Notes on a Vintage: Champagne house Krug pairs 2008 expressions with scores by composer Max Richter

The second movement paired Krug 2008 with Ensemble. The 2008 vintage offered a particularly disciplined score. “It was one of the last classical northern climate conditions,” Cavil explains of the cool, steady growing season, “without any extremes.” The result was precision. “It led to regularity, to very solid backbone wines, the feet in the soil and the head in the sky. Very vertical, and so very elegant and intense.” Verticality in champagne refers to a focused line of acidity that runs straight through the palate, lifting fruit and sharpening the finish. Yet 2008 did not declare itself immediately. “The wines were shy ... very closed,” she says. “You really had to anticipate, with intuition and with experience, what it could be many years later.” Classicism, she implies, demands patience.

Richter’s composition widened accordingly. “Ensemble widens the frame, allowing multiple voices to breathe and interact together.” Strings were layered over piano; textures thickened. In the glass, the wine opened—fruit seemed rounder, mid-palate more expansive. Under the broader harmonies, the austerity softened, revealing generosity without losing structure.

The final act brought scale. Krug Grande Cuvée 164ème Édition, composed around the 2008 harvest but incorporating 127 plots from 11 different years, met Sinfonia. If the Clos was a sentence and the vintage a paragraph, the Grande Cuvée was a novel. “Sinfonia is the full orchestra, like painting with a larger brush on a bigger canvas,” Richter explains. As lower registers entered and the sound deepened, the wine’s amplitude came into relief. Cavil describes the Grande Cuvée as “if you reconcile all the paradoxes in one sip. It’s like a sphere, because you have verticality and ampleness. You are very expressive. You have everything.”

Here, music broadened the experience. Bass tones drew out toast and nutty depth; crescendos mirrored the wine’s persistence. Time, in both glass and score, felt elastic.

Later that evening, the celebration continued in an upstairs space at a private dinner crafted by chef Adam Handling MBE, whose own approach to food mirrors Krug’s philosophy of precision and attention to detail. Handling, the Scottish-born chef-restaurateur behind Frog by Adam Handling, designed a four-course menu as an extension of the sensory dialogue begun with Richter’s music.

It began with hen of the woods mushroom, potato and nettles, an earthy, restrained opening, followed by a more indulgent beef fat lobster with Ahrelia caviar and milk bread, a study in richness and salinity that sharpened the wine’s acidity and length. The main course of beef fillet with sand carrot, sweetbread and bone marrow leaned into amplitude, its fat and protein testing the breadth and composure of the cuvées. Dessert, a Victoria plum tart with clotted cream and meadowsweet, returned the palate to lift and fragrance, the plum’s tartness echoing the wine while cream softened the finish.

With the sensory crescendo complete, the deeper logic of the evening comes into view. Cavil speaks of vineyards as instrumentalists. “We are convinced that each plot, each musician ... grows with his own sensibilities,” she says. In Reims, wines are tasted blind. “We audition what this wine has to say today.” Blending, for her, is orchestration.

For Richter, the collaboration was equally deliberate. “This is something we’ve been thinking about for more than two years,” he says. “It’s a slow evolution of process and ideas and connections.” Tasting, he explains, became his entry point. “It helped me begin to understand the emotional architecture that lies behind each creation.”

Time is the shared axis. “Champagne is a time map of everything it’s gone through,” Richter says. “Musical composition is a way to mediate the flow of time ... and also a time machine.” Repetition allows us to experience the same moment again, “but maybe deeper”.

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There is always the danger that such collaborations tip into spectacle. This one did not. It was grounded in process—in the quiet, meticulous work that precedes performance.

“Nothing is more difficult than making things effortless,” Cavil says. Behind each bottle lies an archive of reserve wines, years of blind tastings, minute calibrations. Richter recognises the parallel. “The sort of craft of moment- to-moment decision-making, thoughtfulness, intention ... that, to me, was just beautiful to see.”

This collaboration was never about making champagne sound like a string quartet, nor music taste of citrus and brioche. It was about how perception is porous. Nothing mystical occurred; the wine remained the wine. But under orchestral guidance, its structure felt more deliberate, its time more visible. The act of tasting slowed and, in that slowing, deepened.

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