Taittinger Champagne Brut La Francaise NV (375ml) 070226ROBUST The wine that comes off

The wine that comes off it is all tension and line — taut

and the wines that survived lean toward freshness and red-fruited transparency rather than muscle - which suits this site well

spends 36 months on the lees

and not in a marketing-speak way — it gets the same long maceration of up to a month as the Brunello and ages 12 months in large Slavonian botti

Taittinger Champagne Brut La Francaise NV (375ml) 070226ROBUST The wine that comes offThe half bottle is an underrated format: two good glasses, no commitment, no flat Champagne going sad in the fridge door. This is Taittinger's house wine, and its house style is Chardonnay forward at roughly 40% of the blend, unusually high for a big house non vintage, with Pinot Noir and Meunier filling in the middle. It spends close to four years on its lees in the chalk cellars beneath Reims, far past the legal minimum, which is where the texture