2002 Champagne Krug, Clos du Mesnil, Blanc de Blancs, Brut

This is a wine with staggering length and immense purity. It's as powerful as chardonnay, showcasing an incredible depth of pure fresh lemons, yellow grapefruit, honey and dried white and yellow flowers. The concentration and complexity of primary fruits are outstanding, and there are some more exotic flavours here, too, in the peach and green-mango spectrum. The texture is ultra-fine and creamy through the mid-palate, its majestic curves sweeping long around a sturdy mineral core. This is very silky and focused, offering gently creamy moments before twisting towards a composed, restricted and compressed chalk-like finish. It delivers an impression of chardonnay that captures incredible richness, fleshiness, persistence and power. Yet the acidity is staggering while being simultaneously perfectly balanced. Drink now, but this will have much more to come after 2020.james_suckling, jamessuckling_com (October 2016)

Very lively, taut and willowy. Very long and lean and vital. Sort of electric energy. Blackcurrant-leaf flavours.Drink 2018 - 2030jancis_robinson_mw MW, JancisRobinson.com (September 2017)

Krug's beautifully citrus colored 2002 Blanc de Blancs Brut Clos du Mesnil (ID 415068 - disgorged IV/2015) shows a deep, complex, very clear and precise if not etherial bouquet with citrus aromas intertwined with chalk and noble brioche notes in the background. Pure, profound and vibrantly fresh on the palate, this is a straight, athletic, very intense and expressive yet highly elegant and finessed Clos du Mesnil with a unique fresh fruit character! The 2002 reveals a great mineral structure and chalky texture on the palate. The highly complex, energetic finish reveals bracing freshness and vitality as well as the charm and creaminess from the vinification in barrels and possibly the dosage wine that seems to boost the Krug style. While terroir wine is the result of hands-off winemaking, Krug's Clos du Mesnil is perhaps a very particular Krug Champagneit has great quality, style and complexity that is the result of the winemaking and the addition of the dosage wine. How the Clos du Mesnil would taste if farmed biodynamically, picked later and dosed with nothing but itself is a pointless question, but it hasn't left my mind since I tasted the paradoxical 2002, which is terribly fresh on one hand and also has this unique Krug reserve style. Notabene: This doesn't include the hypothesis that the wine could be any better. It would just be different and surely less Krug, which is not what we really want, do we? Tasted April 2018.Stephan Reinhardt - 29/06/2018

The 2002 Clos du Mesnil is wonderfully pliant and expressive in the glass. The radiant personality of the year comes through in the wine's ripe, tropically-leaning flavours and open-knit personality. I imagine the 2002 will develop relatively quickly by Clos du Mesnil standards. Even so, there is more than enough freshness underpinning the fruit to support at least two decades of very fine drinking. Drink 2019 - 2032Ian D'Agata, Vinous.com.com (March 2018)