BURGENLAND’S REMARKABLE WHITES - a visit from Stuart Pigott

Senior Editor Stuart Pigott is currently in Burgundy with Jim, so look forward to an avalanche of tasting notes next week. Before arriving there, though, he tasted a remarkable range of dry white and dessert wines from the Kracher Winery in Burgenland, Austria. The most extraordinary of these were library release wines, or perhaps it is better to call them re-releases.

An increasing number of producers around Planet Wine have pushed back release dates for their top wines, and releasing after five years is starting to look quite normal. However, re-releasing after 25 years is a whole different ball game! That’s history in the bottle.

The Kracher Burgenland Trockenbeerenauslese Nummer 6 Grande Cuvée 1999 has a great nose of peat and gunpowder underlined by molasses and candied orange that’s light years removed from the tropical fruit coulis character Stuart remembers this wine having 20 or more years ago. To get that contrast, scroll down and compare this wine with the same wine from the 2021 vintage, which Stuart also loved. What has remained constant in the 1999 over a quarter of a century is the combination of concentration and richness with elegance. If what you’re looking for is luscious fruit, go for the young vintage, but if aromatic complexity is your thing then the mature vintage hits the mark.

Kracher’s Grande Cuvée is a complex blend of grape varieties, sites and vilification vessels that was invented by current winemaker Gerhard Kracher’s father, Alois Kracher, who died in 2007. Gerhard is no less an innovator than his father, and the Sohm & Kracher range of dry gruner veltliner wines is the best example of this. They’re a joint venture between Gerhard Kracher and Aldo Sohm, the famous Austrian chief sommelier of Restaurant Le Bernardin in New York City.

The Sohm & Kracher wines divide into two groups: the young wines, of which the 2023 vintage is soon to be released, and the mature ones, for which 2019 is about to become the current vintage. The two wines in the latter group are another dramatic contrast. The Sohm & Kracher Grüner Veltliner Burgenland St. Georg 2019 has a Burgundian textural richness with some very Austrian aromas, like floral honey and lentils, on the full-bodied palate.

The sleeker and more vivid Sohn & Kracher Grüner Veltliner Niederösterreich Single Vineyard 2019 has really complex aromas of toasted nuts, floral honey and mushrooms. The fresh mineral acidity gives this a wonderfully bright and elegant finish.  This one deftly marries youthful energy with some bottle maturation character. How logical that a great sommelier should offer us such a choice of great wines!

Both Stuart and Jim have experienced a great deal of rain in Western Europe, and when Jim arrived in Burgundy on Tuesday night he walked to dinner through quite a serious thunderstorm. The day before when walking through the rain from one winery to the next in Nuits-Saint-Georges, Stuart was stopped by the local police. “Are you OK?”, they asked with genuine concern, then drove him to his destination. We thank the Burgundian police for their support and hope they are also looking forward to our forthcoming Burgundy Report!

Thanks for the article!