2022 Welschriesling

Weinlaubenhof Kracher was founded in 1959 by Alois Kracher, a farmer with just one hectare of vines, realizing his dream of having a winery one day. His son, also Alois, worked initially as a chemist for an Austrian pharmaceuticals company and joined the company in the early 1980s. With a relentless drive for quality, he made the estate famous with his sweet Beerenauslesen and Trockenbeerenauslesen. His son Gerhard Kracher, born in 1981, started working alongside his father as a teenager – initially just to earn more pocket money – but the exposure to fine dining, gastronomy and wines soon impressed him. While he was enrolled to study economics at university, he preferred to learn on the job, selling his family’s wine to Viennese restaurants, gradually taking over international markets, and learning from his father and grandfather. As of 2004, Gerhard Kracher was the second in command, became cellar master in 2005, and, when his father was taken ill in 2006, he started running the company, taking over after his father’s death in 2007. Kracher emphasizes how much he benefitted from the very different perspectives of both father and grandfather and notes that while their perspectives may have been different, they only ever had the same aim: quality. Today, the family farms 58 hectares of vines, and 70% of production is dedicated to sweet wines, 20% are dry whites, and 10% are reds. Plantings are split into 45% Welschriesling, 20% Chardonnay and 10% Scheurebe, with the remaining 35% split into Traminer, Muscat, Zweigelt, Rosenmuskateller, Grüner Veltliner, and experimental plantings of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Petit Manseng and Viognier. Kracher also started various wine projects: he partnered with Austrian-born New York sommelier Aldo Sohm to produce a series of Grüner Veltliners under the label Sohm & Kracher, and with the local wine co-operative in Neckenmarkt, Mittelburgenland, to produce Blaufränkisch under the Reunion label. The mainstay, however, are the nobly sweet wines grown around the winery in Illmitz, where climate and Lake Neusiedl combine to create favorable conditions for the development of botrytis. With these sweet wines, the term Kollektion is used to denote the "selection of the selection,” i.e., the best wines. The term Nouvelle Vague is used to denote sweet wines made in barrique. The phrase Zwischen den Seen denotes sweet wines made in stainless steel. Botrytis, which can be and often is a varietal equalizer, here acts as an amplifier of varietal character, complexity and purity. This kind of quality is only possible with absolute calibration of harvest points, and up to six harvest passes are made to get just the kind of botrytis infection that is needed for these unusual wines. Kracher and his team take botrytis to the ‘nth’ degree. For 2020, Kracher reports that “despite the heat” of the summer, the year “delivered outstanding botrytis with later autumn rains.” I tasted a selection of dry whites and reds from 2018-2022 and sweet wines from 2022 and 2021, but mainly from the 2020 vintage.