Winemaker Notes
Medium golden yellow. Elegant honey, vanilla, intense tropical fruit, and litchi are backed by discreet and noble oak aromas on the nose. Fully ripe peach joins in in the mouth. The residual sugar is completely integrated and balanced by exquisitely refreshing acidity. It is seldom that a wine so high in residual sugar still remains fun to drink, but this exceptionally harmonious wine will remain youthful and playful nearly eternally.
Professional Ratings
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The Traminer #8 Kracher’s 2004 #9 Chardonnay Trockenbeerenauslese Nouvelle Vague makes! This represents a step down in alcohol (to 8.5) and up in residual sugar (280 grams), but above all in acidity (to 8.9 grams). Vividly juicy Clementine, soursop, and mango are allied to some of the most indelible brown spices I have ever encountered in a wine. The fruit and spice personality here, allied to sheer phenolic intensity and palpable density, give one the impression of chewing on a delicious bar of dried fruits and spices. One proof of this wine’s greatness is its sheer irresistibility. I was panting to swallow and making excuses to go back for additional sips. Your mouth will be left quivering. This should be worth following for 15-20 years at least – not that there is any need to wait.
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Wine Spectator
Elegant and rich, with an impressive purity and concentration to the ripe peach, apricot, vanilla and cream flavors. The spicy finish of cinnamon and nutmeg is lush and filled with ripe tropical fruit notes. Very honeyed and complex.
Apart from the classics, we find many regional gems of different styles.
Late harvest wines are probably the easiest to understand. Grapes are picked so late that the sugars build up and residual sugar remains after the fermentation process. Ice wine, a style founded in Germany and there referred to as eiswein, is an extreme late harvest wine, produced from grapes frozen on the vine, and pressed while still frozen, resulting in a higher concentration of sugar. It is becoming a specialty of Canada as well, where it takes on the English name of ice wine.
Vin Santo, literally “holy wine,” is a Tuscan sweet wine made from drying the local white grapes Trebbiano Toscano and Malvasia in the winery and not pressing until somewhere between November and March.
Rutherglen is an historic wine region in northeast Victoria, Australia, famous for its fortified Topaque and Muscat with complex tawny characteristics.
The source of Austria’s finest botrytized sweet wines, Burgenland covers a lofty portion of Austria's wine producing real estate. It encompasses the smaller regions of Neusiedlersee, Neusiedlersee-Hügelland, Mittelburgenland and Südburgenland. The latter two are most associated with their exceptional red wines. The region as a whole produces no shortage of important whites.
Neusiedlersee, named for the lake that it surrounds to the east, is home to a great diversity of grape varieties. The region’s most notable wines, however, are the botrytis-infected, sweet versions.
Neusiedlersee-Hügelland, which wraps the lake on its western side, includes the town of Rust, a historically esteemed wine community. Its close proximity to the lake’s fog and mist make it another source of some of the more prestigious botrytized wines. Neusiedlersee-Hügelland also produces fine Blaufränkisch, Pinot Blanc, Neuburger and Grüner Veltliner, though a label will usually name the more general, Burgenland, so as not to confuse it with its eastern cousin, Neusiedlersee, across the lake.
Blaufränkisch is well suited to and makes up over half of the vineyard area in Mittelburgenland. The region’s hills and plateaus, which are composed of variations in schist, loess and clay-limestone, produce high quality reds with interesting diversity.
Südburgenland, also known for its deep, complex and age-worthy Blaufränkisch, is beginning to turn out some alluring whites from Grüner Veltliner, Welschriesling and Weissburgunder (Pinot Blanc).