Taittinger
Comte de Champagne Blanc de Blancs
Champagne
2008

The producer

Taittinger emerged from family sale in 2005 and buy-back in 2008 with a purified vision of quality from a more sustainable approach in the vineyards to revitalised winemaking focussing on only the best of their own vineyards and growers produce. Members of the Taittinger family are involved from the running of the company to the blending of the base wines. The selection of wines for the various blends has been refined and the time on lees has been increased to lift the quality of the wines from an already high standard. Taittinger is back at the top of their game. 

Despite longer than usual ageing on lees on everything from non-vintage to the prestige Comtes de Champagne, Taittinger Champagnes are refined, nervy wines of great purity and finesse.

The wine

One of Champagne’s very finest and most consistent blanc de blancs prestige cuvees, Comtes takes full advantage of the extensive holdings in the Cote des Blancs. Drawn mostly from Avize and Le Mesnil-sur-Oger with judicious spicing from Oger, Cramant, Chouilly and Vertus, Comtes is the purest expression of Chardonnay from these fine vineyards. Now aged for a minimum of eight years, and often more depending on vintage, it reaches the market with a depth of maturity that belies the tightly wound nature of the wine. Beautiful on release, it only gains from more cellar age.

We choose our wines based on a range of criteria (see how we choose our wines) of which critic scores is just one. Rather than simply highlight the best score to promote a wine, our average critic score is calculated from the scores provided by several respected wine critics, who we follow for specific regions. They do not represent all critic scores and, wherever possible, we try and give more weight to more recent reviews. Where appropriate we consider market-based scores like Global Wine Score or Wine Searcher Average scores.

As a rule, we look to offer wines that achieve a 92/100 average critic score or better and frankly a lot of very good wines simply don’t make the cut. As a high-end provider we want to reflect that positioning in the quality of wines we offer. Such wines are only a tiny fraction of those generally on offer in the market. We believe that an average score is a more conservative and representative approach, but it is still subjective and only offered as a guide to our customers, who will (and should) do their own research. We will add individual critic scores to our website in the future.