Champagne's Prestige Cuvées: Krug, Dom Pérignon, Cristal, and Salon

Champagne occupies a strange place in the imagination. It is at once the most ordinary of celebratory drinks, poured at every toast, and the source of some of the rarest and most collectible wines in the world. The difference lies in a small, exalted category known as the prestige cuvée, the wine a great house releases only in its best years, made from its finest grapes and aged for far longer than the rest.

The most storied of these bottles carry names that have become shorthand for luxury itself. Dom Pérignon, made by Moët & Chandon and named for the monk long credited with advancing the region's wines, is released only as a vintage, from a single year's harvest, and never blended across years. Krug takes the opposite and equally uncompromising path, building its famous Grande Cuvée from a vast library of reserve wines to achieve a richness of astonishing depth, while its single vineyard Clos du Mesnil is among the rarest Champagnes made. Louis Roederer's Cristal, first created in the nineteenth century for a Russian tsar who wanted his Champagne in a clear bottle so that none could be poisoned within it, remains a byword for opulence. And Salon, produced only in exceptional vintages from a single village and a single grape, is so scarce that many years see no release at all.

What sets these wines apart is patience. Where ordinary Champagne is made to be drunk young and fresh, the great prestige cuvées spend years, sometimes decades, resting in deep chalk cellars before release, and the finest continue to improve for many years more in the bottle. With age, their bubbles soften and their flavors turn from bright citrus toward something richer and more savory, closer to a great white wine than to a party drink. Tasted at maturity, a fine old Champagne is one of the most complex wines in existence.

Beyond the famous houses, a quieter revolution has drawn collectors' attention to grower Champagne, wines made by the families who own the vineyards rather than by the large maisons that buy their grapes. These smaller producers have shown that Champagne, like Burgundy, can express the character of a specific plot of ground, and the best of them are now chased as eagerly as the grandest names.

For the collector, Champagne offers a rare combination of pleasure and value. The prestige cuvées of the great houses are produced in larger quantities than the trophies of Burgundy, yet the very finest, especially in older vintages, appreciate steadily and appear regularly among the results at the great wine sales. They are, in short, both a joy to drink and a serious component of a well built cellar, and they reward the same care in buying and storage set out in our guide to starting a fine wine collection. To source rare and library vintage Champagnes, contact us.