Krug Grande Cuvée & Vintage Vertical Tasting: 2000-2010

Joseph Krug founded his eponymous house in 1843. Five years later, he documented his great vision for Krug in a cherry-red leather notebook, outlining the principles he saw as pertinent for producing champagne of unrivalled quality, such as: selecting only the finest elements from the greatest terrors; rejecting mediocre fruit; and making both a non-vintage and a vintage cuvée – common practice now, but revolutionary back then.

Although nowadays most houses produce both non-vintage and vintage champagnes, Krug remain unique in that their range consists of only prestige cuvées. Whereas the non-vintage champagne is the entry-level cuvée at most houses, Krug Grande Cuvée NV – priced at a similar level to the prestige cuvées of many other major champagne houses – is a prestige cuvée in its own right.

Like other non-vintages, Grande Cuvée consists of wine from several years: a base vintage (the youngest in the blend) and reserve wines from older vintages. What makes Grande Cuvée unique is that the proportion of reserve wines is unusually high (typically 30-50%) and the reserve wines are unusually old (the youngest Edition in this tasting, the 2010 base, features reserve wine from 1998).

“At Krug, we’re not about consistency but generosity. We don’t work to a rulebook or a formula and want to celebrate the differences from year to year” – Olivier Krug

Further, as Krug handle their multitude of reserves wines in individual batches before vinification (typically one grape variety, from one vineyard and one vintage), they have several hundred blending components to choose from for Grande Cuvée each year. Well over 100 different wines from more than 10 different vintages are typically chosen. For this reason, Krug prefer the term ‘multi-vintage’.

Given the typically high percentage of reserve wines from such old vintages, Krug manage to produce a very consistent style and quality with Grande Cuvée each year. However, with 50-70% of the blend coming from one base vintage, each Edition inevitably displays subtle differences that showcase the characteristics of that year.

In late 2016, Krug began numbering each Grande Cuvée blend to promote the individuality of each creation and allow the ageing capacity and potential complexity of Grande Cuvée to be better understood. Now that Grande Cuvée displays its Edition on the label, the famous non-vintage can be fully appreciated as a series of difference releases – which can now be easily compared and explored.

The next step-up in quality level is vintage champagne. Again, where at most houses the vintage category champagnes situate themselves above the brut non-vintage, but below the top prestige cuvée range, at Krug the distinction is obsolete. Their vintage champagnes reveal the unique characteristics of each year; expert blends of expressive wines enhanced by more than ten years of maturity in the cellars, named to reflect their individual identities: Krug 2000 ‘Stormy Indulgence’; Krug 2002 ‘Ode to Nature’; Krug 2003 ‘Vivacious Radiance’; and Krug 2004; ‘Luminous Freshness’.

For our latest tasting, we presented ten Krug champagnes covering the first decade of this century: Krug Vintages 2000-2004 and Krug Grande Cuvée Editions 162-166 NV (base vintages 2006-2010), with Krug 2000 from both bottle and magnum.

The champagnes tasted are listed below in order of rank, by group average score. Tasting notes are all The Finest Bubble’s.