Elite Traveler Summer 2023

KRUG AND LOUIS ROEDERER

elite traveler SUMMER 2023 105

The tales of these two champagnes show di ff erent ways of leading in a region that’s all about luxury. When it comes to price, collector demand and stellar quality, the best cuvées from both of these producers clearly meet the basic test. The prestigious image of Krug, owned by LVMH, owes much to what former CEO Maggie Henríquez referred to as “a founding myth, the aura of history,” to transparency about what’s in the bottle, and to a link between sound and taste perception. Founder Joseph Krug was a visionary for his time in creating multi vintage Grande Cuvée, and today’s bottles o ff er collectors a code to discover how each wine was made. Olivier Krug, the sixth generation, who is still involved, likes to talk about Grande Cuvée as “an orchestral composition.” His family’s long association with music inspired Krug Echoes, original compositions to match each edition of Grande Cuvée, and the rare single vineyard bottling, Clos du Mesnil. Louis Roederer, on the other hand, has led in sustainability. Under the stewardship of chef de cave Jean-Baptiste Lécaillon, Roederer was the fi rst grand marque to shift to organic and biodynamic viticulture especially for its fl agship wine, Cristal. krug.com; louis-roederer.com

DOMAINE DE LA ROMANÉE CONTI Burgundy is a region of modest winemaking domaines. Yet the grand cru vineyards belonging to world-renowned Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC) in Vosne Romanée have been celebrated since before the French Revolution as the source of the region’s most perfect, expensive and scarce pinot noirs. The velvety, rose-petal scented wine from the top plot, four-acre Romanée-Conti, always shows intensely pure, complex, savory-earthy fl avors that re fl ect its singular terroir. Only 6,003 bottles were made in the 2020 vintage, which I tasted in March, and the price of each is about $30,000. Montrachet, the domaine’s rare white from an even smaller vine plot, is surely the purest, most elegant chardonnay in theworld. Long a sustainability trendsetter, DRC farms its vineyards biodynamically. And now-retired co-director Aubert de Villaine spent a decade working to gain Unesco World Heritage status in 2015 for all Burgundy’s patchwork of ‘climats,’ or

individual terroirs. romanee-conti.fr

Marchesi Antinori’s cellars

Domaine de la Romanée Conti in Vosne-Romanée farms its vineyards biodynamically

PRIMUM FAMILIAE VINI The Latin name of this unique, informal 12-member association founded in 1991 means ‘The First Families of Wine,’ and all of them certainly qualify. They include European wine estates that go back to 1385 (Marchesi Antinori in Tuscany), 1797 (Egon Müller Scharzhof in Germany’s Mosel), 1864 (the Alvarez family at Spain’s Vega Sicilia) and two Bordeaux fi rst growth châteaux, Mouton Rothschild and Haut-Brion. The group is bound together by a commitment to several key aspects of luxury: wine quality, protecting the environment, meticulous craftsmanship and, especially, their obsession with passing on values and traditions from one generation to the next. They aim to be examples to others trying to sustain family legacies, and to use their long histories and famous wines to highlight other family companies making high-end products with an annual €100,000 prize launched in 2020. In 2019, for a grand lunch in New York, each family brought a fl agship wine, such as the rare very sweet Egon Müller Scharzhofberger Riesling that retails for about $8,500. But every wine the members poured would unquestionably be recognized as a luxury wine. pfv.org

Domaine de la Romanée-Conti is known for the most perfect and scarce pinot noirs

Photos Roberto Quagli, Boris Zharkov