Wines of Hungary

If one good thing came from the years of Communist control in Hungary, it was to hew Hungarian winemaking to its traditions.

For the most part, Hungary’s wine is still made as it has long been made, by small vineyard owners and wineries, and down-to-earth, everyday folk. Very few wineries in Hungary are owned by multinational companies. Fertilizer use is infrequent; sustainable farming practices are common.

History
This somewhat bucolic image belies Hungary’s past as a winemaking country. From the 17th to the early 20th century, Hungary had the third most sophisticated wine culture in Europe, after France and Germany. As early as the 1600s, Hungary developed the first system in Europe for classifying wine on the basis of quality (well ahead of Bordeaux or Burgundy).

Photo by Boudewijn Huysmans on unsplash.com

Nonetheless, taken as a whole, Hungary’s wines today have little of their former stature—save for one wine, the famed Tokaj Aszú. But the potential for renewed greatness is there—and, if Tokaj is a model, a forgone conclusion.

Hungary possesses all the elements required for fine winemaking: a mix of soils, pocketed throughout the country; favorable climates; a range of grape varieties, both indigenous and “international”; a long history of making both table wines and one of the world’s most sought-after dessert wines; and, finally, the present period of peace and independence.

Hungarian wines can be difficult to understand, especially because of the tortuous Finno-Ugric language that the Magyars introduced to this part of the world. (The names of the white grapes Hárslevelü and Szürkebarát do not come trippingly off the tongue.)

Nonetheless, several Hungarian wines do make their way to American shores.

Some wines
The best-known dry red wine from Hungary is Egri Bikavér, “The Bull’s Blood of (the town of) Eger,” a fanciful name for what was assumed by the invading Turks to have sustained the Magyars during a particularly ferocious battle in the mid-1500s at the fortress of Eger, about halfway between Budapest and Tokaj.

Egri Bikavér is made of the Kékfrankos grape, the same grape the Austrians call Blaufränkisch, and what we in America call the Lemberger. It makes anywhere from a light-bodied to a hearty, rustic red, in all cases with marked acidity.

Furmint, Hungary’s major white grape and the basis for Tokaj, is also bottled as a dry white wine under its own varietal name. It is extraordinarily high in acidity (which nicely balances Tokaj’s sweetness). Thus, it gives dry white wines made from it an exceptionally racy edge.

But what Louis XIV called vinum regnum, rex vinorum—the wine of kings and the king of wines—is Tokaj Aszú (toe-KAY or toe-KAI ah-SZOO).

Tokaj Aszú
All during the years 1682-1725, a detachment of Russian soldiers stationed themselves in eastern Hungary, near the town of Tokaj. Their sole purpose was to return to Russia after each harvest with sufficient Tokaj Aszú for their boss, Czar Peter the Great.

This wine, one of the great sweet wines of the world, is just now regaining that bygone renown—after warding off the relentless destruction visited upon it—in succession—by the plant louse phylloxera, two world wars and the nationalization of its wineries by the successors of Peter the Great.

Since 1989 and the democratization of Hungary, a great deal of foreign investment has come to the country, a lot of it on behalf of this wine, Tokay Aszú.

“Aszú” is the Hungarian name for the dry, rotting grapes affected at the end of harvest by the beneficent mold botrytis cinerea, those grapes that are made into a luscious and unctuous wine in ascending degrees of sweetness.

Botrytis is a “good” mold because, while it does rot grapes, it does so in a way that both does not spoil them and brings about a sought-after quality. As botrytis’s spores puncture the skins of the grapes that it infects, it draws out water to feed itself—but does not allow a grape’s great enemy, oxygen, to get into the grapes.

And as it dehydrates the grapes, it progressively concentrates their sugars and acids. When these grapes are picked (often one by one) and made into wine, the result is nectar.

Tokaj Aszú is constructed from four different grape varieties, the predominant one being Furmint, though all four grapes share one aspect in common: high acidity. Such acidity is a nearly necessary foil to Tokaj Aszú’s sweetness and is, indeed, the one characteristic that distinguishes Tokaj Aszú among its peers in the world’s rare sweet wines.

Tokaj Aszú is made by picking the infected grapes and crushing them into a paste. All uninfected grapes—a substantial quantity—are made into a “base wine.” The Aszú paste is added back to the base wine in various proportions and then everything ferments into wine.

The paste that is added back to the base wine is measured in puttonyos, about 50 pounds or 5+ gallons of Aszú. The more puttonyos, the sweeter the Tokaj Aszú.