At 28, Clémentine Reyboubet has taken on one of Champagne’s most closely watched responsibilities. As the new cellar master of Champagne EPC, she will help shape the wines of a house that is itself barely older than her professional career.
Her appointment is notable not simply because of her age. The role of chef de caves remains one of Champagne’s defining positions: part winemaker, part blender, part custodian of a house style that may need to remain coherent across vintages, growers and changing conditions. It is also a profession historically associated with longer-established careers and, more often than not, men.
Reyboubet therefore represents something of a generational shift. Yet her story at EPC is less about overturning Champagne’s traditions than about learning how to work within them while making the resulting wines easier for drinkers to understand.
From wine labels to Champagne EPC
Wine entered Reyboubet’s world well before it became a profession. As a child, she would practise reading bottle labels with her father, becoming familiar with the vocabulary of regions and grape varieties before she could appreciate what was inside the glass.
That early curiosity eventually developed into a career, though not initially in the cellar. Reyboubet joined Champagne EPC as an intern in 2020 and first worked on the commercial side of the company. Her responsibilities grew to include digital communications and press relations.
Over time, however, her work moved steadily closer to the wine itself.
She began following relationships with partner growers, participating in tastings and working on dosage liqueurs. The transition was deliberate rather than sudden, supported by formal studies in viticulture and oenology. She is continuing her oenological training alongside her new responsibilities.
That route from communications to winemaking may appear unconventional, but it also mirrors one of EPC’s central concerns: connecting what happens in the vineyard and cellar with what the drinker ultimately sees and understands.
A young Champagne house with a different model
Founded in 2019 by Édouard Roy, Jérôme Queige and Camille Jullien, Champagne EPC arrived in a region where history carries unusual commercial weight. Many of Champagne’s best-known houses have spent generations building their identities; EPC began with neither a centuries-old cellar nor a vast estate of its own.
Instead, its original model relied on partnerships with growers and cooperative cellars. Wines were created to defined specifications in collaboration with these producers, allowing EPC to develop individual cuvées without following the conventional path of establishing a large production infrastructure from the outset.
From the beginning, the company also paid particular attention to presentation and communication. The ambition was not so much to reject Champagne’s established codes as to make them less opaque.
That distinction matters. Champagne can be deceptively simple from the outside — a single appellation associated with celebration — while behind the label lies a complicated landscape of villages, grape varieties, growers, vintages, reserve wines and production decisions.
EPC has attempted to bring some of that information closer to the surface.
Transparency as part of the Champagne EPC identity
One of the house’s most visible ideas is its emphasis on provenance. EPC labels provide information about the terroir, year and growers involved in producing a wine, giving consumers more context than they might encounter on a traditional Champagne label.
The packaging also adopts a deliberately informal tone. Some back labels include playful excuses for opening a bottle, while temperature-sensitive markers are intended to help indicate an appropriate serving temperature.
Such details belong to branding, of course, but behind them sits a more substantial question now facing many Champagne producers: how much should the drinker be told about what is in the bottle?
For Reyboubet, transparency appears to be closely connected with wine style. The point is not simply to provide more information, but to make the relationship between a cuvée, its grape variety and its place of origin easier to recognise.
That approach has particular relevance in contemporary Champagne, where increasing attention is being paid to individual villages, parcels, growers and grape varieties alongside the traditional prestige of the grandes marques.
From partnerships to production
EPC’s development entered a new phase with the acquisition of Champagne Charles Mignon in June 2025. The transaction gave the company access to its own vineyard holdings as well as a production site, changing the practical scope of Reyboubet’s position.
EPC is now preparing to produce two of its cuvées itself, a brut and a rosé, while Reyboubet’s responsibilities also include oversight of production at Charles Mignon.
That makes her role considerably broader than simply selecting blends for a young brand.
Her predecessor, Richard Dailly, had worked closely with EPC’s network of growers and partner cellars, and Reyboubet credits him as an important mentor during her progression towards the technical side of the business. She now inherits that collaborative structure while taking on the additional demands that come with direct production.
The shift is significant. Working with outside cellars requires precision and close relationships; producing wine within your own facility adds another layer of control — and responsibility. Decisions that once depended primarily on coordination with partners increasingly become part of the house’s internal winemaking identity.
What Clémentine Reyboubet’s appointment says about Champagne
It would be easy to frame Reyboubet’s promotion principally around her age. At 28, she is unquestionably young for a position carrying this degree of responsibility. But the more interesting aspect may be the professional path that brought her there.
Modern Champagne demands more than technical competence in the cellar. Producers operate in a market where provenance, sustainability, grower relationships, visual identity and communication increasingly overlap. Drinkers want to know not only whether a Champagne is good, but where it comes from, how it was conceived and what distinguishes it from the next bottle.
Reyboubet has worked on both sides of that conversation.
Her challenge now will be to turn EPC’s language of accessibility and transparency into a convincing and consistent identity in the glass. For any cellar master, that is ultimately where the argument must be made.
EPC remains a young name in a region built on long memory. Its future will therefore depend less on appearing modern than on demonstrating that modernity can coexist with the disciplines Champagne has always required: careful sourcing, thoughtful blending, patience and a clear sense of style.
With Reyboubet now guiding its wines, the house has placed that task in the hands of a notably young cellar master — but one whose career has already been closely intertwined with EPC’s evolution.