Tokaj: the wine of kings

I still have those abiding memories of past trips to the Tokaj Hills in Hungary. Perhaps my fondest evokes a lunch with Hugh Johnson at a modest inn on a hot summer’s day. Back then Hugh was one of the owners of Royal Tokaj and I had travelled out with his importers to look round the cellars in the wonderfully-named village of Mad.

We were sitting outside and Hugh decided to demonstrate the particularities of the Tokaji terroir with the aid of the paper napkins on the table. He deftly formed the peaks of Mount Tokaj and Magas-Hegy (both 514m) that form the alpha and omega of the region and the hills that rise to nearly 800 metres and make up the landscape in between; then he showed the influence of defunct volcanoes and the confluence of the Rivers Bodrog and Tisza that causes the autumnal mists that encourage “noble rot”: a benevolent fungus that shrivels the grapes and concentrates the sugars inside. He finished up talking of the hugely varied soils ranging from rhyolite, quartz and tufa to loam and hyper-absorbent loess.

On another occasion I recall arriving alone from Vienna late at night. It was January and distinctly cold and crisp at minus 7C. I stood outside at the entrance to a cellar and looked up at a brilliant array of stars above the cradle of hills. When I descended into the bowels of the earth by narrow stone steps the temperature rose to 10C and I felt blissfully warm again.

I was reminded of Hugh’s lecture when I got to the Merchant Taylors’ Hall in the City for the Tokaj tasting at the beginning of this month. Many of the growers had come with bits of rock or stones to show us the wonders of their terroir. One kind winemaker from Mad gave me a small piece of obsidian, which will join some others I filched from the volcanic island of Pantelleria. A woman I met from another estate was thinking of having some obsidian earrings made. I had to agree they’d look pretty smart.

We know Tokaj chiefly as a luscious sweet Hungarian wine created by adding “puttonyos” or 27-litre hods of super-sweet, shrivelled, nobly rotten fruit (pictured) to a 136-litre barrel of base wine called a “gönci” cask. This is “Aszu”, once the standard tipple of central European emperors, kings and princes when such people still roamed the earth. Aszu is made in appreciable quantities every four or five years or so, and in the vintages in between drinkers have to make do with late harvest wines, “Szamorodni” (which can be sweet or dry) or dry Tokaj.

The standard grape in the Tokaj Hills is Furmint, which is sometimes blended with Harslevelu or with yellow Muscat. Furmint can be fiendishly acidic, but over the years, and in many cases as a result of the softening of the acidity by secondary, malolactic fermentation (or possibly warmer summers?), the wine has become a great deal more palatable. It is now a sappy white wine with the body to grace any table.

I was on the lookout for growers who had succeeded in producing elegant dry Furmints. The 2018 Rány Furmint from Sanzon or Egy Kis (“little one”) from Barta were both noteworthy and Barta also made the gorgeous, smoky 2013 Öreg Király Dülüo Szamorodni. The Gizella estate appealed to me (every second woman in my family was called “Gisela” once), their straight 2018 dry wine contained some Harslevelu grown on loess which appeared to bring out strong aromas of green apple-like fruit. They too made a delicious sweet Szamorodni, but this time a 2017. Grown on volcanic soils they give off a smell of honeycomb. There was a super 2003 dry Szamorodni from Paangold and I awarded high marks for the wines of Carpinus, Juliet Victor (actually Jozsef Váradi) and Orosz Gábor, all of which were new to me.

It is not surprising that many of the best dry (and sweet) Tokajs come from the “crus” or growths that were classified in the eighteenth century, like Szent Tamás, Betsek, Mezes Maly or Király. Istvan Szepsy was the Tokaj grower who took the wine out of the darkness of the Communist years and introduced the new era to the region. His wines have been consistently great. His best dry wines come from Urágya and Szent Tamás. As a treat I was offered a dry Urágya from 2003: it was ample proof that they can age more than gracefully. A sweet 2013 Szamorodni was no disappointment either.

The best recent years for Aszu wines have been 2008 and 2013. From Hétsölö there was a superb 2008, while 2013 produced sensational Puttonyos wines from Dobogo and Grand Tokaj. Some houses manage to make Aszu wines in off vintages: the 2015 from Zsirai is a case in point: leather, cream, honey and baked apples; or the British-owned house of Royal Tokaj which made an opulent Aszu in 2016. For most growers, however, 2017 will be the next taxi off the rank.

There were so many gems at the tasting that it makes a recommendation difficult. One thing to do is to go to the Hungarian specialist Novel Wines in Bath which is having a Furmint February and selling a dry Furmint from Kardos for under a tenner. Another bargain is the 2008 Aszu 6 Puttonyos from Szepsy.