The week before last I had the privilege of being able to visit the Champagne house Krug in Reims. I owed this pleasure to a friend of mine, the Brussels-based Champagne enthusiast M. This visit was characterised by two curious coincidences. At the time I booked my travel, the most recent release of a Krug Vintage, then the vintage, was in late at about the same time as I participated in a Krug Masterclass arranged by Decanter in London. Then just a week before our visit, the news emerged that Krug had just released their 3 vintage in a couple of countries, including the UK, as as reported by Decanter.
This was definitely unexpected, since was a hot year and a vintage that quite a number of Champagne houses decided to skip for their prestige Champagnes, and in many cases for their regular vintage Champagnes as well. Since Krug at a late stage bottles had been resting in the cellar for about 10 years, labels had been orderedd and so on chose to not release a Krug, it seemed like a reasonable guess that they also skip , but this was not the case.
Olivier shares his opinion about the Krug that we have just tasted. As you can see, I also look rather pleased. So it happened that we we few — I suppose five after all is rather few — we happy few, we band of brothers happened to be more-or-less the first visitors to taste the Krug on location in Reims, since our visit took place just a few days before they had come back from a first release tour.
In terms of tasting in Reims, I believe we were only beaten by an unnamed French wine journalist. We also had the pleasure of tasting the in company of Olivier Krug. Already before we go over to the detailed tasting notes, I can say that they definitely have not made a mistake by releasing the , because this vintage is definitely up to Krug Vintage standard! As an illustration of this point, we were told how they had handled the vintage.
The quality was judged to be clearly good enough for a Krug Vintage, but the quantity was rather small. After careful consideration, they therefore decided not to produce a Krug Vintage. No decision on the vintage had been taken yet at the time of our visit. But that is just a guess on my part.
