Champagne, Prosecco and Sparkling Wine
Champagne Taittinger
The Taittingers were a family of wine merchants who, in 1870, moved to the Paris region from the Lorraine in order to retain their French citizenship after the Franco-Prussian War and the Treaty of Frankfurt (1871).
Pierre Taittinger first discoverd the Champagne region as a liason officer during the First World war. Thanks to his passion for wine and gastromony he returned serveral years later to invest all his energy into the nascent champagne business, along with his brother in law.
Thanks to this, In 1932, Pierre Taittinger bought the Château de la Marquetterie from the wine house of Forest-Fourneaux. It had been used as a command post during World War I and he had been laid up there after suffering a heart-attack during combat. The vineyards of the château had been planted with Chardonnay and Pinot noir since the 18th Century. This property had been developed by Brother Jean Oudart, a Benedictine monk, one of the founding fathers of champagne wine, and later also passed the hands of the writer Jacques Cazotte. Since then Champagne Taittinger has grown to a deserved place amongst the great champagne houses with an audacious style influenced particuarly by the Chardonnay grape variety.
From 1945 to 1960 the business was run by Pierre's third son François. Under his direction, the Taittinger cellars were established in the Abbey of Saint-Nicaise, built in the thirteenth century in Gallo-Roman chalk pits dating from the fourth century. After François' death in an accident, his brother Claude took over and directed the business from 1960 to 2005. It was during this time that Taittinger became a champagne house of world renown.
Having bought back the business in the summer of 2006, Pierre-Emanuel Taittinger has sorrounded himself with a young dynamic team that includes his son Clovis (who we were very happy to receive in Malta), as well as daughter Vitalie, as fourth-generation flag bearers.
The area of Taittinger's covers 288.84 hectares of vineyards and has 12 to 13 million bottles in stock.
