If it's good enough for Jeffrey Archer...

For the second of her brilliant drink columns, Lynn Barber decided it was high time she had a champagne lesson... from Monsieur Krug, no less

Before i went to Maison Krug, all i knew about champagne was that the painter Francis Bacon always ordered it with the cry, 'champagne for my real friends; real pain for my sham friends!' and that i didn't like it. I didn't like a) the taste and b) the bubbles, which seemed pretty comprehensive. Also, i associated it with hot summer parties when i drank too much because i was thirsty, and woke next morning with a splitting head. I don't know when, if ever, i have actually sat down and tasted champagne.

So it was jolly nice to start at the top, when M. Rémi Krug invited me to his Maison Krug in Reims for a bit of champagne education. Krug is - despite its unfortunate association with Jeffrey Archer's Christmas parties - the champagne of connoisseurs, and of course of plutocrats, given that it costs at least £86 for the cheapest bottle. Perhaps for that reason I have never tasted Krug. But before I can drink it, I must visit the cellars and learn how it is made.

As a building, Maison Krug disappoints - just a yard, cellar and offices - and I cast envious glances at other champagne houses in Reims, especially Pommery which is a fantastic Disneyland castle with battlemented walls. But of course the whole point of Krug, as M. Rémi likes to say, is that all the money goes into the bottle. In fact all the money lies underground, in the great two-storey cellar, built by M. Rémi's grandfather in the 1870s. (The Maison was founded by his great-great grandfather, a German émigré, in 1843.) It is a vast, cold echoing underground cathedral with a startling juxtaposition of ancient and modern - just as you're admiring a vault of cobwebbed bottles, a man whizzes past on a fork-lift truck. Fascinating though the cellars are, I would dearly love a drink so I am relieved when M. Rémi invites me to 'have some Krug, my dear!'

M. Rémi has been drinking Krug, and talking about it, for over 40 years - he is 63. When he started, the Maison was family-owned and run by his late father Paul, but like many champagne houses it sold out in the late 1990s and is now part of the LVMH conglomerate. However, Rémi and his brother Henri stayed on - Henri as chief winemaker until his recent retirement and Rémi as international spokesman.

Rémi explains that we are going to taste three vintages, to demonstrate the difference between them. They are the 1988, 1989, 1990 and this run of three consecutive years is unique. Krug only produces vintages in very good years, ('It is only when God wants') and it is quite rare to get two in succession - to get three is unprecedented. But, he says, the pattern of harvests seems to be changing - 'We used to have, in every decade until the 1980s, one or two exceptional years, one or two very bad years, two or three good, two or three average. But in the 1980s and 90s we haven't had any very disappointing years and we've had more good years than before.' Could this be global warming? 'I don't know,' he admits, 'though we champenois talk about it a lot.'

He opens the bottle quietly with a gentle squeeze rather than a pop and pours the champagne into long-stemmed tulip glasses - he prefers them to flutes because you get more of the aroma. What happened to those flat, shallow champagne glasses that were supposed to be modelled on someone's breasts? 'We only use them for sorbet,' he sniffs. 'This is the 1989,' he explains and invites me to drink. Yummy yum, this is already completely different to any other champagne I have ever tasted. It has miles more flavour, and only tiny, quiet bubbles. It is on the tip of my tongue to say 'Gosh, this tastes like real wine!' Luckily I manage to bite it back.

M. Rémi, meanwhile, gives me a well-practised spiel about the joys of champagne - for celebration, for laughter, for seduction, blah-di-blah - but I am more interested in what is happening in my mouth. The taste is really extraordinary - it starts good and sort of unfurls into perfection. Then he opens the 1988 and invites me to taste it. 'You see?' he says, 'completely different. What strikes you here is freshness, vitality. The 89 was smooth, ripe, mellow. But with each vintage it's a new story.' He opens the 1990 to reveal yet another taste, which I think he said was like the trumpet fanfare in a symphony or something, but by now my brain is only connected to my mouth. After a while it seems clear that the 1989 is the best - it is quieter, subtler, less fizzy than the others - so our tasting becomes like a game of three-card trick where I am shoving glasses madly round the table trying to ensure that they all get refilled with the 1989. Anyway it demonstrates the point M. Krug was trying to make: that the vintages are very different.

Which leads on to his next and most important point - that given this difference from year to year, the art of blending the Grand Cuvée or non-vintage champagne, and making it taste the same every year, is what champagne-making is really all about. This is the art to which he and his elder brother Henri have devoted a very large part of their lives. Every year after the grape harvest they conduct daily tastings, until they arrive at the recipe for the Grand Cuvée. 'You start by tasting every single wine in the new crop - and you're talking of hundreds - and you reject what you don't like. Then, from what you want to keep, you know that you're working from a year that is maybe very rich, or very light, and therefore you already have in mind what sort of complement you need from the reserve. So then you taste all your reserve wines from previous years and write down notes and possibilities. We do have every tasting note in the history of Krug but we rarely look at them: we rely on our own taste, our own memory. And after we've finished this cycle of tastings, we look at our notes and say "Well, what about we try this?" and make little trial blends. Usually we try many times and say "This is a bit better, not quite there yet," - and sometimes the fine tuning will take months. But at the end we arrive at the recipe and say "This is it." But I always have a little stress because we are making a decision we will not know for six years. Time must be a friend.'

Time is the great ingredient of Krug. The Grand Cuvée is aged for six years before release, the vintages at least 12 - the youngest currently on sale is the 1990. And because Krug is made so slowly, it has incredible longevity - M. Rémi says he recently drank a 1904 Krug and it was still superb, though the all-time best is the 1928.

Fortunately, taste is the one sense that does not fade with age so although Henri is 66 and officially retired, he still leads the tastings. But Rémi says 'We've been tasting together for 40 years and we always agree so if I ever had to make the decision by myself, I have no fear that I could.' Their father Paul, he says, was the best taster ever, despite the fact (I was thrilled to hear) that he was a heavy smoker in his youth. He only gave up in his forties and said it felt as though a screen had been removed. 'But the irony is he was such a good taster, nobody can tell the difference between Krug when Paul was smoking and Krug when he was not. Which means that his sharpness was already superb.'

M. Rémi is one of the sunniest, smoothest people I have ever interviewed - much like his own Grand Cuvée one might say - and he even manages to remain sunny when I mention the name Jeffrey Archer - 'We always appeal to crazy individualists. We are not for the herd.' But suddenly everything changes when I ask if he saw the film Sideways, and he practically explodes. 'Yes,' he says curtly, 'I didn't like it. I was bored. It had no emotion. I am tired, fed up, with a certain approach to wine now which you see in the press and in movies which is what I call the California back-label syndrome. It started in the late 1980s in the US - people being obsessed with types of grapes, percentage of this, percentage of that, the type of oak used for the barrels. It's like if you talk about Mozart and say it is x per cent cello and y per cent violin. Pah!'

To smooth him down, I ask whether 2005 looks like being a good year, but M. Rémi says he can't tell yet - he won't know until September when the grapes are in. 'Every day you wake up and look at the sky and every day the sky can bring you a catastrophe, so you have to be very, very humble. So far so good - we had a superb spring, no frost, no bad rain. But yesterday we had a big thunderstorm which might have brought some hail, and we could have more storms between now and September, and too much rain, or not enough - so from now on every day counts. We talk about glamour, beauty, luxury, but it starts from the feet in the chalk.'

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