Krug Grande Cuvée 168 Ème Édition—A Toast-Worthy Champagne

Last night, I opened a bottle of the Krug Grande Cuvée 168 Ème Édition Brut Champagne as the aperitif for Cinnamon and my father. We paired it with some excellent pistachio paté that Clyde had given us as well as the Jamon Iberico that Cinnamon gave me for my birthday. Krug Grande Cuvée is one of the world’s great wines, and unlike most of the other great wines of the world, it is a wine that is defined by time as much as it is by soil or grape varieties.

While the First Growths of Bordeaux and the greats of Burgundy and California are released young, with this Champagne, much of the aging has been done for you. The 168 Ème Édition has been aged for seven years on the lees and contains wine going back as far as 1996 and as recent as 2012—11 vintages total. The 2012 harvest, which was a small and concentrated one, makes up 58% of the blend, while the other ten vintages make up 42%. All of this information is easily available by looking up the Krug ID on the back of the bottle on the Krug website- ours was ID 119001.

This staggering work of isolating and aging individual wines is the know-how of Krug that allows them to recreate the Grande Cuvée every year. Anyone who has visited the cellars in Reims will see the amazing number of small tanks that house decades worth of wines, every one of them kept separate, waiting to be added to a future Grande Cuvée. The blend for the 168 Ème Édition is 52% Pinot Noir, 35% Chardonnay, and 13% Meunier.

I loved this wine from the moment I stuck my nose in the glass, and I find it the most extroverted release since the 165 Ème Édition. The way that the subtle white flower aromas are intertwined with warm baguette toast reminds me of the best wines of Avize. In the mouth, it is clean and bright at first blush, but layers of complexity lie just underneath with spicy, savory red cherry Pinot Noir character. With the pistachio paté, it also showed hints of tropical exoticism from the Meunier, while the Jamon brought out the firmer savoriness of the Pinot Noir. This is a wine that has a tremendous amount of hidden power, with only the finish showing obvious concentration at this point. The finish has everything I want in Krug: immense chalky drive and a review of the savory mid-palate that becomes almost Burgundian at the end.

This is a wine that will develop in a good cellar like few others from anywhere in the world. Because so much of the aging has been done for us, it is also a great choice for a special New Years' Eve bottle now. At this price, the drinking window should be open—and then stay open for a long time. As usual, Krug has delivered with this 168 Ème Édition Grande Cuvée.

A toast to you!

Gary Westby