2004 Alois Kracher Scheurebe TBA #10 ZDS

You can’t help but think of Alois Kracher’s description of Scheurebe as “my Riesling” when you taste his 2004 #4 Scheurebe Trockenbeerenauslese Zwischen den Seen. A concentration of lemon and grapefruit gives this wine an electric presence. Distilled black fruits, ginger, fresh peach, caramelized pineapple, mineral salts, and a liqueur-like herbal essence add ravishing complexity and succulence and the finish is brash and brassy in the manner of a trumpet choir. Then comes a revelation: this wine has 14% alcohol. How could it? Talk about sublimation in the service of art! The alcohol seems to have been burned as fuel. The inspiring and otherwise irrepressible Alois “Luis” Kracher died last December 5, after a nearly year-long battle with pancreatic cancer. His son Gerhard, 27, and still-active father will continue the work of this exemplary estate. Note: I tasted the Kracher wines of 2005 and 2006 for the reviews above this Spring, and the 2004s in late 2007 and again this Spring. Kracher was restrained in his early judgment of the challenging 2004 vintage, in which he could not start picking noble rot until November, and continued until Christmas. “The first selections were wonderful; the second passage classic, good; the third – kaput,” was how he described it. “From two months of work,” he continued, “we netted 6,000 liters of quality T.B.A.,” from which he promises a modest-sized collection so that – as he puts it – he wouldn’t have to apologize for a vintage that is good but not great. I don’t believe that this was a tactical confession on his part. Kracher was genuinely surprised by the quality that emerged as his 2004 collection evolved, and in the end, he bottled the same number of Trockenbeerenauslesen – ten – as in the manifestly more classic botrytis vintage of 2005. Importer: Vin Divino, Chicago, IL; tel. (773) 334-6700