I do not know who to give credit to for this article, but it came to me via email and is worth placing here for all of us Krug lovers to learn more and appreciate:
"Chances are when you open your first bottle of Krug Champagne you’ll be toasting a special moment in your life—or even better, taking an ordinary Monday and making it memorable. You likely won’t be thinking about the wine’s evocative notes of brioche, hazelnut and citrus, or the roughly 400 individual wines tasted and 5,000 tasting notes recorded during the wine’s conception. You probably won’t care that the Krug team assembled a wine composed of 120 wines from ten different years, and you certainly won’t note that a single bottle of Krug embodies the collective decision of as many as seven people’s tasting notes and opinions. As Olivier Krug, likes to remind everyone, “The Krug Moment should always be about pleasure,” and notebooks, tasting notes, blending sessions and analysis are not pleasure. Yet, what happens each year to make a single bottle of Krug Grande Cuvée is compelling stuff, and it is unlike anything else that happens in the world of Champagne.
Each year Krug makes what they call Krug Grande Cuvée which, in simple terms, is a blend of various wines from the harvest and from previous years. Yet, it’s not at all simple. Krug Cellar Master, Eric Lebel, is something of a Champagne genius, a Mozart of bubbly, orchestrating over 400 different elements each year into his blended masterpiece: The Cuvee.
Lebel is a serious person. He cracks a smile occasionally, but he has a lot on his mind such as his large black notebook, thick with grape stained notes (he estimates 5,000 or so notes in one year) from tastings. He’s not only tasting wine; his notes go as far back as the beginning of the growing season when he tastes individual grape samples from each and every vineyard. He doesn’t like to go far, (leaving the business of parties, fundraisers and promotion to the effusive Olivier Krug), preferring to stay in constant contact with his wines.
He’s a tough gatekeeper, putting over 3,000 miles on his car each harvest visiting each grower to ensure things are coming along. Tasting is an obsessive habit for Lebel, when he isn’t tasting grapes in the vineyard; he’s working his way through the library reserve wines, which add up to 120 to 150 per year. To make things even more challenging, each harvest Krug vinifies each plot of grapes separately. After fermentation the individual wines from each plot are then stored separately and tasted separately. Absolutely nothing is blended until it is time to compose the Grande Cuvée. This way he can call on the individual notes of each wine to help compose the perfect blend.
Lebel isn’t just responsible for composing the cuvée—-he’s also on the hook for future generations of Krug, selecting which specific wines from the harvest he must set aside as reserve wines for future use. And, finally, Lebel must also tastes the wines after aging to ensure the cuvee is maturing properly.Indeed, one rarely sees him without his large black notebook and when he talks about coping with the pressure of getting the blend just right each year (and remembering all of those individual tastes), he makes a vague, slightly Zen statement, referring the moment of blending as a “matter of introspection.” You can’t teach that in winemaking school, you just have to know when it’s right.
And, what is Krug when it’s right? It is not a blanc de blanc, or a blanc de noirs, or even a vintage, when asked if it can be called a non-vintage blend Lebel shakes his head: “Non. The term non-vintage is too common.” Krug is something unique, a multi-vintage expression crafted from over 200 to 250 separate plots of grapes. This is exactly why a sip of Krug hits every note on your palate—fresh, rich, playful and complex; it sure tastes good—but Lebel probably already has that written down in his notebook, on the last page."
After re-reading this, Im thirsty and have a good idea as to which bubbly were drinking tonight.
Cheers,
Blake
![[cheers.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/0/0ff9bfcdb0964982cd3240b6159868fbdf215b1a.gif "cheers"){kind=small}