Vintner revived the Austrian industry with his sweet wines

Alois Kracher, 48, a vintner whose success producing sweet wines helped to revive the Austrian wine industry, died of cancer Wednesday.

The announcement on the website Decanter.com did not say where Kracher died.

Kracher, working at his father’s vineyard in Illmitz, in the eastern Austrian province of Burgenland, was known for making sweet wines that connoisseurs rated among the world’s best.

An Illmitz native, he was named White Wine Maker of the Year in the 1994 International Wine Challenge, the world’s largest wine competition. Last year, he was chosen as Sweet Wine Maker of the Year at the challenge.

“He was far and away Austria’s most well-known vintner and the catalyst for Austria’s presence in the wine world,” Seth Allen, Kracher’s U.S. importer, told the online edition of Wine Spectator this week.

A chemist by training, Kracher worked in the pharmaceutical industry until 1991, when he went to work full time at his family’s wine estate. The previous several years had been disastrous for Austrian wine exports, the demand for which disappeared after a scandal involving the addition of illegal additives to cheap Austrian dessert wines in 1985.

Luckily for Kracher, 1991 was an excellent vintage that enabled him to produce a complete collection of top-notch dessert wines. The wines displayed his mastery of the style of winemaking that depends on Botrytis cinerea, a fungus that causes ripe grapes to shrivel, concentrating the sugar and intensifying the flavor.