Tim Hall joins Krug director Olivier Krug and chef de cave Julie Cavil in Reims and Ambonnay for the launch of Champagne Krug Grande Cuvée 174th Edition.
Champagne and real estate share the same watchwords: location, location, location. The good grower domaines and grandes marques all aspire to a mastery of terroir—the quality and typical tastes of grapes from Champagne’s myriad villages and lieux-dits. Without that grasp, no blend, whether from one lieu-dit, several, or many villages, can be harmonious. And with that is seasoned knowledge of how harvests play tricks. Each vintage may give you grapes ranging from perfect to so-so or cry havoc and let slip the dogs, be they in the form of frost, both mildews, or, increasingly, too much heat. And that matrix of quality and potential from each terroir will vary each year. Krug is, for many, the Champagne quintessence of this fundamental skill—how to select from the best locations each year to make the best blend. Grande Cuvée—the epitome of this nose-to-terroir requirement and Krug’s principal wine—is always a “prestige cuvée” in conception, creation, and positioning.
In April, Olivier Krug, director, alongside chef de cave Julie Cavil, led a “Behind the Scenes” event in Reims and at the new Joseph Winery in Ambonnay, to launch Krug Grande Cuvée 174th Edition, the flagship wine that makes up about 80% of Krug’s total progeny.
Especially for the 174th, “edition” seems every bit as apt as the term “Multi-Vintage” (which the house prefers to “Non-Vintage”), because the 2018 harvest—which makes up 64% of the blend—demanded a shrewd interpretation and the sourcing of healthy, evenly ripe grapes in the hottest vintage on record. The underlying strength of 2018, which has made some impressive Vintage wines, too, was a wet winter (13.5in [345mm] of rain from November 2017 to January 2018), gifting a chalk-held reservoir of water to sustain the vines through the July and August heatwave—vital for evenly ripe bunches. Temperatures reached a high of 94.8°F (34.9°C) on August 7, and when picking began on August 17 it was then the earliest ever in Champagne. Krug says Edition 174 is “crafted around a beautiful harvest marked by few challenges […]. This édition of Krug Grande Cuvée came together quite naturally.”
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But while Krug’s 21ha (52 acres) of owned vineyards and its closely supervised contracts with some 100 growers no doubt supplied superlative fruit, the high sugar and modest acidity levels presented a challenge. After Krug’s signature two-month, parcel-by-parcel fermentation in some 4,300 205-liter Champagne oak pièces and before transfer into tank, the house’s tasting committee spent five months recording blind assessments of each new 2018 wine while retasting the progress of the vast reserves library contained in 300 stainless-steel cuves. There is genuine Krug pride in the collegiate enterprise that compiles and enhances the tasting database app, formerly the famous Black Book. The final blend of Edition 174 was decided in 2019 by then chef de cave Éric Lebel, in his penultimate year before moving to be deputy director and handing over to Julie Cavil in 2020.
For all the relative ease and sanitary splendor of the harvest itself, it’s clear that the committee’s work in arriving at the final blend was incisive, giving us the nub of Grande Cuvée. It is never a Vintage-character, “snapshot” wine, primped out with reserves. Nor is it a repeatedly relaid foundation stone of “house style,” jockeyed into place with mallets that repeat the same measured knockings each year. Each version is a singularity, never a chip off the same old block, no simple or too obvious a congenital relation to the generalized harvest character of its birth year. The proportion of Pinot Noir in the blend of Edition 174 is the highest of the past dozen Grande Cuvées, at 54% some 7.5% higher than the average Pinot Noir fraction over the period. Likewise, the Chardonnay proportion inverses from an average of 35% in most Grande Cuvée editions to 29% in the 2018 expression.
Well-honed instinct and extensive tasting may both have led Krug to favor Pinot Noir in 2018 and downplay Chardonnay; to leverage the sheer ripeness, extract, tension, and phenolic balance of the best Pinot Noir, and avoid the heat-induced softness of many Chardonnays, which offered less of their usual precision and verticality, even from Côte des Blancs grand cru sites. And then there is the 36% of reserve wines from ten different years, the oldest being 2001. We are reminded that the sense of mitigation in successful Champagne blending is not always to find alternatives to grapes that are in low supply or damaged by disease or the weather but, increasingly, to retrieve freshness, structure, and necessary tension from immaculately preserved reserve wines kept long on their fine lees. One wonders, in the face of climate change, whether Chardonnay may no longer be the sure bet for the citric-cut freshness it has long supplied in Champagne.
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In recent years, we have marveled at how, in a seeming fit of transparency, Krug has literally opened its doors—at least to professional specialists. All enthusiasts now know so much more about Krug than they used to. I’m aware, too, of the limits to what we know. We learn of blending options, of some 500 separate library reserve wines in tank, the often more than 150 separate wines composing the blends. But the plot and path and precise choices of what and how much and when each piece of the puzzle is chosen are details we maybe shouldn’t begrudge the wines’ creators keeping to themselves. Krug’s latest musical collaboration, with Max Richter, is called Every Note Counts—a reminder that, as in music, the pleasure of fine wine is largely in listening attentively to what we taste rather than concerning ourselves too much with how it was made.
Tasting
Champagne Krug Grande Cuvée 174th Edition
Based around the 2018 vintage, 64%, plus 36% of reserve wines. 54% Pinot Noir, 29% Chardonnay, 17% Meunier. Our bottle was ID 1 25 004, disgorged in winter 2024/25. Glinting with platinum highlights; cool, with a caressing, talcum start. Just after, there’s a pert, citric, and leggiero fingertip play pressing on the palate, the bright antidote to simple fluidity. Then a mosaic of flavors resolving citrus notes into lemon oil and dried peel, white sponge, white peach flesh laced with a stricter quince, and in the background a gentle chord of shortbread like a shawl around the wine, which carries to the finish. The impression is mid-weight, as if the gentle, love-handled girth of Grandes Cuvées a decade past is not the model now. The balance currently is more youthful teetering than resolved, refreshing, while the kiss of bittersweetness on the end is a reminder of 2018’s generosity and structure, tempered by the extra-brut dosage. There’s intensity without great mass, achieved by embryonic complexity and high-pitched tension. The idea crept up on me that, for now, the wine evokes the morning or the cooler evenings of the near-torrid days that brought most of this wine home during the harvest. A very good Grande Cuvée that will show even more with time. | 94
