Habits de Lumière history

A millennium walk becomes a Champagne weekend

Épernay’s Habits de Lumière began in December 2000 with a simple invitation: walk the Avenue de Champagne after dark. The Comité de l’Avenue de Champagne brought the first edition together to celebrate the new millennium and show off the street’s Champagne heritage. Its setting was already spectacular: nineteenth-century mansions and commercial buildings stood above a town whose cellar network extends for more than 110km. Illuminations temporarily turned a working wine-trade address into a public evening promenade.

The festival’s organising structure changed in 2005, when the City of Épernay became its principal organiser, continuing the partnership with the avenue committee. That division still explains the character of the celebration. The city arranges public-street entertainment, decorations, illuminations and fireworks; Champagne houses animate their own courtyards, including Champagne bars. A visitor moves between civic space and producer premises along one avenue, with the individual house identities still visible behind the lights.

The official origin story lists past themes including fashion, cinema, travel, white, colour, the Roaring Twenties, the Swinging Sixties and the fantastic machines of Jules Verne. These changing ideas give designers a new visual starting point without changing the festival’s address. The annual attraction is the Avenue de Champagne itself, dressed differently for a December night. None of those historical themes is a promise that the same production will appear at the next edition.

Food, children and a second night of fireworks

The children’s culinary strand arrived in 2012 and became the Concours des P’tits Pâtissiers. This added a daytime family activity to a celebration strongly associated with evening lights and Champagne. Saturday’s programme now places pastry-making beside Habits de Saveurs, where chefs collaborate with houses and growers. The documented 2012 addition is a useful marker of how the event broadened beyond a single illuminated walk.

A further change followed in 2014: Saturday acquired its own fireworks display. The organiser explains that this created two comparable festive evenings, on Friday and Saturday. That mattered to the weekend’s shape, giving visitors a choice of nights for the principal street spectacle. The modern three-day outline combines those two evenings with Saturday gastronomy and a Sunday parade of old vehicles, bringing food, performance and motoring into the original Champagne-house setting.

Public figures associated with Habits de Lumière have included filmmaker Claude Lelouch, food journalist Julie Andrieu, sommelier Philippe Faure-Brac, travel journalist Jean-Sébastien Petitdemange and Guide du Routard creator Philippe Gloaguen. The organiser also names pastry chef Jérôme Chaucesse and broadcaster Vincent Ferniot. Their different backgrounds reflect the festival’s combination of cinema, travel, food and wine; the official history does not assign every patron to a dated edition.

2025: the avenue’s centenary and the 25th edition

The 2025 festival took place on 12, 13 and 14 December and was advertised as its 25th edition. It also concluded Épernay’s centenary celebrations for the Avenue de Champagne name. Those are two different anniversaries: the avenue’s naming in 1925 and a festival launched in 2000. The city’s centenary press pack placed Habits de Lumière at the end of a year of avenue celebrations, connecting the December event with the longer story of the street.

The same municipal press pack described video mapping on the Hôtel de Ville and Lycée Stéphane-Hessel, live performances, light installations, Champagne bars and a silent disco for the 2025 evening programme. This was a larger production vocabulary than the first edition’s decorated promenade. The illuminated façades remained central, while performance and headphone dancing added different ways to spend the evening along the avenue.

Production studio Azarek records a specific contribution to that anniversary: Let’s Dance!, a mapping made for Épernay’s Hôtel de Ville on 12 and 13 December 2025. Its credits name Artcom Diffusion as producer and technical provider, Éric Ourth as artistic director, Jean-Sébastien Martin for motion design and Raphaël Pibarot for sound design. The work was commissioned by the city. Those credits reveal the specialist film, sound and technical work behind a façade that appears to dance.

After the celebration, the city reported 95,000 attendees across the 25th edition and called it an attendance record. Its retrospective described original mappings, sparkling installations and street performances, alongside the contributions of houses and growers. Nearly 500 old vehicles joined the concluding automobile parade. These are figures for the completed 2025 edition, useful for understanding the event’s growth without treating a past crowd count as a forecast for another December.

A three-day celebration with several kinds of participation

The organiser’s three-day description distinguishes the avenue evenings from Saturday’s food events. Habits de Saveurs pairs Michelin-starred chefs with avenue houses and growers to create a recipe in front of the public. The children’s pastry competition follows in the afternoon, alongside food-and-wine workshops and cellar visits. On Sunday, vehicles replace the night-time light shows as the principal moving spectacle through town. This sequence gives each day an identity.

The city’s current event notice makes a practical distinction inherited from that mixed programme: avenue festivities, Habits de Saveurs, the children’s competition and the automobile parade are free without an admission ticket. Food-and-wine workshops are separately paid and reserved. A Champagne-house cellar visit also has its own booking. Free entry to the public celebration therefore means access to the street programme, while a tasting or workshop remains a separate decision.

The next chapter: December 2026

The announced 26th edition is 11–13 December 2026. One piece of its programme history was already made on 16 July, when the Habits de Saveurs pairings were drawn by Hubert de Billy, president of the avenue committee, and Vincent Dallet, president of Les Étoilés de la Champagne. The organiser names eight house-or-grower and restaurant partnerships for Saturday 12 December near Halle Saint-Thibault. That July draw shows how the food programme takes shape months before the avenue lights come on.

The announced pairings include A. Bergère with Arbane, Boizel with La Grillade Gourmande, Collard-Picard with L’Hôtel d’Angleterre and Esterlin with Le Millénaire. Mercier is paired with Le Royal Champagne, Patrick Boivin with Le Château de Courcelles, Perrier-Jouët with Les Crayères, and Pol Roger with Le Foch. Each chef is to create a seasonal recipe matched to a cuvée from the associated producer. These are the published 2026 partnerships, not an assumption that the same eight return annually.

The detailed 2026 programme is due in mid-November, with the workshop reservation arrangements to follow in the event information. For an evening among the illuminated mansions, start with the Habits de Lumière visitor guide; for the avenue in daylight, use our Épernay walk. Knowing the festival’s 2000 beginning, 2005 civic partnership and later food-and-fireworks additions makes the December spectacle easier to read as a living town celebration.

The organisations and recipes behind the spectacle

The avenue committee predates the festival: the participating houses formed it in 1996 to pool ideas and skills for the Avenue de Champagne’s cultural, artistic and tourist development. Its published membership includes Moët & Chandon, Mercier, Boizel, Pol Roger, Esterlin and smaller producer addresses. That existing association supplied an organisational home for the millennium celebration four years later. The partnership was rooted in one street’s businesses before the municipality took the principal organising role.

Habits de Saveurs also leaves something behind after the December demonstrations. The organiser maintains downloadable recipe collections for 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2022–2025. Those files preserve the food strand as a practical archive, alongside the photographs and films of the illuminated avenue. The named recipes are tied to their editions, so a dish from a 2019 sheet belongs to that collaboration, not a menu guaranteed at the next festival.