Olivier Krug doesn't want to talk tariffs

The 6th generation Champagne maker has seen it all and views life through a wider lens

I asked Olivier Krug about tariffs, and he told me about phylloxera.

At first I thought the sixth generation head of Champagne Krug may have misunderstood my question, but no, his English is fine. His perspective is just broader than the narrow focus I had tried to impose on him.

“Life in a champagne house has never been a long bed of roses,” Krug told me during a recent visit to Washington, D.C. “If you look at history, we had the phylloxera,” the root louse that devastated Champagne’s vineyards in the 1890s. “We were occupied and bombed for four years during the First World War, then the Prohibition and the 1929 crisis” of the Great Depression. (He didn’t mention the collapse of the Russian market after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, but perhaps that hit Veuve Clicquot harder.)

“And now we have a cloud, much darker than anything else, the flavescence dorée,¹ this new disease coming with global warming from the south, and starting to bite some of the vineyards of Champagne,” he said. “So we are used to living with uncertainty, one of which is climate.”

I had made the mistake of seeing champagne through the miasmic lens of politics that affects all perspectives and outlooks in Washington during the rapture of the Second Coming of Trump. Wine lovers of a certain age (mine) remember the M in LVMH, the French luxury conglomerate, stands for Moët, and that LVMH’s holdings include several champagne houses, including a majority ownership in Krug. But Olivier Krug didn’t share my POV. While I saw a high-status luxury good as an easy pawn in a silly tariff war, Krug deftly reminded me that champagne is an agricultural product shaped by generations of history. Each edition of the Krug Grande Cuvée, after all, is a blend of more than 120 separate wines from more than 10 vintages. It’s not a wine of the moment, but one for the ages.

Olivier Krug. Photo: Krug.com

Krug is soft-spoken and unassuming, quick with a smile and passionate about his family’s legacy in Champagne, though his demeanor is more boardroom than riddling rack. He’s very keen on the story of the Grande Cuvée, Krug’s flagship wine, and quick to dispel any sense that it is akin to any other champagne house’s non-vintage blend.

Grande Cuvée was born of the vision of Joseph Krug, who founded Maison Krug in 1843, during a period of frenetic growth in the region’s wine industry. British and Russian soldiers who vanquished Napoleon Bonaparte a couple decades earlier fell in love with champagne, creating a demand for exports. Heavier glass and a better understanding of how much sugar to add to induce the second, bubbly, fermentation lowered the risk of exploding bottles.

The technique of blending non-vintage cuvées (sometimes called multivintage) developed as a way for a producer to create a consistent house style and guard against the vagaries of Champagne’s unreliable northern climate. Winemakers blend in reserve wines from previous years to flesh out weaknesses of the current vintage.

But Joseph Krug was what we now might call a terroir geek. Developing a network of growers throughout the Champagne region, he was very meticulous about his blending, with the idea of creating not a house-style NV wine but a premium cuvée that reflects the character of its vintage despite not being a vintage-labeled wine. This wine, which we know as Krug Grande Cuvée, is still made the same way. Cellar Master Julie Cavil and her team use separate vinifications for the wines from each grower as well as reserve wines from previous years, and blend each edition of the Grande Cuvée by selecting from more than 400 wines.

For example, the 173rd edition, which Olivier Krug brought for me to taste ahead of its U.S. release this fall, was blended from 150 wines from 13 different years. Most of these were from 2017, with 31 percent of the blend from vintages as far back as 2001. It spent about 6 years on its lees and another year in the cellar after disgorgement (the winery website is not specific about dates).

To hear Olivier Krug describe the process was a bit dizzying, because it sounded a lot like he was describing the idea of a typical non-vintage champagne. The difference in the Krug approach is the attention to individual vinifications of wines. In 2024, he said, Cavil made separate wines from 300 plots to select from in blending the Grande Cuvée we’ll get to taste in 2032.

“Champagne is very much like Burgundy,” Krug explained. “Champagne is about plots, not about good years and bad years. For some people, you add a bit more pinot, more chardonnay or meunier, and this is the only way people talk about champagne. But Champagne has more than 300 villages, with 280,000 different plots.”

Joseph Krug’s idea, his descendant explained, was to have a wide variety of elements to assemble his blend, and to keep them separate, even as reserve wines. “So he would have not only the wines of the year, but outstanding individual character from previous years, allowing him not to keep a standard, but to bring what is missing.”

Maison Krug added the edition number to the Grande Cuvée labels in 2016 to help consumers distinguish the age of their wine. It also emphasizes the individuality of each year’s cuvée and that Maison Krug has been around since 1843. Even earlier, in 2011, they added the Krug iD, a 6-digit number, to the label of every Krug wine. By entering your bottle’s Krug iD on the winery website or the Krug smartphone app, you can learn when and how the wine was made, the blend, about when it was released, and more. Most champagne houses still don’t offer this information.

Here are my notes on the four wines Olivier Krug featured during his recent visit to Washington, D.C.:

Krug Grande Cuvée 173ème Édition: Arriving in the U.S. in autumn 2025. Brioche, lemon curd and lime zest. More than individual flavors, notable for plush, generous texture. Based on the 2017 vintage, with 31% reserve wines dating back to 2001.

Krug Grande Cuvée 167ème Édition: The first to bear the edition number. Based on the 2011 vintage, with 42% from reserve wines dating to 1995. This was creamier than the 173rd, with some dried fruit and spice notes from its extended aging in bottle.

Krug 2011: I didn’t actually write any notes of my impressions, because I was focusing on what Olivier Krug was saying. “A vintage wine at Krug is not a better champagne than the Grande Cuvée,” he explained. “It tells the story of the year.” And 2011, he said, was a bit backwards, with a hot, dry start, a rainy summer, then alternating periods of heat, rain and heat. Wineries that don’t follow Krug’s micro-vinification strategy typically did not make a vintage cuvée that year, he said. The heat spikes affected the chardonnay, so this blend is heavier on pinot noir and muenier.

Krug Rosé 29ème Édition: Henri Krug, Olivier’s father, started making rosé in 1976 in response to market demand. This wine, to be release in the U.S. this autumn, is based on the 2017 vintage, with a third of the blend from reserve wines dating back to 2010. I found it fresh, structured, grounded (something I don’t usually think of with rosé of any kind) and long. It was not particularly floral or fruity. As Olivier Krug said, “It’s a Krug before it’s a rosé.”

1. Flavescence dorée, known in English as grapevine yellows, is not exactly new, but the changing climate has increased its threat by helping spread its insect vector. Like phylloxera, that insect, the leafhopper Scaphoideus titanus, is native to the eastern U.S. and Canada and was apparently introduced to Europe after World War II, according to “The Great Big Book of Everything,” a.k.a. the Oxford Companion to Wine. Once established in a vineyard, flavesence dorée can spread rapidly, killing young vines and rendering older vines uneconomical by reducing yields.