What do you mean ‘a little death’?” asked Pierre-Emmanuel Taittinger.

The question from the head of one of France’s leading champagne houses was prompted during lunch last week at The Modern, the restaurant attached to the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan. Pierre-Emmanuel clearly enjoyed sharing one of the finest bottles his company produced, a vintage 1999 Comtes de Champagne. "Can you think of anything better? Well, perhaps sex. Sometimes it's hard to tell which is best," he said.

“A little like la petit mort,” remarked our dining companion, Marybeth Bentwood, the head of public relations for Kobrand Wine and Spirits, the New York-based distributor for Taittinger in the United States.

Pierre-Emmanuel had never heard the expression, a euphemism for an orgasm. We try to explain it to him, but there’s an absurdity to the whole episode—here are two Americans trying to translate a French metaphor about the ultimate satisfaction to a sophisticated-yet-humble Frenchman who takes obvious delight in what he’s doing.

This wasn’t intended as a lunch to talk about a specific Taittinger product or a new advertising campaign or a business proposition. It was simply a meal to get to know the 57-year-old head of one of the most well-known family businesses in the world—a man who helped his branch of his famous family win back control of their eponymous champagne house in 2006, a year after the Starwood Capital Group bought the Taittinger Group, which had grown to include Baccarat Crystal and luxury-hotel properties, for 2.1 billion euros.

Starwood decided after buying Taittinger that it would keep the real estate holdings, but wanted to divest itself the portion of the company it knew the least about—its champagne house, a vineyard in the Loire Valley, and the Domaine Carneros winery in California’s Napa Valley. Pierre-Emmanuel mounted a yearlong effort to return Taittinger champagne to his branch of the family (there were seven lines of Taittingers involved in the original Taittinger Group) and succeeded with his offer of 590 million euros. The revived company kept the Napa Valley property, but sold off its Loire holdings.

“My grandfather gave me a book when I was 5 years old,” Pierre-Emmanuel said. “In the dedication it said ‘To my grandson, who will one day be an entrepreneur and be the guardian of the family tradition.’”

That tradition now includes Pierre-Emmanuel’s own children: a son, Clovis Taittinger, a 32-year-old who had a successful real estate career before joining his father as the company’s chief export official; and a daughter, Vitalie Taittinger, a 31-year-old graphic artist who handles the company’s artistic vision.

“The fact that I bought it back created a huge promotion for the brand,” Pierre-Emmanuel said with a smile. He is not boasting. He doesn’t know that the restaurant’s big wine chiller sits behind him, emblazoned with the Taittinger logo. He’s simply speaking with the satisfaction of a man who rescued a brand that bore his family’s name since 1932.

While Pierre-Emmanuel has no problems talking about Champagne Taittinger, he is eager to discuss much more—the health of the U.S. economy (he wanted to get my take on how this nation fared), attempts to raise the retirement age in France (he praised the work ethic of Americans as he admonished his own countrymen for being so opposed to a two-year extension of their working lives), the ethnic diversity of New York City (he suggested I learn a few words of Polish so I could better communicate with my landlord), and the limits of email (he much prefers doing business by phone, if not in person). Among his candid observations:

• “Global warming has been very good for champagne,” he says a bit mischievously, noting that the last 10 years or so have produced six vintage releases, and he doesn’t know yet if the current year will have the same luck. Normally, a vintage release comes every three years or so.
• “You will not drink champagne on the Internet. You will not have sex on the Internet,” he says, eschewing much of an interest in digital communications. Drinking champagne is, ultimately, a purely social experience.
• “Speed is not always a friend,” he says, comparing the pace of life in a city like New York or Paris with that in the French winemaking countryside.

Toward the end of our 90-minute lunch, I asked him what was the main lesson he had to offer entrepreneurs. “Be yourself,” he said. “Have ideas. And, more importantly, do them. Make them a reality.”