2008 Krug: Monumental Champagne
This Friday night, Cinnamon and I shared a bottle of the greatest young vintage I have ever tasted from the legendary house of Krug, their monumental 2008. The bottle that we drank was Krug ID 419044, and all the technical details are available on the Krug App or Krug website simply by entering this ID number. To celebrate Krug’s ingredient of the year, rice, we picked up sushi to have with it from Kanpai in Palo Alto. Chefs (famous and home alike) all over the world are creating special pairings for Krug with rice this year, and you can follow them on Instagram by using the #krugxrice hashtag.
Expectations were high for this bottle, given that it was the most anticipated release in my 22 years of doing the Champagne buying at K&L. Those expectations were exceeded. It is a darn shame that so little of this great wine is available… Sadly, I do not know when we may get more. The 2008 vintage’s quality and ripe-yet-fresh style will be familiar to most reading these pages. It was a year that mirrored 1996 very closely, with a very sunny autumn cooled by unusual east winds. This led to very high levels of sugar in the grapes, yet preserved unusually high levels of acidity. Many producers have told me that they were not ready for such packed ingredients as they’d had in 1996, but after seeing them once, were prepared in 2008. One can hardly go wrong with Champagne from this vintage, but this Krug goes much further than other producers. This wine will be a legend like 1945 Mouton, 1978 Hermitage La Chapelle, or 1921 Salon. They nailed it.
The 2008 Krug is composed of 53% Pinot Noir, 25% Meunier, and 22% Chardonnay. As always, the wine is 100% barrel fermented in used barrels, so as not to give the wine oak flavors, but instead to introduce oxygen to the wine in its infancy. Our bottle was disgorged in fall of 2019, after more than a decade of ageing on the lees and two-and-a-half years on the cork before we enjoyed it. The color was light gold and promised great richness. I was surprised that the high-quality Chardonnay was the first thing to jump out at me aromatically. There is a lime component that reminded me of a Coche-Dury Enseigneres in its striking purity. But the 2008 Krug goes beyond that with hazelnut depth from its top-class, barrel-fermented Pinot Noir and the profound savor of old-vine Meunier. Amazingly, the wine is completely elegant on the mid-palate, without a trace of heaviness. The power comes on the finish: this wine fans out in a peacock’s tail of complexity and swells up showing more concentration than when it is in the mouth. The legendary acidity of 2008 carries the chalky minerality of the finish on and on.
I hope that my Champagne loving friends will have an opportunity to experience this monumental 2008. Too bad so little is around! You can add yourself to the waiting list here.
A toast to you!