Austrians like to check themselves out against the competition … including Château d'Yquem.
In the early 1990s the late Alois Kracher spent three months’ salary on some of the best sweet wines in the world, including two vintages of Yquem, for a blind tasting he was planning in London. His family winery is based in Illmitz in Burgenland, their vineyards sloping down to the shallow Neusiedlersee, which straddles the Austria/Hungary border (see this World Atlas of Wine map). Botrytis is guaranteed in the misty mornings there and a considerable proportion of the vines his father so carefully tended went...