Krug

Krug is the house that refuses Champagne's ranking of vintage above non-vintage: the blended wine is its main production, not its entry level. Krug Grande Cuvée 173ème Édition draws 150 wines from 13 different years, the youngest 2017 and the oldest 2001, with reserve wines at 31 per cent of the blend. The house sits in Champagne, in Reims — though its door does not open to the public.

Expect a bottle rather than a cellar door. Krug states on its own contact page that the house of Krug is not open to the general public, and krug.com carries no tour or tasting page at all. The encounter Krug does design sits on the label: a six-digit Krug ID, added in 2011, that unlocks the bottle's creation story online or in the Krug app, plus the restaurants and merchants the house names Krug Ambassades.

There is no visitor season at Krug, because the house does not receive the general public in any month. The working calendar is fixed, though. Barrels are watered from July in the ritual Krug calls the abreuvage, the juice ferments in September, racking the wine off its lees runs from December to February, and the tasting committee sits every morning for six months after the harvest.

Krug does not publish visiting hours, tasting prices or a booking page, because there is nothing to book: the house's own contact page states that the house of Krug is not open to the general public. There are no walk-ins at 5 rue Coquebert, 51100 Reims. The one published channel is the contact form, staffed Monday to Friday, 10:00–18:00 Paris time (July 2026). To taste Krug, use the house's retailer locator or one of its Krug Ambassades.

Maison Krug's address is 5 rue Coquebert, 51100 Reims — a working address, not a visitor entrance, since Krug is not open to the general public. Reims has two main stations: Gare de Reims in the city centre and Gare de Champagne-Ardenne TGV, five kilometres south-west, on the high-speed line to Paris. Two other Reims houses, Taittinger and Ruinart, stand in the same city.

Krug is the Champagne house at 5 rue Coquebert in Reims whose flagship wine carries no vintage year on the label. Joseph Krug founded it in 1843, and every year since, the house has blended a new édition of Krug Grande Cuvée from more than 120 individual wines drawn from over ten different harvests. The current release, Krug Grande Cuvée 173ème Édition, holds 150 wines from 13 years.

Joseph Krug founded Maison Krug in Reims in 1843 and wrote his vision into a dark cherry personal notebook in 1848. Rémi and Henri Krug, the fifth generation, secured the walled Clos du Mesnil in 1971 and made its first wine from the 1979 harvest. Rémy Cointreau sold Krug to LVMH in January 1999. The Joseph winery opened in 2024, and King Charles III revoked Krug's British royal warrant, reported in January 2025.

Krug owns about 20 hectares of vines — at Ambonnay, Aÿ, Le Mesnil and Trépail — and buys the rest of its fruit from long-term contract growers across 250 plots, selected from some 270,000 registered in Champagne. Every Krug grower engagement is tied to a named plot rather than to volume, the oldest running since 1876, and cellar master Julie Cavil states there is no hierarchy in the selection: no plot is favoured over another.

Two things about a Krug bottle are rarely spelled out. Bottles that left the Reims cellars before the mid-2010s carry no édition number, and older bottles may carry no Krug ID either, so the six-digit lookup simply fails on them. And Krug asks for its champagnes to be served between 9°C and 12°C, warmer than most people pour champagne, because colder temperatures limit the expression of their flavours and aromas.