(Wine-Searcher) - The Champagne house shifts its focus across the Channel to Kent.

Champagne Taittinger will be the first Champagne house to break ground in England, with the announcement that it will shortly be planting a vineyard in Kent.

Taittinger has bought 69 hectares (170.5 acres) of farmland at Stone Stile near Canterbury in the southern English county, 40ha of which it will plant to Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Pinot Meunier within the next eighteen months.

The goal of the "multimillion pound investment", chairman Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger said at a press conference in London's Westminster Abbey, is to produce some 25,000 cases of "premium English sparkling wine".

The vineyard will be called Domaine Evremond, after the 17th Century French writer, diplomat and anglophile, Charles de Saint-Evremond, who is buried in Poet's Corner in the abbey, which stands opposite the Houses of Parliament.

"He was a great diplomat, a great epicurean and bon viveur, the most loved Frenchman in England, a friend of Charles II, and a true connoisseur of Champagne," Taittinger said. "He worked to abolish frontiers between England and France."

Taittinger went on to say that his aim in establishing a vineyard in England was to "pay our debt of gratitude to the United Kingdom for what you have done for Champagne over the last 200 years, and to show the great friendship that exists between the two countries."

There is another connection with Kent, he added – his father Jean, as mayor of Reims, twinned the town with Canterbury in the 1970s.

The company also said its aim was "not just to be an English sparkling winemaker, but also an active supporter of the whole English wine industry".

It took the Taittinger team, along with viticulturalists such as English wine expert Stephen Skelton MW, two years to find the right land. They considered Sussex and Hampshire but after exhaustive analysis finally chose the former apple farm near Chilham.