by Tessa Brown, new Oz Wine Show contributing author.
Elevating myself before nine in the morning on a weekend day is, at best, challenging. Performing same on four hours’ sleep, when Friday night ended at three am after the following: 1997 Billecart Salmon Elisabeth Rosé, 1983 Roederer Blanc de Blancs, 2000 Pierre Usseglio Châteauneuf du Pape, and a cracking 2002 Gunderloch spætlese? Such a feat is nothing short of a miracle.
However, when nine am Saturday presents you with a strong flat white and a glass of Gosset Grande Reserve in quick succession, you do what you must. Winemaker Alois ‘Luis’ Kracher was presenting the Kracher beerenauslese, trockenbeerenauslese and icewines over a degustation breakfast tasting, and the notion of meeting an Austrian dessert wine specialist was more than enough to battle through the fact that I felt like the bluntest pencil in the case.
This is the first time I have heard of a breakfast wine tasting, but the format actually could not have worked more perfectly for the styles of wine being presented. Can you imagine looking through a glaze of late harvest sweetness and botrytis over an afternoon? You’d need a pillow and a blanket and a nap halfway through. Put it at the other end of the day, however, when your metabolism is still primed and it works brilliantly. By eleven o’clock I felt fantastic. Not the least of the reasons being that the wines Luis makes are superb.
The Kracher estate vineyards lie adjacent to lake Neusiedl, which is located in the far east of Austria near the border with Hungary. The water bodies (in addition to the main lake, the area is dotted with smaller lagoons, in an area which the locals call “Seewinkelâ€) moderate Summer temperatures and importantly collect morning fog in the Autumn, which, after rainfall during ripening, encourages the slow development of Botrytis in certain parts of the vineyard. In addition to producing both late harvest and botrytised styles, every so often nature affords Kracher the ability to make icewine as well.
The varieties used in the production of Kracher’s dessert wines mostly comprise Welschriesling, Scheurebe and Chardonnay. Welschriesling is not dialect for, or a variant of true Rhine Riesling, which is what most people (myself included) immediately assume. It is cultivated reasonably widely throughout Austria, Yugoslavia, Hungary and the Czech Republic, yielding more heavily than Riesling, with thinner skins and a less pronounced, but still floral aromatic character. Scheurebe is a German Riesling/ Sylvaner cross, designed to ripen earlier then Riesling and grown widely in the Rheinhessen and Pfalz regions in Germany (as well as Austria). Chardonnay, we obviously all know intimately.
Kracher uses very generally the classification format of Germany for the sweetness of his wines, so there are ausleses, beerenausleses and trockenbeerenausleses, the last two of which are abbreviated BA and TBA. Then there is the eiswein (icewine). The BA is usually somewhere around 100 grams per litre residual sugar (not dissimilar to the sugar content of cola drinks), and the TBAs vary from about 200 g/ L up to a staggering 400 g/ L. When you consider that your average dry Australian Riesling possesses between 1 and 8 grams per litre residual, we’re talking about really quite impressive sugar levels.
Each of Kracher’s TBA wines are given a number, from 1 to 10 in the case of the Kollection 2002, to signify the level of concentration and raisining (which Luis cutely calls ‘shrimpling’) in the fruit before processing. Each vineyard is picked over at least three, and up to eight times, starting with whole bunches and ending, as in the Hungarian Tokaji puttonyas, snipping out parts of bunches and plucking off individual berries. You might be starting to get a picture of the labour involved in creating these wines. With such a high concentration of sugar, it can take months for the many dozens of individual ferments to plod along.
Most of the BAs and TBAs are stainless steel ferments. Some are matured in larger old oak casks (like the Alsacien foudres, 500 up to 2000 litres) and the style of these wines is called ‘Zwischen den Seen’, meaning ‘between the lakes’. The Chardonnays and some parcels of the other varieties go to a style called ‘Nouvelle Vague’, named after the Jean-Luc Godard 1990 film of the same name. These are fermented and matured in barrel, giving them an entirely different palate structure, texture and impression.
Kracher’s wines are not widely available in Australia, but keep an eye out in better restaurants and in high end wine retailers, and you should be able to track the label down. Click here for their distribution links. Of the ten wines shown, the following were my picks.
2004 Kracher Cuvée Eiswein. 50% Welschriesling, 50% Chardonnay (12.5% alc, 105g/ L residual sugar) Luis heralds this wine by saying “You can really taste the frozen grapesâ€. He’s right, and the effect is astonishing. The crispness and purity is fantastic, with powdery, sweet alyssum florals and cold dewy grass aromas. In the mouth, the wine is quite delicate, with a very fine sweet spice character over the white florals. Truly refreshing. $55.
2002 Kracher Welschriesling TBA No. 3 ‘Zwischen den Seen’. (10.0% alc, 208g/ L residual sugar) Unmistakeably botrytised nose, like eating the mouldy raisins straight from the vine (sounds awful, but it is really quite tasty). There are also some quite Riesling-like, blossomy citrus floral aromas. In the mouth: a lovely, almost velvety texture, with fine acidity that makes the palate build, and a savoury/ volatile edge amongst the flavours of apricot liqueur and faint lychee. Very smart, very well balanced. $95.
2002 Kracher Scheurebe TBA No. 10 ‘Zwischen den Seen’ (8.5% alc, 311g/ L residual sugar) This is phenomenally concentrated. Aromas of dried pawpaw and mango vie with cold tea, faint rose petal and melted brown sugar. The palate is supremely sweet, apricot fleshy and condensed, but the acidity gives clarity and focus. Bravissimo. $120.
Photo sourced from www.kracher.com
Great writeup Tessa. I’ve bought a bottle of the Eiswein to try tomorrow night at dinner and I’m really looking forward to it!
9. My partner will be leaving in a couple of weeks for Australia due to career related causes. I was worried that living away from each other will produce problems in our relationship in the future. However he guaranteed me that everything will be alright and there’s nothing to worry about. Life in general can be a little harsh for us newlyweds to fall in a circumstance like this.