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When I was offered an interview with Manuel Reman, the new president of Krug since April 1, I thought anything but that I was dealing with a real person. Biased? Perhaps, but the fact is that I thought the register and scenario of the interview would be decided a priori by the company, which happens almost automatically when dealing with groups of this type.
The son of a French mother and a "self-taught Indian father", he grew up in Normandy, "far from the vineyards but close to nature", with his grandmother, "one of the best people I've ever met". When I was a child," he confides, "I used to spend vacations on her farm: well, even then, as now that he's 96, I was enchanted by her direct and total adherence to the natural world, of which her few, measured but very pertinent words were the exact representation.
From her, Manuel must have borrowed intrinsic brilliance, I think; from his father, "who worked every night to be able to afford medical studies in France", determination, as well as the first of all forms of gratitude: that towards oneself.
Curiously, generosity, luminosity and resolution, as well as an irresistible and inordinate desire to please, are also the salient characteristics of the new Grande Cuvée 170ème Edition from Krug, a mercurial combination of complexity and immediacy, grandeur and simplicity. But the association, or rather identification, between the individual and the universal, the private and the public, continues on another level too, for "between the House and me," explains Reman, "there has always been a great affinity. Krug is, in fact, a small company, made up of just a few elements and a few carefully selected marketing projects that impose simplicity in relationships as well as the absence of any superstructure..... It's all very real," he insists, as if to take the words right out of my mouth.
Manuel Reman has held every possible position at Moët Hennessy over the past 18 years: from special projects manager in his early days to financial controller at LVMH Holding in 2010, before returning to champagne to manage a team of 450 people involved in all practical operations, from bottling to labeling, at Moët & Chandon, Dom Pérignon, Mercier and Ruinart. Then, after a spell in Barcelona as Managing Director of Moët Hennessy Iberia, he returned to France to become President of Moët Hennessy Champagne Services (MHCS): this time working in contact with the winegrowers and coordinating all grape purchasing strategies to ensure consistency between the Houses. Last but not least, since 2020 Reman has also been the representative of the LVMH Champagne Houses on the Comité Interprofessionnel du Vin de Champagne (CIVC), where he strives to serve not only the interests of the group, but those of the appellation as a whole.
As for the state of play at Krug, today, the House has just presented the world with the 170th edition of its Grande Cuvée, and has done so, as usual, by associating it with a piece of music which, as Reman says, "makes the complex codification of the Grande Cuvée accessible through the universal language of music".
Listening to it, you're struck by the tinkling beats of a triangle in sequence, which then articulate into a fugue of violins, a rising oboe and a set of flutes, and even the anchoring, new as I don't remember hearing it in the echoes of the 169th or even the 168th, of a precise, vibrant bass: a fast pulse, almost tempted by techno reminiscences under a blanket of warm, white alto voices.
Top and bottom, in short, come together with unsettling magnetism in this Grande Cuvée 170ème Édition where, in the mosaic of 195 wines used - 12 vintages, from 1998 to 2014, which constitutes the base (at 55%) - the 2013 was used precisely to breathe structure and substrate into a material that would otherwise have been far too airy given the considerable losses suffered on the Pinot noir, precisely in 2014.
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