Since 1843, six generations of the Krug family have perpetuated this dream, enriching the Joseph Krug’s vision and savoir faire. Today, the Family House welcomes Krug Lovers from around the world to take a sensorial journey around Krug Champagne.

What are the 12 greatest wine estates in the world? A subjective question, surely. Lewis Chester doesn’t think so. The British financier and founder of the Golden Vines awards kicks off a series where he outlines for LUX his golden dozen, the most collectible wine estates from the world’s major regions. For the first instalment, he pays homage to Krug, the revered champagne house owned by LVMH

Why begin my personalised list of the World’s Best 12 Fine Wine Estates with Maison Krug? As a fine wine collector for almost twenty-five years, I have collected more bottles of Krug than any other wine: more than 1,500. More importantly, I drink more bottles of Krug than any other wine – every Friday night with my family at a minimum. My middle daughter, Anoushka, was just twelve years old when she developed a craving for Krug. Maggie Henriquez, at the time the Maison’s President & CEO, found out about Anoushka’s love of Krug and invited her and her friends to celebrate her future eighteenth birthday party at the estate!

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Krug evokes class and sophistication. In 2012, the late, great Paul Pontallier invited me to an 8-hour marathon lunch in the great salon of Château Margaux, one of the five left-bank First Growths. On arrival, Paul – the Château’s estate manager – served me a glass of Krug Grande Cuvée, the multi-wine non-vintage blend that Krug lovers around the world imbibe on a regular basis. At around 7pm, after having consumed six bottles of Margaux and a bottle of cognac, I asked Paul why he had chosen to serve me Krug: “We, at Château Margaux, want our guests to consider our wines as being at the same level as those from Maison Krug”. Wow! What an endorsement. Many years later, I would be told something quite similar by Don Weaver, the estate manager at Harlan Estate in Napa Valley, when he met me at the winery door holding two glasses and a cold bottle of Krug Grande Cuvée.

Joseph Krug did not believe in hierarchies between his Champagnes, clearly written in his personal notebook in 1848. Today the House offers seven Champagnes, all of the same undisputed quality, each illustrating a different expression of Nature.

Krug ages forever. Along with Grande Cuvée, the ‘cheapest’ wine in the Maison’s range at around £200 per bottle, the Maison produces a vintage bottling in good years, as well as a formidable non-vintage Rosé, and a rare ‘Collection’ version of its vintage champagnes (only available to private clients). For those willing and able to pay thousands of pounds per bottle, they also produce – in miniscule quantities – a single-vineyard Blanc de Blancs (Chardonnay) wine, Clos du Mesnil, and a single-vineyard Blanc de Noirs (Pinot Noir), Clos d’Ambonnay.

Known for having wines that are generous on the palate, with huge complexity helped by ageing in wooden barrels, Krug is somewhat opposite in design to its LVMH stablemate, Dom Pérignon, which is known for its reductive style of champagnes. Unlike Dom Pérignon, Krug makes less than a tenth of the volume of wine, although getting the exact production figures from either Maison is as difficult as getting your hands on Russia’s nuclear launch codes.

Olivier Krug, the sixth generation of the Krug family and Director of the House welcomes Krug Lovers from around the world to the Family House in Reims.

The Maison was established in Reims in 1843, by Joseph Krug, a true visionary non-conformist with an uncompromising philosophy for quality. Joseph’s novel idea was to craft the very best Champagne he could offer, every single year, regardless of annual variations in climate – rather than bottling a wine only in good vintages. He also introduced the idea of building an extensive library of reserve wines from many different years to craft the perfect blend. Six generations of the Krug family have continued Joseph’s work, with Olivier Krug being the latest in a long line of family members to be working at the estate which has been owned by LVMH since 1999.
The most recent innovation at the estate was numbering each bottling of Krug Grande Cuvée with an ‘Edition’ number. In 2016, Edition 163eme was launched, representing the 163rd annual bottling of Grande Cuvée from the time of Joseph Krug’s first vintage in 1844. Krug Rosé edition numbers shortly followed suit. Collectors can use the Krug app to quickly find out what and how many wines comprise any given Edition number, and even what music ensemble to pair with the wine. For instance, the most recent release, 171eme Edition, is blended with 131 wines from 12 different years (2015 all the way back to 2000), made up of 45% Pinot Noir, 37% Chardonnay and 18% Meunier grapes. Julie Cavil, the Chef de Cave, recommends enjoying this Krug with Joseph’s Theme: Dream Variation (composed by Kazu Makino et al).

Read more: A tasting of Drouhin’s fine Burgundies

Lewis’s Best 3 Wines from Maison Krug

Krug, Clos du Mesnil, 1979: the first vintage from this iconic single vineyard, it ranks as one of the best three wines I have ever tasted from any estate. Aromas of roses and petals, and a finish that ran for several minutes in the mouth. Worldclass.

Krug, Clos du Mesnil, 2002: although still a relative puppy, I am convinced that the 2002 vintage will last for another twenty-plus years and be considered alongside the 1979 vintage as a legendary wine.

Krug, Vintage 1988: if you can find a bottle that has been stored well, the wine will be remarkably fresh, vibrant and complex, and I guarantee that it will blow your socks off.

Each year, Krug’s Cellar Master auditions 250 wines of the year and 150 reserve wines when creating a new Édition of Krug Grande Cuvée

The 2024 edition of the Golden Vines awards will take place in Madrid between October 25-27 2024. liquidicons.com

Eurocave’s wine storage cabinets can be built into kitchen interiors, such as this cabinet from the Inspiration range

LUX Editor-in-Chief Darius Sanai shares his experiences of storing and spoiling wine, and explains why Eurocave cabinets offer the optimum storage conditions

Wine is a subject that can engage a vast cast of humans in discussion, from friends wondering what to drink on their terrace in St Tropez next summer that won’t give them a headache, to full-on geek discussions about the grape picking dates in the grand cru vineyards of Gevrey-Chambertin in 2017, via speculation on which wines will be the next to jump in price and provide a payoff for speculators.

But storing wine? I can’t remember the last time I spoke to anyone outside the wine trade about that. You buy it, you store it somewhere not too hot until it’s ready, then you drink it. What’s there to discuss?

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Quite a lot, as it happens, as how you store wine is an essential element not just of ownership, but of the point of the stuff, which is how much you enjoy drinking it. There is an old adage that there is no such thing as a great wine, just a great bottle of a wine, and much of the truth in this emanates from the extreme sensitivity of wine – any wine – to how it is stored. Wine is fermented fruit juice, and some of the finest wines contain minimal amounts of (natural) preservative, so rely almost entirely on a natural process to improve in the bottle, and also not to spoil, like any other foodstuff.

The first rule of buying wine – any wine, whether it’s a case of Domaine de la Romanee Conti, or a bottle over dinner – is provenance, which means being as sure as you can that it has been stored correctly to date. A single morning in a hot warehouse, or lying on a wharf in direct sunlight on an August day in the Mediterranean, is enough to ruin a wine, permanently. Sometimes there may be telltale signs, like the cork pushing out through the capsule, or rivers of dried wine, escaped from the bottle when the liquid expanded as it heated. Often, though, there are no signs, which means you need to trust your consignor, or know you are taking a gamble with your money.

Read more: Why responsible travel means authenticity

If provenance is what has happened to a wine until you lay hands on it, storage is what happens to a wine after you buy it. If you happen to live in a country pile with a deep, windowless cellar, or have a professional cellar in your house – congratulations, there’s no need to read on. (But even you have a proper cellar in your main home, you may not have one in every place in which you serve wine.) If not, and you plan on keeping any wine or champagne in your house more than 24 hours, ask yourself if you would store any other perishable foodstuff in a rack by your oven, in a spare room, or in a garage.

Eurocave’s Royale cabinet can store up 122 traditional Bordeaux bottles or up to 50 magnums

My own enlightenment on wine storage came after many years, and many false starts, and thousands of pounds’ worth of spoiled wines, after trying almost every alternative to spending money on the highest quality storage cabinets for wine. Here’s what happened to me and why (actually, I present those two in reverse order for reasons I hope will become evident) – hopefully this will allow you to travel a smoother route to enjoying your wines as they were made to be enjoyed:

1. Heat kills wine.

And so does direct sunlight. Once, I took up a friend’s offer to store my wine collection in his country house basement. What could possibly go wrong in damp, cool England? I was horrified to discover, on paying a social call, that the dark, damp basement I had deposited the wines in during January became a bright, hot basement in July, as its high-level windows caught the summer sun and created a greenhouse effect. The result was a lot of French wine vinegar.

2. Even if it’s dark and never hot, temperature variation kills wine.

After the country house episode, I bit the bullet and bought some wine cabinets. Declining to buy expensive “restaurant” type cabinets, I purchased small, attractive and cheap wine cabinets from a fashionable homeware store. Six months later, every bottle I opened from these cabinets was nasty. Extensive investigation revealed that these cabinets only imposed a temperature ceiling, through cooling – they had no heat facility. They were placed next to a draughty French window at home, which, in winter, when winds came from the east, let in icy air. When the wind changed, the area of the house was the same temperature as the rest of home. A 15 degree variation, often in a single day. More vinegar. (Cold conditions by themselves can also damage wine, as the liquid contracts and the resulting vacuum can suck in oxidising air).

Read more: How Hong Kong’s M+ museum will transform Asia’s art scene

3. Sunlight kills wine.

Extensive laboratory testing has proven that even a few minutes of direct sunlight can irrevocably damage a wine. That few minutes can be the sun shining onto your meticulously installed home shelving for half an hour a day during a certain month, while you’re at work and unaware. This resulted in some very rank champagnes.

Finally, a few years ago, having spent years making significant investments in wine, only to see a fair amount of that destroyed by the above, I made an investment that changed my wine life. I bought the best specification wine cabinets I could find, and since have housed every bottle I own in them. Eurocave make the fridge-sized cabinets you see in restaurants and hotels.

The Eurocave Tête à Tête wine cabinet stores up to 12 bottles

Eurocave cabinets work because:

a) unlike many other species of wine cabinet, they are made to both cool and warm the air inside them, allowing a constant temperature no matter what happens outside (mine are in a garage) – this is enormously important, per point 2 above, and buying a wine cabinet which can’t do this is like buying a chocolate teapot.

b) they are extremely well insulated. This means that the effect of any outside temperature variations, or a power cut, is minimised. A lot of wine cabinets have a metal wall between inside and outside – metal is an excellent thermal conductor, meaning it is a terrible insulator.

c) they have either solid or UV-tinted doors, meaning no spoilage due to light is possible.

Within the range, there is an enormous amount of choice in terms of size, capacity and function – you can have sliding shelves for individual bottles, or fixed shelves for piles of bottles of cases. They aren’t cheap, but nor are the wines I store in them. So until you buy the country pile, or install a full cellar room (Eurocave do those) in your house, buy one. Your wines, and your future self, will thank you.

Find out more: eurocave.co.uk