What makes a champagne recognisably Taittinger? And, perhaps more importantly, how much should that identity be allowed to move with the vintage?
During a recent tasting with Taittinger Chef de Cave, Alexandre Ponnavoy, we tasted across several current and forthcoming wines, notably the Comtes de Champagne Blanc de Blancs 2014 alongside the soon-to-be-released 2015.
Taittinger is closely associated with Chardonnay, elegance and reduction. So how do they choose to interpret a year like 2015 when the conditions in the vineyard were simply more generous than usual? At at what point should the character of a given year be allowed to lead? And can ripeness become another form of expression, rather than something to be reined in?
The comparison between Comtes 2014 and 2015 gets directly to the heart of it.
Comtes de Champagne Blanc de Blancs 2014
Classical Comtes, and a stunningly elegant wine. There's almost always a slick of melted butter on the nose of great Comtes, and for me it's one of the wine's most discerning features — you could pick this out in a line-up blind. It sits here alongside that familiar reductive character before moving into a palate that's softly textured, creamy and light. A slight bitterness on the finish gives it some shape and good length, and at this stage, it's remarkably open and approachable. Dosage sits around eight to nine grams per litre, and everything about it feels resolved.
It's impressively effortless: slim, elegant, almost ballerina-like in its proportions. Tasted beside 2015, it becomes obvious just how strongly the identity of Comtes itself leads in this vintage. The oceanic conditions of 2014 are there, of course, but the House speaks first, and the year is really only ever a footnote.
Score: 96/100 points
Comtes de Champagne Blanc de Blancs 2015
If in 2014 the DNA of Comtes comes first, and vintage second, 2015 flips the order entirely.
2015 swung hard between extremes in the vineyard, with a dry, testing stretch through the season that held phenolic ripening on a tighter leash than growers would have liked. It's exactly the kind of year that can catch a Chardonnay out - and exactly why Ponnavoy's insistence on tasting rather than following a fixed formula matters so much here. The final blend draws only from the five great Chardonnay villages (Avize, Chouilly, Cramant, Oger and Le Mesnil-sur-Oger) with a level of selection that shows in the glass as real clarity rather than effort.
Disgorged in October 2025 with a dosage a touch higher at nine grams per litre, it's more direct and assertive on the palate straight away - there's real muscle here, and right now it reads more like the child of 2015 than it does a classical Comtes. I don't say that as a criticism. It's a great wine. It's just a different one.
Ponnavoy has a lovely way of framing it - vintages as children within the same family. "One may be shy and another more assertive," he told me, "but each remains part of the family." It's an apt line for this pairing. Where 2014 is poised and restrained, 2015 has broader shoulders, but crucially, it hasn't lost its purity. There's nothing heavy or overworked about it, and Taittinger clearly hasn't tried to force it into shape just to fit expectations.
Ponnavoy is increasingly comfortable letting Chardonnay reach genuine phenolic maturity rather than picking to a predetermined number on a lab sheet. "In a solar year, we must accept and express ripeness," he said. "In a cool year, we preserve the acidity and a different aromatic profile. The essential objective is balance."
This could become one of the more defining traits of Comtes going forward. In cooler, classical years, the House's identity seems to arrive almost before the vintage does. In warmer years, the vintage gets there first, and Comtes has to make room for it. 2015 is a great Comtes - but it's more a portrait of the power of its year than an attempt to conform to a fixed idea of what Comtes should taste like.
Score: 94/100 points
L-R: Peter Liem, Sara Underdown, Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger, and Taittinger, Chef de Caves, Alexandre Ponnavoy.
Taittinger Brut Millésimé 2018
Launched in January 2026, the Brut Millésimé 2018 continues this same conversation around warmth, texture and freshness, just from a different angle.
A 50/50 blend of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, it's creamy and quite dense - Villers Marmery does a lot of the work bringing texture - but despite that breadth, it never loses the precision Ponnavoy treats as non-negotiable for the House style. The aim here is structure without heaviness, staying within Taittinger's reductive comfort zone while chasing freshness through minerality rather than leaning on acidity alone.
Champagne's whole conversation around freshness has traditionally been an acidity conversation, and warmer vintages are making that definition feel increasingly out of date. As Ponnavoy put it to me: "Freshness does not come only from measured acidity. It can also be carried by pH balance, texture and the bitterness at the end of the palate." I suspect we'll all need to get more comfortable talking about freshness that way.
Score: 92/100 points
Comtes de Champagne Rosé 2014 and 2013
The Comtes Rosés add another layer - this time, about the role of time.
The 2014 incarnation is pink-salmon in the glass, spicy and charcuterie-driven, with real salinity giving it an immediately savoury pull. It's also, quite simply, delicious - and I don't say that lightly with prestige rosé, which can sometimes get so caught up in complexity that it forgets to be enjoyable.
The 2013, by contrast, is more reserved at this stage. Savoury, tight, a little closed - but that sits right with the current state of the 2013 vintage which is one of the strongest and most classically structured years of recent decades. It has the architecture to drink now and the patience to reward keeping.
Taittinger has chosen to hold the rosé back a year longer than the Comtes Blanc de Blancs on account of experience with earlier releases which were often used to protect colour and freshness. Ponnavoy's experience has pushed him the other way: longer ageing, later release, in pursuit of the complexity he actually wants in the glass. It's a good reminder that freshness and youth aren't the same thing.
Score: 2013 - 95/100 points
Score: 2014 - 93/100 points
Les Folies de la Marquetterie — 2019 base
Folies remains one of my genuinely sentimental favourites in the Taittinger range, and tasting the 2019 base only reinforced why.
It has always felt like a grower's wine living inside the scale of one of Champagne's great Maisons - tiny in production, but enormous in sentimental weight for the Taittinger family, who built it originally as a parcellaire expression tied closely to the vineyards around Château de la Marquetterie. Over time, the concept has widened to include fruit from Pierry, Trépail, Verzenay and Hautvillers, and it's these additional crus that have done so much to build the wine's structure, freshness and overall quality.
In the glass, there's a lovely sweetness on the nose from the barrel contact, but it never tips into an oaky wine - what you notice instead is the tension between texture and freshness, held together beautifully. The bottles spend six to seven years on lees building texture.
Folies is one of Taittinger's most interesting wines because it doesn't sit neatly inside expectations of the House. It has the intimacy of a small-production, vineyard-driven champagne, backed by the blending intelligence of a Grande Maison.
Score: 91/100 points
Taittinger, Chef de Caves, Alexandre Ponnavoy. Looking back through the years of Folies de la Marquetterie with chef de caves, Alexandre Ponnavoy.
