Winemaker Notes
Bright golden-yellow. Bouquet of meadow herbs, delicate notes of stone fruit and lychee. The palate is fresh and vibrant, with nuances of pineapple, and tropical fruit notes on the finish, complemented with a hint of honey in the aftertaste. Good grip.
Pair with "Kardinal" cake, apricot dumblings, goose liverterrine with brioche and "Fleur de Sel".
Blend: 70% Chardonnay and 30% Welschriesling.
Professional Ratings
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James Suckling
Beautiful, golden fruit that glows in the autumn sunshine! Very rich and lush, but with the acidity to carry all this opulence. The finish is as complex as it is fresh with some savage beauty. Drink or hold.
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Wine Enthusiast
Candied pineapple and candied lemon zest on the nose coalesce on the palate around a wonderfully tart core of purest passion fruit. This is rich and tense, taut but sweet, aromatic and heady. Each drop sends sweet ripples of aroma across the palate, while lovely citrus pulls the focus. The finish has a lovely herbaceous edge of bergamot and citrus foliage. Lovely tension. Drink until 2035.
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2015 Trockenbeerenauslese No 6 Grande Cuvee Nouvelle Vague is made mostly from Chardonnay, yet includes 30% Welschriesling, all aged 18 months in larger oak tanks. It’s a vibrant, racy beauty that has perfumed notes of tangerines, passion fruits, mint, and honey in its full-bodied yet clean, silky, beautifully balanced style. This is yet another dessert wine from Kracher that packs an incredible amount of sweetness and character in a fresh, balanced, elegant package that’s a joy to drink. Drink it anytime over the coming 2-3 decades.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
The 2015 Trockenbeerenauslese No 6 "Grande Cuvée" Nouvelle Vague is a blend of barrel-fermented Chardonnay (70%) and Welschriesling (30%) that was aged in a 1,000-liter oak vat, both parts for 18 months. The wine offers a very clear, precise, fresh, intense and really distinctive bouquet with aromas of stewed quinces and lemons. On the palate, this is a highly delicate and perfectly balanced TBA with great finesse and purity (despite its high concentration). The acidity is very fine and persistently salty, and if there are any tannins, these are very fine too. A great elegant, finessed, beautifully balanced TBA.
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Wine & Spirits
Ripeness came easily in 2015, a hot year, and the botrytis was abundant and clean. Kracher made a dozen sweet wines that vintage, including his flagship, Nummer 6. It’s a blend of chardonnay and welschriesling, two varieties that have been growing in the region since the 12th century. And it’s insanely sweet, with 238.8 grams per liter of residual sugar. But once the sugar-shock wears off, a calm warmth floods the palate, a plush, humid texture carrying notes of pineapple, orange and sweet pumpkin preserves. It feels like sunshine in liquid form, a radiant wine to serve alone or with an apricot tart.
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Wine Spectator
Silky and fresh-tasting for a dessert wine, with well-cut minerality through the notes of white raisin, dried pineapple and papaya. Features a long, well-defined finish. Drink now through 2027.
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.
Appreciated for superior wines made from indigenous varieties, Austria should be on the radar of any curious wine drinker. A rather cool and dry wine growing region, this country produces wine that is quintessentially European in style: food-friendly with racy acidity, moderate alcohol and fresh fruit flavors.
Austria’s viticultural history is rich and vast, dating back to Celtic tribes with first written record of winemaking starting with the Romans. But the 20th century brought Austria a series of winemaking obstacles, namely the plunder of both world wars, as well as its own self-imposed quality breach. In the mid 1980s, after a handful of shameless vintners were found to have added diethylene glycol (a toxic substance) to their sweet wines to imitate the unctuous qualities imparted by botrytis, Austria’s credibility as a wine-producing country was compromised. While no one was harmed, the incident forced the country to rebound and recover stronger than ever. By the 1990s, Austria was back on the playing field with exports and today is prized globally for its quality standards and dedication to purity and excellence.
Grüner Veltliner, known for its racy acidity and herbal, peppery aromatics, is Austria's most important white variety, comprising nearly a third of Austrian plantings. Riesling in Austria is high in quality but not quantity, planted on less than 5% of the country’s vineyard land. Austrian Rieslings are almost always dry and are full of bright citrus flavors and good acidity. Red varietal wines include the tart and peppery Zweigelt, spicy and dense Blaufränkisch and juicy Saint Laurent. These red varieties are also sometimes blended.