Champagne house Taittinger to produce sparkling wine in Britain

By Dominique Vidalon and Pascale Denis

PARIS (Reuters) - Taittinger will become the first French champagne maker to produce sparkling wine in Britain after buying land in Kent, underlining the growing status of southern England as a home to high quality vineyards.

The company has teamed up with British distributor Hatch Mansfield to buy 69 hectares of farmland near Canterbury in south-east England for an initial 4 to 5 million pounds ($7.58 million), to produce a high-quality sparkling wine, Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger told Reuters.

There has been increasing speculation that France's champagne makers such as LVMH , Pernod Ricard and Laurent Perrier might look to purchase vineyards in England, which already produces some sparkling wine.

Taittinger said the chalky soils of Kent were ideal to make "a great" sparkling wine in Britain's increasingly mild climate due to global warming.

Southern England, off limits to commercial wine growers just a generation ago, has become an up and coming wine region because warmer summers have created a favorable climate for grape growing, and, since 2000, particularly grapes for sparkling wine which competes with champagne.

English sparkling wines mainly target the 20 pound plus market in England, according to the UK Vineyards Association. This market is currently around 10 million bottles and is dominated by champagne.

Taittinger will plant the first 30 to 40 hectares with Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier grapes, with the first harvest expected in three to four years and the first bottles sold within seven to eight years, the president said.

The name of the new wine will be Domaine Evremond after Charles de Saint-Evremond, a Frenchman who lived in exile in England in the late 1660s and contributed to the popularity of champagne at the court of King Charles II.

Taittinger exports the bulk of its champagne production. Britain is its biggest market, accounting for 25 percent of its exports.

Taittinger also has had sparkling wine vineyards in the United States since 1987 when it launched Domaine Carneros by Taittinger, a venture with the Kopf family of Kobrand Wine & Spirits.

(Additional reporting by Nigel Hunt. Editing by Jane Merriman)

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