In 1734, Jacques Fourneaux established a wine-business in Champagne and worked closely with the Benedictine Abbeys which, at that time, owned the finest vineyards in the region.
In 1932, Pierre Taittinger bought the Château de la Marquetterie from the wine house of Forest-Fourneaux. It had been used as a command post during World War I and he had been laid up there after suffering a heart-attack during combat. Two years later he also bought the Forest-Fourneaux Champagne House, which was one of the oldest in Champagne. The foundations for the Taittinger venture in Champagne were now in place. The Taittinger family has owned the business ever since - except for a year in 2005/06 when the business was first sold to Starwood Group and then bought back 11 months later.

The Taittinger cellars were established in the Abbey of Saint-Nicaise, in Reims, built in the thirteenth century in Gallo-Roman chalk pits dating from the fourth century.
Throughout the 4th century, the chalk quarries were painstakingly carved out to extract chalk blocks for building work, before, 900 years later, becoming the cellars for the Saint-Nicaise Abbey. They became a network of galleries; linking cellars, crypts and vaults for storing wine first made by the Benedictine monks in Champagne. The Abbey was destroyed during the French Revolution, but the cellars remain intact.

Many people use the term Champagne as a generic term for sparkling wine but in some countries, it is illegal to label any product Champagne unless it both comes from the Champagne region of France and is produced under the rules of the appellation, including, among other things, secondary fermentation of the wine in the bottle to create carbonation.

The oldest recorded sparkling wine is Blanquette de Limoux, which was apparently invented by Benedictine monks in the Abbey of Saint-Hilaire, near Carcassonne in 1531. They achieved this by bottling the wine before the initial fermentation had ended. Over a century later, the English scientist and physician Christopher Merret documented the addition of sugar to a finished wine to create a second fermentation. Merret's discoveries coincided with English glass-makers' technical developments that allowed bottles to be produced that could withstand the required internal pressures during secondary fermentation. French glass-makers at this time could not produce bottles of the required quality or strength. In France the first sparkling champagne was created accidentally; the pressure in the bottle led it to be called "the devil's wine" (le vin du diable), as bottles exploded or corks popped. At the time, bubbles were considered a fault. hampagne did not use the méthode champenoise until the 19th century, about 200 years after Merret documented the process.