Champagne is a celebration. The minute the familiar pop of a champagne cork is heard the mood is lightened and smiles brighten. However, the choice of champagne is always a difficult one. Those looking to impress will usually start at the bottom of the list where the big names, with bigger price tags, reside, but the truly impressive choice doesn’t need a second mortgage to afford and therefore can be enjoyed all the more. This seeming paradox of champagne is found in a bottle of Taittinger.
The Taittinger Style
Each champagne house has a typical style that is adhered to from vintage to vintage and for Taittinger the word that best describes their approach is elegance. Some others can be quite creamy or nutty or overwhelmingly intense, but at Taittinger the fruit is allowed to shine. Most Champagnes consist of three grape varieties, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier, but at Taittinger, Chardonnay is the preferred grape of choice and is sourced from some of the best Grand Cru vineyards in Champagne’s Côte des Blanc region, including from some of the 260 hectares owned by the family.
Their prestige cuvee, the Comtes de Champagne (current vintage 1998) is 100% Blanc de Blancs, meaning solely made from Chardonnay, and is produced only in exceptional years. By law in Champagne, vintage bottlings must have been aged for at least three years, but the Comtes de Champagne is often matured for as long as 10 years or more to yield a delicate, fresh and ethereal wine.
The Art of Champagne
The technique by which champagne is made is intricate and extensive and results in an expressive masterpiece, which can also be said of artists whose creations adorn the walls of galleries everywhere. It was this dedication to beauty that saw the collaboration of Taittinger with some of the most renowned artists around the world and the beginning of the ‘Taittinger Collection’.
In 1983, Hungarian born artist, Victor Vasarely created the first bottle in the collection. Vasarely’s penchant for geometric shapes was a perfect fit to create a most distinctive look for the design of a bottle. The wine in Vasarely’s bottle was a 1978 Brut consisting of 40% Chardonnay and 60% Pinot Noir. Since then, other artists to adorn bottles with their artistic visions have been Roy Lichenstein (1990), Imaï (1994) and Rauschenberg in 2007. Only 5000 bottles of the Taittinger Collection are created in each production, making them a rare and unique acquisition.
The Final Sip
Wine and champagne are as personal a choice as perfume or cologne and our palates have the last word when it comes to individual preference, but next time the dilemma of choosing the right champagne arises, rest assured that the elegance of any from the Taittinger range will more than adequately delight and impress.
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