Taittinger

Comtes de Champagne Blanc de Blancs

• 

  Vintage 2004
  97 points Halliday Wine Companion

A blend of six or seven Grand Crus of the Cote des Blancs, taken through mlf, with up to 5% matured in near-new barriques before tirage. It is the Australian winemakers'' favourite Champagne, and remember you can''t find a nine-year-old Grand Cru Burgundy or a First Growth Bordeaux at a fraction of this price. This is a superb Comtes, with exquisite balance and mouthfeel to its sinuous flavours of citrus and white peach fruit, the finish and aftertaste lasting a seeming eternity.

• 

  Vintage 2004
  98 points

The 2004 Comtes brings back all the innocence of a joyful childhood, of scaling lemon and lime trees to plunder their tangy fruits, of a free-as-air dash through fields of daisies in endless blue daylight, of freshly roasted cashew nuts mounded in market baskets, and of a breathless plunge into an icy mountain rock pool. Then, nougat, pepper, gunflint and rising minerality of iceberg proportions. Such is the nervous tension, racy endurance and sheer stature of 2004 that it best be left until it at least attains adolescence.