritage Convention, July 2013
World Heritage Centre: Cultural Landscapes, Paragraph 47
State Party Nomination Dossier: France (2014–2015)
ICOMOS Technical Evaluation Mission: October 2014
TAG: CHAMPAGNE 10TH ANNIVERSARY, WORLD HERITAGE CHAMPAGNE, ICOMOS CRITERIA UNESCO, CHAMPAGNE CULTURAL LANDSCAPE, UNESCO FRANCE, AGRO-INDUSTRIAL WINE REGION, HERITAGE CELEBRATION CHAMPAGNE, AVENUE DE CHAMPAGNE, SAINT-NICAISE REIMS
