2002 Scheurebe Zwischen den Seen TBA (Nummer 10)

With his 2002 collection, Alois Kracher has once again shown why he is Austria's most famous producer of sweet wines.Happily, I have had the opportunity to taste these versatile and extraordinarily complex dessert wines several times over the past year, because it is not easy to arrange an appointment with Kracher as he is a globetrotter like no other Austrian winemaker.Whether promoting his own wines or Austrian wine in general, or working on diverse sweet wine projects abroad-for example, with Manfred Krankl at Sine Qua Non in Southern California or with the Spanish wine merchant Jorge Ordonez in Malaga-Kracher's goal is to learn and to communicate.Happily, the time and energy that Kracher devotes to widening his horizons have only served to make his own wines more distinctive. Rather than becoming more international in style or more banal, his wines, if anything, have grown in authoritative regional character in recent years.It is this quality that has won loyal fans from Europe to Los Angeles to Tokyo.Kracher rates the 2002 vintage as the second best in his career after 1995, with everything happening at exactly the right time:rain, elimination of grapes affected by grey rot, and the final, very late selection of the best fruit.While the first Auslese grapes were harvested on September 16, the main harvest took place during the first half of November.Despite the extraordinary concentration shown by Kracher's 2002 dessert wines, they have managed to maintain enormous fruitiness and uncanny balance. Needless to say, the wines have outstanding potential for bottle aging.Vintages 2004 and 2003 were much more difficult for sweet wines here.Noble rot came very late in 2004:Kracher's Auslese wines display little or no botrytis and his Beerenauslesen were only about 50% affected.The harvest began late in November, and the last grapes picked, during the first week of December, were still acceptable but not exceptional. Around one-third of the TBA harvest displayed acetobacter, which can quickly cause wine to oxidize, and this material was immediately discharged for distillation.In the end only 50% of a normal crop remained. Kracher's collection of numbered TBAs from the 2004 vintage will comprise only seven to nine wines, and in much smaller quantities than normal.Vintage 2003 brought large quantities of Auslese and Beerenauslese, but the overall quality in the region was not great.This was the most expensive harvest ever at the Kracher estate from the standpoint of labor costs. The very warm summer promoted thick grape skins that were resistant to noble rot.While quality Auslese was relatively easy to achieve, any serious botrytization proved extremely difficult.Kracher was able to achieve around one-third of his harvest at TBA must weights, but chose to label much of this wine as Beerenauslese.It is likely that the 2003 vintage will caramelize fairly rapidly with bottle aging, and thus I would expect these wines to have lower-than-average aging potential.