Alois Kracher, Gunning for Yquem

“Well,” said the well-known American wine merchant after tasting the glass of anonymous dessert wine, “it’s either Cha^teau d’Yquem or it’s Alois Kracher.”

He was dead on. The golden liquid he had tasted “blind” was indeed from Kracher, a phenomenon and the maker of remarkable wines. Almost overnight this previously unknown winemaker from an obscure corner of Austria has shot to international fame in a manner that recalls the rise of winemaking stars Marcel Guigal of the Rho^ne in France and Angelo Gaja of Piedmont in Italy.

A native of Illmitz, just two miles from the Austrian-Hungarian border in the state of Burgenland, Kracher, 37, has not stopped making headlines since the British magazine Wine named him its white wine maker of the year on Sept. 7, 1994. Previous winners included Brian Croser of Petaluma winery in South Australia and Olivier Humbrecht of Zind-Humbrecht in Alsace, France.

In 1995, the American wine press showered Kracher with praise. Wine & Spirits magazine gave him a rare platinum medal, and both the Wine Spectator and International Wine Cellar have given many of his wines 90-plus ratings.

What makes Kracher’s achievement all the more remarkable is that he is a dessert wine specialist. After a 1985 scandal involving the addition of illegal additives to cheap Austrian dessert wines, it had been impossible to sell any Austrian wines outside Austria.

They are only now making a comeback. In recent blind tastings in England, France and Italy, Kracher’s dessert wines have matched or bettered top vintages of Cha^teau d’Yquem, the Sauternes that remains the benchmark for aspiring producers of late-harvest wine around the world.

It is not just the combination of pure ripe flavors, silky richness and great elegance of his wines that has made Kracher such a big hit with the world’s dessert wine fanciers, though. A gregarious personality that seems to have no problem switching from the rural countryside of Illmitz to the frenetic bustle of midtown Manhattan has also won him many friends.

It would be hard to find a vintner with a more contagious smile than Kracher’s. Like the Cheshire Cat’s in “Alice in Wonderland,” it remains imprinted in your mind long after its owner has found his way back to the shore of the Neusiedler See, the lake near which his 19 acres of vines stand.

“We are very lucky that our vineyards have the high humidity and warm autumn weather ideal for the development of noble rot, or botrytis. Only a few miles away, it is too dry for this,” Kracher told me.

The great majority of the world’s dessert wines would not exist without the Botrytis cinerea fungus. When it infects ripe grapes under favorable conditions, they shrivel, concentrating the juice to give intense, naturally sweet wines. Botrytis does not affect grapes evenly, though, so stringent selection of the most shriveled berries is essential to good results. Whether in Austria, France, Germany or California, harvesting botrytised grapes requires enormous dedication and painstaking attention to detail.

The humidity that enables botrytis to develop with such frequency in Illmitz’s vineyards comes from the Neusiedler See, 10 miles long and two miles wide, and the many smaller lakes on its eastern side. Some of the latter have extraordinary names, such as the Unterstinkersee, or Lower Stinking Lake.

What makes the landscape so extraordinary are its extreme flatness and the patches of vineyards lying between lakes and reed beds that are home to many rare species of bird. Nearly all of Kracher’s best vineyards fall within the boundaries of Neusiedler See National Park.

“Here as everywhere else,” Kracher said as we toured his vineyards, “the best wines come from the hills.” I scanned the horizon vainly searching for hills. What he was referring to as hills were gentle rises whose “peaks” stood no more than a few feet above the surrounding ground. Kracher’s comment was at once serious and laced with his own ironic brand of humor.

In spite of these natural advantages, Illmitz’s wine-growing history is rather short in European terms. Kracher describes his own region as “the California of Austria.” Significant areas of vineyard were first planted a little more than a century ago, and the first top-class late-harvest wines were made only in 1969.

If you look at the other leading producers in this corner of Austria, nearly all are new arrivals. The Velich brothers in next-door Apetlon, who make Austria’s finest barrel-aged Chardonnay, have been in business for less than a decade. In Illmitz, Kracher’s leading competitor, Willi Opitz, began experimenting with innovative styles of dessert wines during the late ‘70s.

Kracher took over the winemaking from his now-68-year-old father, Alois Kracher Sr., only 10 years ago. “I made my first wines in 1981,” he said, “but they were far behind my father’s. It was a sobering experience. I realized how much experience he had and how much I still had to learn.” A stint at Cha^teau La Tour Blanche, the wine school of Sauternes, in 1986 was the first of his many steps to mastering the making of dessert wines.

Kracher gave up his well-paid job in the pharmaceutical industry in 1991 to grow wine full-time. Looking back, he has mixed feelings about the years he spent away from the family wine estate. “In retrospect, I think it was a rather adolescent thing to do, but working [in the pharmaceutical industry] did teach me the vital importance of thoroughness and precision.”

Fate was with him, because 1991 was an excellent vintage, enabling him to produce an entire collection of world-class dessert wines for the first time. They provided the launching pad for his takeoff from national to international fame.

With this vintage, he also introduced an internal classification to help guide consumers through his labyrinthine range of beerenauslese and trockenbeerenauslese wines. (The Austrian wine law uses the same designations for late-harvest wines as does Germany.) Those made in the traditional style in barrels of neutral oak or acacia wood are sold under the name Zwischen den Seen (“between the lakes”). The succulent interplay of lush fruit and palate-cleansing acidity gives these wines their appeal. This, together with their generally modest alcoholic content, gives them a family resemblance to top-quality German dessert wines.

Kracher bottles only varietal wines under the Zwischen den Seen label, the Scheurebe grape giving the most consistently exciting results. These wines possess an intense exotic fruit and pink grapefruit character and perfect balance. Muskat-Ottonel, one of the Muscat grapes of Alsace, along with local varieties Welschriesling and Bouvier, also give excellent wines in this style.

The wines Kracher vinifies in small new oak casks using methods he learned in Sauternes are marketed as Nouvelle Vague (“new wave”). Here vanilla, spice, toast and bread notes mingle with the fruit, and it is alcohol more than acidity that is the balancing element for the wines’ natural sweetness. The most exciting of these wines is the Chardonnay-Welschriesling Beerenauslese, a dead ringer for top-class Sauternes.

At first, blending Chardonnay and Welschriesling sounds bizarre. But Kracher insists that the components play the same roles that Semillon and Sauvignon Blanc grapes do in Sauternes; in both instances the first grape provides richness and the latter brings freshness. The Traminer (a close relative of Gewurztraminer) in this series is a genuinely strange wine whose intense spicy-toasty character will either knock you out or leave you cold.

The Grand Cuvee, a complex blend of many grapes that is produced only in the best vintages, stands apart from these groups. Kracher describes his aim here as “matching the highest possible concentration of flavor with the greatest possible elegance.” The 1994 Grand Cuvee is probably the best wine Kracher has bottled to date. It is packed full of dried fruit, melted butter and citrus flavors, extremely intense and lush, yet has a very clean aftertaste. Breathtaking now, it will gain in subtlety and harmony with age and will live for decades if correctly cellared.

The next time somebody organizes a competitive blind tasting of the finest dessert wines of the world to see whether the French and German classics are still top of the pile, Kracher does not need to worry about the results if this wine is in the row. This is a comparison he has always sought, not so much for the reflected glory but to see how his wines measure up to the severe standards he sets for himself.

Spend an evening tasting his wines with Kracher and a frequent question will be, “Yes, but is it great or only good?” If he is well-practiced in asking this question, it is because he has posed it himself untold times.

* Note: Alois Kracher will be in Los Angeles for a dinner on Aug. 12 at Campanile, where seven of his wines will be tasted during the five-course dinner. Seating is limited. The cost is $115 per person, not including tax and gratuity. For more information, call Campanile at (213) 938-1447.