Taittinger family

Taittinger (pronounced: [tɛ.tɛ̃.ʒe]) is a French wine family who are famous producers of Champagne. The estate is headed by Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger (born 1953), a member of the consultative committee of the Banque de France. Its diversified holdings included Champagne Taittinger, Société du Louvre and Concorde Hotels, whose flagship is the famed Hotel de Crillon on the Place de la Concorde in Paris, France as well as the Loire Valley wine producing firm of Bouvet-Ladubay, and a partnership in Domaine Carneros in California, until it was sold to Starwood Capital in 2005.

Founded in 1734, the Taittinger Champagne house is based in Reims. The flagship wines of the house are the Comtes de Champagne (composed of 100% Chardonnay) and Comtes de Champagne Rosé (70% Pinot noir and 30% Chardonnay ).

In 1734, Jacques Fourneaux established a wine-business in Champagne and worked closely with the Benedictine Abbeys which, at that time, owned the finest vineyards in the region. After the First World War, the wine-house was moved to a large mansion on the Rue de Tambour in which Theobald I of Navarre (1201–1253) had lived. A long-standing legend held that it was he who brought the Chardonnay grape from Cyprus on returning from a crusade in the Middle Ages. This has been disproved by genetic analysis done at the University of California at Davis.

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