Clos to Perfection

JON WALL visits a tiny corner of Champagne’s Côtes des Blancs that produces one of the most celebrated sparkling wines ever concocted

HUNKERED DOWN AGAINST the midsummer heat on the baking chalk slopes of the Côtes des Blancs, the somnolent village of Le-Mesnil-sur-Oger, 160km east of Paris, seems an unlikely source for one of the most celebrated wines in the world. Yet it’s in a walled, 1.8-hectare plot in the heart of this modest settlement of 1,200 people that the great house of Krug grows the Chardonnay grapes that go into Clos du Mesnil – its single-vineyard vintage blanc de blancs. And it’s to this idyllic spot, sheltered from the sun by a stand of trees, that we’ve come for lunch in the garden and to learn more about the wine and the maison.

In fact, we’ve already bumped into Krug’s business development manager Romain Cans, our host for the day, who joined us aboard the Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) for the 45-minute dash between Paris and Reims, and a leisurely 30-minute drive through the gently rolling countryside of Marne. As we swelter in the late-June heat, Cans tells us that this year’s grape harvest will be unusually early. “We think it’ll take place at the end of August,” he says, “and that’s very, very special. This is a key period in the year for us, because this is when the grapes are starting to take shape. They’re still green and very soon they’ll start turning yellow – or red.”

Best known for its non-vintage Grand Cuvée, which commands even higher prices than many houses’ premium vintage cuvées, the maison was founded in the 1840s by expatriate German Johann-Joseph Krug, who, after working for the champagne house Jacquesson for almost a decade, was determined to create his own wine, the quality of which would remain constant whatever its year of production. “Krug decided to go beyond vintages,” Cans says. “He didn’t want to wait for an exceptional year, so he founded his own house with the notion of creating and recreating, year after year after year, excellence in champagne. This is how he created the house of Krug, which today is the only champagne house that solely crafts prestige cuvées.

“A journalist in the UK once said that Krug starts where the others stop, and the fact is that there’s no compromise on the quality of the champagne. The objective of our winemakers is to be able to craft excellence, and how to achieve that is to look for excellence in the grapes. That’s where everything starts.”

Yet in spite of its mission to produce the most exceptional non-vintage champagne in existence, Krug also produces vintage wines, among which Clos du Mesnil has achieved almost legendary status (the maison also produces an even rarer and more expensive single-vineyard blanc de noirs: Clos d’Ambonnay). Acquired by Krug some 40 years ago and surrounded by stone walls dating to the late 17th century (at a time when the village in which it now lies didn’t exist), the clos is one of tens of thousands of small vineyards – “tiny gardens,” Cans calls them – that make up the Côtes des Blancs, where most of the region’s Chardonnay grapes are grown.

Crucially, he says, each plot delivers a different quality and character of grape, and the more characters a winemaker can choose from ensures a greater richness in the quality of the eventual blend. On average, for Grand Cuvée Krug selects grapes – Chardonnay, Pinot Meunier and Pinot Noir – from around 150 different parcels of land scattered around the region, some owned by the house itself but the majority by independent growers.

Although the development of the village around the clos helped protect the grapes against low winter temperatures and frost, Cans says that when Krug bought the property the vines were in “a pretty mediocre condition.” So the decision was taken to replant the land with five separate parcels of vines, each reflecting variations in the incline and soil. Once these matured and bore fruit it became clear through blind tastings that the wines from the property, which had originally been intended as a source for Grand Cuvée, were much more special than the winemakers had dared hope for. The result – much to the surprise of many in the wine industry, and even to those within the house itself – was Krug’s first single-vineyard blanc de blancs in 1979, which was released in 1986.

Today, says Cans, “Clos du Mesnil is one of the most mythical wines in the world of champagne. And here [at the clos], we’re trying to preserve as much as possible the beauty of the grapes that we find in this little garden, to magnify their potential and to be able to develop here one of the most precise, elegant and refined expressions of the Chardonnay [grape] that you can find in champagne.”

Like all vintage Krugs, Clos du Mesnil is declared only in exceptional years – “years of character” – though even then not necessarily using the grapes of all five parcels. Wines of years when a vintage is not declared are retained in reserve at the house’s headquarters in Reims for blending into the non-vintage Grand Cuvée, which itself is created from wines of up to 15 years old.

Only around 10,000 bottles of Clos du Mesnil are produced each vintage, the last to be released being 1998, which, according to Cans, was a remarkable year. “We might be seeing something similar this year because 1998 was very warm and especially good for Chardonnay,” he tells us, as we stand in the sun, sipping the foaming golden liquid and savouring its magical notes of fruit, honey and spices.

“One of the key rules we have at Krug is that individuality is maintained, and that each and every element that enters the blend in the creation of a cuvée is irreproachable. Many champagne houses declared a vintage in 1999. Krug did not, but we did create a Clos du Mesnil 1999. We did a tasting last December and our winemakers decided, even though this wine was crafted in the same way as all our other wines, even though 1999 was interesting on paper when we originally decided to [go ahead], and even though we’d kept the wine for 12 years, that we would never, ever release it.”

The quality just wasn’t at the level that the house was looking for. “It was a high-quality champagne,” says Cans, raising a glass of the previous year’s vintage that did pass the rigorous taste test, “but it didn’t match our standards.”