Collection: Taittinger's 2013 Comtes de Champagne Rosé

A bottle of the new Comtes de Champagne Rosé 2013 arrived in the office recently. We opened it. It's a cracker... certainly the best new release of Comtes Rosé our Wine Director Tom can recall, and he's tasted quite a few!

Taittinger's Comtes de Champagne Rosé is the rarest thing the house produces — made only in exceptional years, exclusively from Grand Cru fruit, and aged for 12 years in UNESCO-listed 4th-century chalk cellars beneath Reims before release. The 2013 has just arrived and the scores say everything: 98 points from James Suckling and 97 from Antonio Galloni, who calls it "a gorgeous, exotic wine... sublime."

The 2013 vintage in Champagne was marked by an exceptionally late, cool growing season followed by a glorious summer and an equally late harvest that preserved extraordinary freshness and definition. The result is a wine of remarkable energy — Suckling describes it as "sleek, taut and superbly fresh... seamless and long." Galloni finds "sweet dried cherry, kirsch, tobacco, rose petal, cedar and mint... a sumptuous, racy Rosé that delivers on all fronts."

Taittinger remains one of the few great Champagne houses owned and actively managed by the family on the label — Vitalie and Clovis Taittinger, great-grandchildren of the founder, run it today. We have just 12 cases of this belter.