NV Krug Grande Cuvee 168ème Édition Champagne 750 ml

We’ve offered some incredible Champagnes over the years. But never before have we cracked the vault on this king’s bounty: Krug’s regal Grande Cuvée, a legend from the house many consider the greatest in Champagne.

We’ve tasted previous iterations of this wine before on a few special occasions—a 2010 New Year’s Eve dinner at Daniel, a friend’s summer home on the coast of Nice at sunset. When a sample arrived at our office, we couldn’t help but treat it with a degree of reverence, edged with Christmas morning excitement.

The 168th release is based on the radiant 2012 vintage, with almost half composed of 198 reserve wines blended from 11 vintages dating back to 1996. An irrepressible, sassy mousse hints at the celebratory golden core, with freshly baked brioche, Asian pear, and golden apples leading on the nose, dusted with toasted hazelnuts. The palate is mouthwatering, rich, seamless, and broad, the elegant acidity carrying on through a persistent, polished finish.

Dual 96-point scores place this bottle squarely in must-have collector territory. “The wine is pure and softly powerful, youthful energy finely poised, somewhat cautious after so many years in the chalky cellars,” wrote Decanter in a rhapsodic review. “In these days of privation, [it] takes one to wherever one may wish to go.”

“A classic in the making,” raved Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate. “It's deep and elegantly fleshy, with a beautifully refined mousse and an enveloping core of fruit that's complemented by the characteristic Krug patina of nutty complexity imparted by barrel fermentation.”

If you drink Champagne seriously, you’re likely already headed for the buy button on this gorgeous rarity. But no matter what the make-up of your cellar might be, Krug’s timeless (literally) Grande Cuvée is a stellar, jealously-inducing, make-it-a-night-to-remember addition.

The production of Krug’s Grande Cuvées takes place on a timeline foreign to most of us. Each annual release requires somewhere between 20 and 25 years to assemble. To give you a sense of scale, this spring they were working on assembling the 175th edition—likely slated for sale somewhere around 2030.

This 168th edition has been attracting special attention because it is based on the 2012 vintage, which some consider the best of the century. Charles Philipponnat told Vinous: “2012 is the greatest vintage since 1959.” It was as dry a year in Champagne as anyone has seen since the early 1970s; it was also historically quite low in volume, with yields down 20% across the board. These factors in combination with other climatic conditions gave the 2012 stock a uniquely powerful concentration, which cellarmaster Eric Lebel and current winemaker Julie Cavil sought to tame with the finely tuned selection of nearly 200 reserve wines.

It’s that blend of aged wines and fresher vintages that endow this wine with such a complex range of flavors, from green apple to dried apricot—and no one blends better than Krug. This release is composed of 52% Pinot Noir (including one wine harvested in 1996 from the Grand Cru village Verzenay), 35% Chardonnay, and 13% Pinot Meunier.

That final blend aged for seven years starting in 2013. Now it’s on the market, after years of labor, patience, and painstaking curation—a testament to Champagne at its best.