Before the rigours of the competition, the finalists took a trip to the Taittinger vineyards in France for a taste of the Champagne house's vintages
There are five Champagne glasses to pair with tonight's four-course dinner at Château de la Marquetterie. Hidden in the vineyards of Pierry, south of Épernay, the homely mansion, which was acquired by Pierre-Charles Taittinger in the 1930s, is complete with sophisticated furnishings, family photographs and glass chandeliers.
The nine finalists of this year's Taittinger UK Sommelier of the Year are sitting round the dining table with Taittinger brand ambassador Jean-Pierre Redont, who has brought both the Taittinger Comtes de Champagne Blanc de Blancs (2012) and the Taittinger Brut Réserve (2012) for an exclusive tasting. The Brut Réserve marks a particularly special welcome, as the Champagne house rarely labels – let alone releases – vintages to the market.
It's a gesture of generosity that serves as an educational opportunity for the sommeliers. The Comtes is made entirely from Chardonnay sourced from five villages on the Côte des Blancs, each of which have Grands Crus classifications. It is only produced in exceptional years, which gives the wine an enhanced freshness and fruitiness.
The vintage, by contrast, showcases Taittinger's signature blend of 40% Chardonnay, 35% Pinot Noir and 25% Pinot Meunier with a pronounced maturity. It is imbued with new flavours when paired with the sea bream tartare served with sliced Granny Smith apples, which sparks discussion and vigorous nods of approval.
After the dinner, Martin Kleveta, first-time finalist and head sommelier at Alain Ducasse at the Dorchester, says he preferred the vintage to the Comtes: "I've never tried vintage Champagne from Taittinger, so it was very nice to see that it could be of a higher quality than the top cuvée. It was ready to drink and very rounded. The Comtes de Champagne was way too young to show its potential."
While a few of the candidates, including Kleveta, had never been to Champagne before, the trip also welcomed seasoned Sommelier of the Year alumni, including last year's runner-up (and this year's winner) Agnieszka Swiecka, head of wine at Audley and Mount Street restaurant, and Christopher Parker, 2019 finalist and independent British sommelier. Parker has represented restaurants including Lime Wood in the New Forest, but says "even if you don't have that base, we're here just as much for ourselves. We do this because it's a huge part of our development. It inspires you, it teaches you and it's about learning some humility and confidence."
In good company
Kevin McKee, UK director of Taittinger, has always valued the competition's emphasis on training the next generation of sommeliers. The Champagne house has organised trips for the finalists ever since it became headline sponsor of the UK Sommelier of the Year in 2018, offering all candidates the chance to enrich their understanding of Champagne for the purposes of the final.
McKee says the competition has gained momentum in that time and that he is witnessing a noticeably higher calibre of candidates entering the award each year. "For the sommeliers, success breeds success. They want to be among people of a similar ilk. They feed off each other and learn off each other, so they are constantly getting better and better," he says.
The Taittinger family are "very much behind the industry" as a whole, which can be seen not only in their commitment to the wine world, but also hospitality more broadly. They have been hosting the Prix Culinaire for the past 56 years, a competition that "encourages young chefs to become great chefs".
McKee adds: "It's important for us to be connected to the sommeliers as well. With the Sommelier of the Year competition, we're encouraging all the sommeliers to be as good as they can be. For us, it's great to have them here and to get to know them."
Thanks to renovation works taking place at Taittinger's cellars until 2024, the competitors have access to a different venue for their centrepiece Champagne tasting; the Closterman, Taittinger's purpose-built production facility. It's home to 300 wine tanks, some of which have a capacity for 1,500 hectolitres. Taittinger bought the building from Champagne Montaudon in 2011 and, since 2017, it has been ageing millions of bottles at the site, which has always been closed to the public. Most of the reserve wines are bottled at Closterman, while the Comtes bottling happens in a bigger cellar, which can age 20 million bottles.
The tasting takes place in a pristine meeting room overlooking an immaculate row of metallic tanks. Quentin Dupla, deputy wine-maker of Taittinger, guides the contestants through a masterclass on dosage, the process by which a degree of sweetness is added to the Champagne. Five bottles of Taittinger are laid on the table, lined up in order of Brut Réserve, Nocturne, Demi-sec, Prestige Rosé and the Nocturne Rosé. The flavour profile of the Nocturne, for example, which has 18g of sugar per litre, is compared to that of the non-vintage Brut Réserve, which contains half the amount of sugar.
"We are looking for as much precision as we can in our wines, so we adapt every step of the process," says Dupla, while the sommeliers swirl their glasses of Champagne.
"With the blend at the beginning [for the Nocturne], there is 5%-10% more Chardonnay. We are looking for Chardonnay with a lot of tension and a lot of freshness to balance and integrate the sugar at the end." He points out that the Nocturne undergoes four to five years of ageing compared to three years of ageing for the non-vintage, as "complexity is very useful when we have more dosage".
When he is asked about the difficulties of ageing Champagne, Dupla explains that the region produces wines with a notably low pH and high acidity, which keep the wines "fresh and elegant".
"This is something very specific to Champagne; the pH is around three, which is low for wine. If you compare that with the South of France, Spain or Italy, the wines can have pH of over 3.6 or 3.7, so the wine is not the same for ageing."
At the end of the tasting, Dupla tentatively predicts how Champagne Taittinger might develop under the added pressures and uncertainties of climate change. "The Champagne style will move, as it did many, many years ago. Maybe we will have Champagne with more density, more ripeness. Maybe the sugar would be reduced because of the balance of the wine – nobody knows," he muses.
"What we know is we are going to adapt to make the best wine we can make with global warming."
Dolly Chao, junior sommelier at 67 Pall Mall in London's St James's, says the tasting was a "very rare experience", because it came from the wine-maker's perspective. "If I organised a tasting trip, I might not be able to go that deeply into it. It's good to understand the whole philosophy of Taittinger. I might know what it tastes like, but I never know what they really look for in the wine. I didn't know they ‘look backwards', so the wine they select really depends on the dosage. What I understood was that it's the opposite: [the winemakers] see how the vintage is and adjust the dosage.
"I now know more about Taittinger and I've started to really like the brand because of the effort they put in. I will definitely reflect on that when we go back to work," she adds.
Nine months ago, before joining 67 Pall Mall, Chao was a sommelier in Singapore and she is still coming to terms with the scale of London's wine scene. Compared to Asia, where tea and spirits are the dominant drinks, the UK offers greater exposure to wines, she says.
"I learn faster as well because of the exposure, especially in Pall Mall. I get to taste so many wines. Some of them, I only get to read them and I've never see them, but here, I can actually taste them," she says. However, she says she has been surprised by the lack of female sommeliers in London compared to Singapore: "When I did the qualifying round, I saw three female sommeliers. That's three out of 36 people. In Singapore it is maybe five out of 20, so it was a surprise to me. I appreciate what Queena [Wong of Curious Vines] has been doing and we need to push harder. I would really love to see more female sommeliers on the stage, because we have a different approach to things."
The routes to wine
Although female representation remains a challenge, the Taittinger UK Sommelier of the Year has consistently shown an impressive international breadth, with this year's candidates coming from Taiwan, New Zealand and the Czech Republic, to name a few.
Alexios Stasinopoulos, director of wine at Seren Collection, which has properties such as the Grove of Narberth in Pembrokeshire and the Penmaenuchaf hotel in Gwynedd, is from Greece. He moved to the UK 10 years ago to continue his career in wine and recalls how access to the hospitality scene has changed for overseas workers during that period. Since Brexit and Covid, the challenges of being a sommelier with a non-British passport have only increased.
"The Home Office at the moment doesn't even recognise sommelier as a position on the skilled worker visa," he says.
Despite there being skilled worker visas for specialist roles such as pastry chef, master butcher and fishmonger, the closest available equivalent to a sommelier is a bar manager or a restaurant manager. "I hire people, so it is a big, big dent," he adds, solemnly. "I know a lot of people outside of the UK who would love to come here. And for us who were here before Brexit, it's gutting."
While there is no denying the industry's challenges, the two-day trip offers something encouraging of its own. Amid the masterclasses, the shared magnums of Taittinger Prestige Rosé and the casual revelations of the contestants' guilty drink of choice (fruity beer, cheap rosé and vodka among them), the finalists are reminded of the enduring strength of the sommelier community.
"It was really informative and really nice to be with people with the same serious interest. It was good to meet people and get things explained – things that I wouldn't imagine I would be able to ask," Stasinopoulos says. "It created that curiosity again, so it was amazing."
It's an observation that Redont makes after the last of the sommeliers leave the final lunch of the trip, held at Café du Palais, an art deco-style family brasserie in the centre of Reims.
"What I appreciate this year is that all the candidates look very friendly together. It's really a team," he says, with a smile. "They will compete later, but today, they have fun together, and that's something very nice to see."
About Champagne Taittinger
Taittinger is one of the few remaining Champagne houses to be owned and actively managed by the family named on the label.
The house was founded in 1734 by Jacques Fourneaux, who worked closely with the Benedictine abbeys. The Taittinger link was established in the 1930s, when Pierre Taittinger acquired the Château de la Marquetterie from the original Forest-Fourneaux business. He had been stationed at the property while serving as a cavalry officer in the First World War and eventually purchased the grounds.
Château de la Marquetterie is the only such estate surrounded by a vineyard, with eight of the house's 288 hectares surrounding the property.
In 2019, Pierre's grandson, Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger passed over the Champagne house to his daughter Vitalie, who is now president.
How does Taittinger choose its reserve wine?
During the dosage tasting, Quentin Dupla reveals the Champagne house's criteria for selecting its reserve wine. The reserve wine is integrated into new Champagnes to ensure consistency in the house style.
For example, the Taittinger Brut Réserve, which McKee attests is a consistent bestseller in the UK, includes a proportion of reserve wine to guarantee the Champagne house's signature flavour from year to year. "When you have a wine that shows some oxidation notes, we don't use it as the reserve wine. The wine has to be very straight and closed at the moment you choose it for reserve wine.
"The oldest reserve wine at the moment is maybe 2015, which is not really that old if you compare this with other Champagne houses. But the style of Champagne Taittinger is very elegant, subtle, [with a high proportion of] Chardonnay and tension. We don't really need very old reserve wines because it's not our signature."
