A Tribute to Chardonnay

Every Krug Vintage gets a nickname from the house’s tasting committee, and the one they gave 1998 is quietly radical: A Tribute to Chardonnay. Krug is a Pinot Noir house by instinct and by history, and in the whole line of its vintages only one before this — the 1981 — had ever led with Chardonnay. The 1998 blend runs 46% Chardonnay, 35% Pinot Noir, 19% Meunier.

The year explains the inversion. August 1998 was ferociously hot in Champagne, and the Pinots came in opulent, broad, and low on nerve. What rebalanced the blend was Chardonnay picked early from the Côte des Blancs and Trépail — the vivacity injected back in, as the house put it. The committee did not so much choose Chardonnay as need it.

Fourteen Years in the Cellar

As always with Krug, the base wines were fermented in small old oak casks, blended, and then left. The 1998 spent roughly fourteen years in Krug’s cellars before disgorgement in the winter of 2011–2012 — a schedule that makes even the long-ageing prestige cuvées of other houses look impatient. By the time any bottle of this wine reaches a table, the toast, honey and citrus register is not an accident of age; it was built in.

At twenty-two years, the wine sits in the fully mature part of its arc without tipping over. The house style — breadth from oak and lees, a ginger-and-toast spice line, richness carried on acidity rather than sugar — is all present, with the Chardonnay lead showing in a finish that narrows to citrus rather than fanning out into red fruit. Against the 1989 at thirty-five or the 1995 at thirty, the 1998 reads as the tauter, cooler-toned sibling — a Krug that finishes with a question rather than an embrace.

The Opening Act

On this evening it had the hardest job at the table: opening for La Tâche 2008, with a Liger-Belair Vosne-Romanée alongside. A Champagne poured before serious Burgundy usually gets remembered as scenery. This one held its ground — twenty-two years old, still vertical, and doing the thing Krug’s committee named it for: proving that in the right year, even at this house, Chardonnay leads.