Blending masterclass at the Krug Celebration

Krug is one of the last houses to blend their ‘non-vintage’ champagne, the Grande Cuvee and they had just finished putting the 2012 version together a week or two earlier. Every year, they start with all over again, not considering what they have done in the past. Initially, Chef de Cave Eric Lebel and his team started out in September with over 300 wines to choose from to use for the blend.

Over the next few months they held one tasting a day to determine which should go into the blend. I asked Frederica, one of the winemakers,why they had only one tasting a day? Surely it would be faster to do 2 or 3 tastings each day. She said that they had tried to do 2 a day but in the end it was too difficult to give accurate assessments of the wines and so they reverted back to one tasting a day. Eric, has a special black notebook where he keeps notes on each of the wines tasted. He has to answer two questions every year: 1) to make a vintage champagne and 2) which wines should be saved as reserve wines. For 2012 it has been decided not to make a vintage Krug as the harvest was so small that they would not have enough wine left for the reserve if they made a vintage champagne.

On to our little experiments to create a Krug Grande Cuvee. As the previous day we had tried the base wines of 2012, now we were being giving a combination of chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot muenier – 16 2012’s and 12 reserve wines to make our own Krug Grande Cuvee 2012 blend. The oldest reserve wine being a 1996 pinot noir.

We were giving 2 and 1/2 hours to make our blend so we quickly got down to re-tasting the wines and then proceeded to divide up the percentages of what we thought should go into the blend. We decided on 70% 2012 wines and 30% reserve wines. It was a challenge to blend a batch of chardonnay, pinot noir and pinot meunier. Each had to be done separately to ensure that we had the right blend before we combined them all in the grande cuvee blend. It might sound easy but it’s not! We also had to figure out what percentage of each wine would go into each the blend. There was a lot of maths going on around the table and we all at some point had our heads down with iPhones set to “calculator” in hand.  I’m not a fan of numbers but sometimes they are essential.

Finally, we had our blend and presented it along with the 3 other teams. We all had the chance to try the others’ blends and it was a provocative result. Despite having all the same wines, each of our wines were very different. One blend was rather flat. which we attributed to too much chardonnay used in the blend, the next was very good but with a bit too much fruit showing. One of the other tables had made a very good blend which we all enjoyed and ours, well, ours was built to last! Needless to say, we thought ours was the best 🙂

Afterwards, Eric told us the blend that Krug used for 2012. Here is it: 58% 2012 wines,  42% reserve wines, with 52% pinot noir, 35% chardonnay and 13% pinot muenier. We were quite chuffed that we had used 13.5% pinot muenier in our blend – maybe there is still hope to be a Krug champagne maker. In total, Krug used 198 different wines and 11 different years (the oldest reserve wine the 1991) for their 2012 Grande Cuvee.

After that tough morning of tasting and blending we were treated to a last lunch at the house. As a final surprise, we were served Krug Rose in magnum (2004 base) with our simple lunch of roast chicken, pumpkin puree and buckwheat. It was not a fancy meal but good hearty food and it matched very well with the rose.

Krug doesn’t usually do rose in magnum and these were the first ones they have opened so far. All too soon we had to catch our train back to Paris but it was a tremendous few days in the company of the Krugs and a fantastic experience. Look out for the Krug Grande Cuvee (base 2012) in 2020 when it should be ready for release.