Michelin Guide brings its Grapes rating to Champagne

The Michelin Guide will publish its first Grapes selection for Champagne on 4 February 2027, extending a wine-rating system that began in Burgundy to France's best-known sparkling region.

Michelin Grapes rates wine estates from one to three grapes, with a separate Recommended tier below that, using the same inspection logic the guide applies to restaurants. Independent inspectors judge producers on five criteria, agronomy, technical mastery, identity, balance and consistency across vintages, rather than scoring individual bottles or vintages in isolation.

Michelin Grapes follows Burgundy and Bordeaux into Champagne

A grape rating only earns trust once it survives the first grower who disagrees with it.

Burgundy was the rating's first region, recognising 94 estates in its inaugural edition. The scheme has not been free of friction: Arnoux Lachaux, a Vosne-Romanée domaine awarded one grape, formally asked Michelin to remove it from the guide, a sign that not every producer wants to be rated by a system built for dining rooms. Bordeaux followed, and Champagne is now the third major French region to receive the distinction, chosen, Michelin says, for a heritage reputation that extends well beyond France's borders.

Gwendal Poullennec, the Michelin Guide's international director, said Champagne "holds a truly unique place in the wine world" and that extending Grapes there was meant to "help reveal and celebrate the dynamism" of growers working alongside the region's historic Houses. Michelin has not said how many Champagne estates will be rated or disclosed its inspection timeline ahead of the February reveal.

A region still counting a thin 2026 harvest

The announcement lands in a year when French wine volumes overall are running low: this year's harvest is tracking toward its smallest since 1957, with Bordeaux among the regions that picked early after a scorching summer. Whether Champagne's growers, who have spent decades building collective marketing around the Houses that bottle most of their fruit, embrace a grower-by-grower rating the way Burgundy's smaller domaines did will become clear only once the first list appears in February. For now, the Houses that dominate Champagne's export trade have said nothing publicly about the coming selection.