Kracher

Kracher, or Weinlaubenhof Kracher to give the estate its full name, is in the village of Illmitz on the eastern shore of Lake Neusiedl, in the flat corner of Burgenland called the Seewinkel. If you know one Austrian producer by name, it is probably this one, and the reason is sweet wine.

The Seewinkel is a strange and rather beautiful place to grow grapes: a strip of reedy wetland about twenty kilometres wide, scattered with shallow lakes, most of them barely deeper than a person is tall, and protected since 1993 as the Neusiedler See-Seewinkel National Park. The climate is Pannonian, which means hot dry summers and hard winters, moderated by all that water. In autumn the evenings turn cool, moisture evaporates off the lakes, and heavy fog sits over the vineyards until the sun burns through around midday. That daily cycle of damp and then dry is exactly what noble rot needs, and the estate describes botrytis here as a nearly annual gift of nature. Most sweet wine regions get botrytis in good years. The Seewinkel gets it in most of them, which is why Kracher can do something almost nobody else can.

Three generations have built the name. Alois Kracher senior, who lived from 1928 to 2010, ran the vineyards and was making wine from nobly rotten grapes before that was a normal thing to do. His son Alois junior, known as Luis, born in 1959 and died in 2007, was a trained chemist who started making wine at twenty-two and turned a small family farm into an international reference. His argument was that a great sweet wine is about fruit character, finesse and balance rather than sweetness for its own sake, and the wine world agreed with him: the UK's Wine magazine named him Winemaker of the Year seven times, in 1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2001, 2006 and 2008. Gerhard Kracher, born in 1981, took over in 2007 and runs the estate today with his wife Yvonne.

What sets Kracher apart is not only the botrytis, it is the system built around it. In a good year the estate makes ten to fifteen separate Trockenbeerenauslesen, numbered in ascending order, and splits them between two named styles. The Zwischen den Seen wines ("between the lakes") are raised in large wooden casks or steel tanks with long yeast contact, which keeps them fresh and primary. The Nouvelle Vague wines are fermented and aged in new barriques with air exchange, which gives spice, depth and length. Same estate, same harvest, two genuinely different readings of the same grapes. The varieties run through Welschriesling, Chardonnay, Traminer, Scheurebe, Muskat-Ottonel, Rosenmuskateller and, now and then, red Zweigelt. The vines are planted densely on purpose to stress them into small crops, and the vineyards are picked over the gentlest rises in an otherwise flat landscape, undulations of barely a metre that the family will tell you make a real difference to the quality of the rot.

The Beerenauslese Cuvee is the sensible way into the house, with the non-vintage Noble Reserve Trockenbeerenauslese a step above it. The estate also holds back small quantities of old vintages as collection bottles and releases them decades on. Alongside the sweet wines Kracher makes Auslese, Eiswein and a little dry white and red.