There are people who make great wine, and then there are people who change the way we think about it. Richard Geoffroy belongs firmly in the second camp.
Born into a winemaking family in Champagne, Geoffroy initially chose a completely different path. He studied medicine and became a doctor before eventually finding his way back to wine. Maybe that explains something about the way he approached it. There was always precision to his work, but also curiosity. He wanted to understand why something worked, rather than simply accepting that it always had.
In 1990, Geoffroy became Chef de Cave of Dom Pérignon and would spend the next 28 years shaping the wines and philosophy of one of the most famous names in Champagne.
Dom Pérignon was already an icon when he arrived, so his job was never about reinventing it for the sake of reinvention. It was about understanding what made it special and then seeing how far that idea could be pushed.
At the centre of his thinking was the vintage.
Dom Pérignon is only made as a vintage wine, which means every release begins with a particular harvest and everything that came with it. The weather, the fruit, the difficult moments and the unexpected ones. Geoffroy believed the wine should not fight those things. It should capture them.
That meant he wasn’t afraid of difficult years.
The 2003 vintage is probably the best example. It was an extraordinary year in Champagne, beginning with severe frost and followed by an intensely hot summer. It would have been easy to decide the conditions were simply too extreme. Instead, Geoffroy saw something worth pursuing.
That tells you quite a lot about him.
He wasn’t trying to make the same Dom Pérignon every year. He was trying to find Dom Pérignon within each year.
His influence can also be seen in the way the house approached ageing. Geoffroy helped bring the idea of Plénitude to the forefront, the belief that Champagne doesn’t simply get older in a straight line. Given enough time, there are moments when the wine seems to open up and enter another stage of its life.
This became P2 and P3, later releases that allowed people to experience the same vintage at completely different stages of its evolution. Ageing was no longer simply about keeping a bottle in a cellar. It became part of the story of the wine itself.
Perhaps that is where Geoffroy had his greatest impact.
He understood that great wine is about more than flavour.
There is place. There is memory. There is time. There are the people who made it and the people sitting around a table drinking it years later.
When Geoffroy left Dom Pérignon in 2018, it would have been very easy to stop. After nearly three decades at the top of Champagne, there was not much left for him to prove.
Instead, he went to Japan.
Geoffroy had been travelling there since the early 1990s and had developed a deep fascination with the country, its people and its culture. After leaving Dom Pérignon, that relationship became the beginning of something new.
In 2019 he founded IWA Sake of Japan. (IWA Sake of Japan)
Rather than trying to make a Japanese version of Champagne, Geoffroy immersed himself in sake. He built IWA around an idea he knew intimately: assemblage.
IWA 5 is created by bringing together different components, including multiple rice varieties, origins, yeast strains and brewing methods. Yamada Nishiki brings finesse, Omachi contributes texture and richness, while Gohyakumangoku plays another role in completing the assemblage. Different yeast strains and reserve sakes add further layers. (IWA Sake of Japan)
The philosophy feels unmistakably Geoffroy.
There is no fixed recipe.
Each new Assemblage is an experiment. The intention is not to reproduce the previous release perfectly, but to keep moving, learning and finding a new expression of balance. (IWA Sake of Japan)
And he has gone much further than simply creating a bottle of sake.
In Toyama Prefecture, IWA established its own kura, or sake brewery, designed by Japanese architect Kengo Kuma. Designer Marc Newson created the distinctive dark bottle, while Geoffroy worked alongside Japanese brewers and collaborators to build something that feels deeply connected to Japan while looking outward to the rest of the world. (IWA Sake USA)
Today Geoffroy is still listed as IWA’s Founder and Maker, and the project continues to evolve through successive Assemblages. The current collection has reached Assemblage 6, continuing the experiment he began after leaving Champagne. (IWA Sake USA)
There is something wonderful about that second act.
After spending 28 years mastering one of the most celebrated wines in the world, Geoffroy deliberately put himself somewhere unfamiliar again.
New country. New ingredients. New traditions. New rules.
But the question seems to have remained the same.
How do you respect tradition without becoming trapped by it?
At Dom Pérignon, Geoffroy spent nearly three decades answering that question through Champagne.
With IWA, he is asking it all over again through sake.
And perhaps that curiosity is the real Richard Geoffroy story.
Not the pursuit of perfection, but the refusal to believe you have finally found it.
