Champagne Taittinger's Domaine Evremond opens in Kent, signalling a profound shift in the global sparkling wine market.
When one of France's most storied Champagne houses plants vines on English soil, it is not an act of curiosity. It is a verdict.
The story of Domaine Evremond begins not in a tasting room but in an orchard. In 2015, when Champagne Taittinger - a family house founded in 1734 and one of France's most celebrated producers - purchased 69 hectares of apple and pear farmland at Stone Stile Farm near the village of Chilham in Kent, it was the first time a major Champagne house had invested in the United Kingdom with the explicit intention of building a premium English sparkling wine operation from scratch. The land belonged to the Gaskain family, fourth-generation fruit growers who remain the largest apple growers in the UK, and who stayed involved in the project after the sale.
The venture was conceived by two men with a long-running friendship: Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger, then president of the Champagne house, and Patrick McGrath MW, founder and CEO of Hatch Mansfield, Taittinger's UK distribution partner since 1998. McGrath had been watching the English sparkling wine scene with growing interest in the early 2010s and initially floated the idea of bringing an existing English wine into the portfolio. Pierre-Emmanuel had a more ambitious counter-proposal: do what Taittinger had done in California with Domaine Carneros - build something new.
The name they chose carried centuries of meaning. Domaine Evremond honors Charles de Saint-Evremond (1614-1703), a French poet, courtier, and epicurean exiled to England by Louis XIV, who became a passionate advocate for the wines of Champagne at the court of Charles II and remains the only Frenchman buried in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey. The name was not accidental. Pierre-Emmanuel's father, Jean Taittinger, had twinned the city of Reims with Canterbury when he was mayor of Reims in the 1950s. The bond between the Taittinger family and Kent ran decades deep before a single vine was planted.
The site selection was not sentimental. Taittinger engaged leading English wine specialist Stephen Skelton to search for land meeting strict viticultural criteria: chalk soils, south or southwest-facing slopes, altitude below 100 metres above sea level. It took 18 months to find the right match. The Chilham site satisfied every criterion. Its free-draining chalk subsoil is geologically continuous with the Paris Basin, the same underlying geology that runs beneath the vineyards of Champagne. Flint is embedded throughout, giving the wines what winemaker Alexandre Ponnavoy describes as a reductive, mineral quality. The site sits between 50 and 90 metres above sea level on south-facing slopes, and Whitstable - a North Sea port - lies just six miles to the north, bringing a maritime moderation and oceanic breezes that create what Ponnavoy calls a "contrasting climatology."
The first vines went into the ground in 2017, initially 21 hectares of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and Pinot Meunier - the same three varieties used to make Champagne. More plantings followed in 2019, and again during the pandemic in 2020 when the team set up at a local Premier Inn to complete the work. By the time the winery opened in late 2024, the estate had 69 hectares under vine, with Chardonnay planted on the thinnest topsoil for maximum chalk access and Pinot Noir on more clay-rich plots.
The vines are managed differently from Champagne. They are spaced at 5,000 vines per hectare - half the density Taittinger uses in France - and trained taller to improve airflow and manage England's characteristic disease pressure. Mark Gaskain and his team handle day-to-day vineyard management, guided by Christelle Rinville, Taittinger's Director of Viticulture, who travels regularly from Reims. That cross-channel expertise sharing is one of the project's distinguishing features. Rinville has had to learn a great deal about the specific local terroir: the presence of silex, the maritime climate that differs markedly from Champagne's continental conditions, and the rhythms of an English growing season where the grape harvest falls neatly between the Gala and Braeburn apple picks.
Construction began in spring 2022 after two years of planning approvals from Ashford Borough Council. The firm that helped dig the Channel Tunnel excavated 83,000 tonnes of chalk - roughly 2,000 lorry loads - to make way for a three-storey winery that descends 20 metres below ground. Designed by Reims-based architect Giovanni Pace and built by UK construction firm Arkay, the facility is two-thirds underground, designed to blend into the rolling Kent Downs rather than stand on them. The result is a gravity-fed winery with a naturally cool chalk cellar capable of holding up to 1.5 million bottles without any additional energy expenditure on cooling. The cellar door opened to visitors in April 2025.
The winery was completed in time for the autumn 2024 harvest - a relief after years of makeshift arrangements. Early vintages were vinified at nearby Simpsons Wine Estate, and from 2020 the team operated out of an old concrete barn on the property, running the whole operation on a generator. "We were over budget four weeks after starting," Patrick McGrath said of the construction, with characteristic candour. Total investment in the project reached approximately 17 million pounds.
The official opening ceremony on 26 September 2024 was conducted by Sophie, the Duchess of Edinburgh, alongside Vitalie Taittinger - who has succeeded her father Pierre-Emmanuel as President of Champagne Taittinger - and McGrath himself. India McGrath, Patrick's daughter, now runs the commercial side of Domaine Evremond, making the project genuinely a family affair across two nationalities.
The Classic Cuvee Edition 1 was released in spring 2025, a non-vintage blend built on the 2020 harvest with approximately 25 percent reserve wine drawn from 2019 and 2018 - vintages from vines so young they were never intended for commercial release. Ponnavoy insisted on keeping those early harvests back and following them in tank over several years rather than releasing them, a costly decision that delayed the first wine but gave the blend unusual depth for an inaugural release. The wine was bottled in June 2021, spent over three years on its lees, and was disgorged in August 2024. It is a blend of 55 percent Pinot Noir, 35 percent Chardonnay, and 10 percent Pinot Meunier, fermented entirely in stainless steel, with a dosage of 7 grams per litre.
Vinous awarded it 93 points, praising the wine's exemplary mousse and pristine, linear style. Anne Krebiehl MW, a Champagne specialist, described the mousse as lending real elegance, with the wine showing brighter and airier than the Pinot Noir dominance would suggest. Wine critic Jamie Goode scored it 93 out of 100 as well, noting fine integration of acidity and a saline twist to the fruit. The wine retails at approximately 52 pounds per bottle, and the first edition ran to 100,000 bottles. Future editions are already planned, with Edition 2 based on the 2021 vintage disgorged in early 2025, and longer-term ambitions include a vintage wine, a rose, and a prestige Blanc de Blancs once the vines mature further. Annual production is expected to rise toward 400,000 bottles.
Ponnavoy is clear about what he was trying to achieve. "It was really important not to do a copy of another sparkling wine," he has said, insisting the goal was always to find what he calls the Evremond identity - one shaped by the chalk and flint of Chilham, the oceanic breeze from Whitstable, and the cool maritime conditions of Kent.
Domaine Evremond did not arrive in a vacuum. It arrived at the crest of a wave. Over the past two decades, English sparkling wine has moved from curiosity to genuine global force. The area under vine in England has grown by 510 percent since 2005, reaching 4,841 hectares by 2024, spread across 1,104 vineyards and 238 registered wineries. Kent alone accounts for nearly a quarter of all English wine production and leads all counties in planted area. WineGB data shows English wine sales climbed 3 percent in 2024, even as overall premium sparkling wine categories declined.
The quality signal has been unambiguous. In September 2025, Nyetimber's Blanc de Blancs 2016 Magnum became the first non-Champagne wine in the 34-year history of the International Wine Challenge to be named Champion Sparkling Wine - a trophy that had never previously left France. Nyetimber Head Winemaker Cherie Spriggs simultaneously won Sparkling Winemaker of the Year for the second time, remaining the only woman and the only person outside Champagne to have done so. The result was not an anomaly. Blind tastings across multiple competitions and consumer events have repeatedly placed English sparkling wines at or near the top of mixed flights, with products from Chapel Down, Gusbourne, Hambledon, and others earning gold medals in international competition.
Climate is both the cause and the context. Average temperatures in southeast England have risen by approximately 1.8 degrees Celsius over the past 50 years, pushing the region into growing conditions that mirror what Champagne experienced a generation ago - cool enough to preserve acidity and allow slow ripening, warm enough to achieve consistent fruit maturity. As Champagne itself warms, some producers see English soil as an insurance policy. Taittinger is not alone: Pommery planted vineyards in Hampshire, and Burgundy estate Domaine Duroche recently entered a joint venture in Essex. The direction of travel is clear.
Not everyone finds Domaine Evremond's arrival straightforwardly celebratory. Some in the English wine industry are ambivalent about a major French house claiming territory at the premium end of a category that domestic producers have spent decades building. The prices charged by English sparkling wines - the average bottle retails at 32.47 pounds, above Prosecco and Cava and comparable to entry-level Champagne - reflect a quality positioning that requires constant justification to consumers still conditioned to see France as the benchmark. When a prestigious Champagne house validates the category, it helps. But it also changes the conversation about what English sparkling wine is, and who it belongs to.
Ponnavoy has pushed back on this consistently. Domaine Evremond is not Champagne transplanted to Kent. The stainless steel fermentation, the full malolactic conversion, the particular balance struck against what he describes as bitterness common in some English sparkling wines - these are deliberate departures from the Taittinger house style. The flint in the Chilham soil gives the wine a mineral profile that Champagne cannot replicate. The maritime influence softens the structure differently. It is, Ponnavoy insists, an English wine made with Champagne expertise.
The distinction matters commercially as much as philosophically. Domaine Evremond is distributed exclusively in the UK - the estate does not ship internationally, and buyers outside the country must contact regional partners. That tight geographic focus is a choice. It reflects the project's founding logic: this wine belongs to Kent, to England, to the specific conversation happening here about what the south of England can produce. It is not a Champagne extension or a second label. It is a first wine, from a new place, with its own identity to build.
The question Domaine Evremond raises is not whether English sparkling wine can compete with Champagne. That has been settled. The q…