Lenz whites v the best

Austrians like to check themselves out against the competition … including Château d'Yquem.

Tuesday, 14 May 2024
Lenz Peninsula line-up

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...