Vitalie Taittinger Pairs Her Family’s Wines With Crustacean Beverly Hills Highlight Reel of Dishes
by Kyle Billings
Vitalie Taittinger seems eerily at ease. Seated on the patio of Crustacean Beverly Hills restaurant in Los Angeles, Vitalie hosts a coterie of Champagne lovers to showcase selections of the house. She has made her annual sojourn to Southern California to honor the partnership between Taittinger (the famous Champagne producer, which she was recently announced president of) and the Screen Actors Guild Awards. Despite being hours away from commencing the broadcast and rubbing shoulders with the biggest names in Hollywood, Vitalie is nonplussed. She seems equally pleased to be soaking up the southland sun whilst welcoming guests and drinking bubbly.
Despite only recently succeeding her father Pierre-Emmanual Taittinger as the president of the maison, Vitalie dispels any air of pretension, laughing easily and eagerly soliciting stories from the gathered company. The first wine, Taittinger Brut La Francaise, is poured. It’s the most recognized of the day’s Champagnes, and according to Vitalie, the most important for that reason. After describing the wine, she steals a brief moment with Brut La Française (as she will with each wine), closing her eyes and raising her glass after first sips, as if surprised by the quality of its contents.
Four Champagnes are paired with the chef’s highlight reel of dishes. Spit cups merited little more than table adornments. Following the Brut La Française is the 2013 Millésimé, which Vitalie describes as an amalgam of freshness, precision and body. An equal cépage of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, she concedes that this tends to be the winemaker’s favorite, a constant challenge to best reflect the interaction of the vines and the weather in a single harvest.
Subsequently, Champagne flutes are replaced with white-wine glasses and guests enjoy the Comtes de Champagne 2007. A dedication to the region’s historical lineage of influential counts (“comtes”), the tête de cuvée has been heralded at each release since its 1952 debut.
When she’s not governing the awards circuit, Vitalie maintains an itinerant and varied schedule. She prides the maison on their third year of investments in English sparkling wine. She also touts the celebrated culinary prize “Le Taittinger,” founded by Pierre Taittinger with a legacy in excess of 50 years honoring French cuisine.
“It is a tradition of the French gastronomy to the new generation,” she says. However, this year the prize underwent a redesign. “This year I decided to change the rules. Gastronomy is no longer just French.” To elevate the global congregation of unheralded chefs, Taittinger opened the contest beyond envoys of French cuisine: to find a chef who could embody the pillars of product, technique, and personality—the latter Vitalie describes as “your singularity, your soul.”
The coup de grâce of the afternoon is the unveiling of the 2007 Comtes de Champagne Rosé. Aged more than ten years and made exclusively of grapes from Côte des Blancs and Montagne de Reims grand cru vineyards, it is a cuvée of pleasant tension with singularity. The spit cups remain unsullied.
Before departing, Vitalie offers a pledge of gratitude for the attention of the assembly: If there were an accolade being awarded for generosity and grace, there’d be little doubt who the award would go to.
