Winemaker Notes
Blend: 60% Welschriesling, 40% Chardonnay
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
I like the spicy complexity here with anise aromas alongside marmalade, caramelised apples, roasted figs and burnt toffee. Fantastic concentration, full-bodied and sweet, but you are left more with the almost savory spice and molasses character. Chardonnay and welschriesling. Drink or hold.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Blending 40% Chardonnay with 60% Welschriesling, the golden-yellow colored 2020 Beerenauslese Cuvée is intense and concentrated on the finely saline and fruit-intense nose that reveals perfectly ripe, stewed and candied lemon zest and orange aromas intermingled with ripe apricot and a kiss of toast and mocha due to the 15% used barriques during the vinification. Round and refined on the palate, this is a very intense yet fine, elegant, fruit-intense and balanced Beerenauslese with very delicate acidity. It has an uplifting, savory and saline finish and delivers lots of energy and tension but most of all finesse paired with intensity. This is surely one of the finest BAs I have ever tasted from Kracher in 20 years.
Rating: 94+
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).