Deliciously balanced, this Champagne is impressive. The iconic wine is in its 171st blend, meaning it combines vintages for the best result for each bottling, not a specific vintage. The 171st essence is dry, while also having fine textured fruit. This is a magnificent wine... *Cellar Selection* (RV)

The current release of Krug “Grande Cuvée”, their 171ème Édition of this beautiful bottling, is based on the vintage of 2015. I last had the opportunity to drink this wine in the summer of 2023 and it has just continued to blossom in the interim. For those keeping score at home, the wine includes reserve wines back to 2000 in the blend and ended up being crafted from a cépages of forty-five percent pinot noir, thirty-seven percent chardonnay and eighteen percent pinot meunier. The reserve wines constitute more than forty percent of the cuvée in this iteration. The wine delivers a very refined and impressively open bouquet of apple, pear, fresh baked bread, chalky minerality, caraway seed, almond, fruit blossoms and gentle smokiness in the upper register. The touch of oak the wine showed eight months ago has already been subsumed in the other aromatic elements. On the palate the wine is deep, full-bodied and impeccably balanced, with fine depth at the core, lovely soil signature, refined mousse and a long, complex and beautifully precise finish. It remains a young wine that will drink even better five to ten years down the road, but it is hard to keep one’s hands off of it already.

The NV Grande Cuvée 171ème Edition is a delightful blend of 45% Pinot Noir, 37% Chardonnay and 18% Pinot Meunier and boasts an attractive and captivating aroma of dried fruits, pastry, lemon oil, marzipan, spring flowers and ginger, with hints of almond and vanilla notes that become more pronounced over time. This medium to full-bodied wine is precise and well-structured, with a fleshy core of fruit and a sapid, incisive finish. Crafted around the 2015 vintage, the blend comprises 131 reserve wines from as far back as 2000 (42% of the total blend) and is expected to age beautifully over the next decade. (YC)