Tokaj – Wines Galore

Statue of Bacchus Outside Racozi Pince

Tokaj (toke-eye, or toe-coy as some of the locals pronounce it)is world famous for its wines…its white wines.  Starting in the 17th century, the Hungarian king laid down restrictions stating that only wines made in this small region and only those made with one or more of six grape varietals could bear the name Tokaj.  This effectively made Tokaj the first “closed” wine region in the world; well before Bordeaux or Champagne.  Tokaj’s most famous wine is the aszú (a-zoo).  Aszú is essentially made from rotten grapes.  The grapes grow very large, but then the so-called “noble rot” sets in and cracks the skin of the grape, exposing it to the harsh sun.  These cracks coupled with exposure to the sun removes all of the moisture from the grapes, concentrating the sugar.  The aszú grapes are then picked by hand, one-by-one, and used to create the wine by the same name.  After tasting aszú wine, Louis XIV famously stated that it was “The wine of kings, and the king of wines.”  The wines we tasted definitely live up to their reputation.

What should have been a simple trip to relax and drink wine, once again, turned into quite an ordeal.  These difficulties have really been the overarching theme of our tenure in Hungary.  Luckily, we ran into a few very nice people over the course of the day that really helped us out.  We booked our train from Miskolc to Tokaj early Friday morning without issue.  Yet when we went to board the train, I wanted to make sure it was the right train so I checked with the conductor.  Good thing I did because he informed me that the Tokaj railway station wasn’t open!  They have been doing construction work on the railway just before Tokaj all week.  We would pick the one week that it’s nearly impossible to get to Tokaj.  Instead of just disembarking at the Tokaj train station, we were told that we had to get off the train at Szerencs and find a substitute bus that would take us the rest of the way to Tokaj.

Enter helpful stranger.  When we boarded the train there had been a middle-aged man sleeping in the seats across the aisle from ours.  After hearing my clumsy exchange with the conductor, he revealed to us that he spoke very good English, and even better, he was en route to Tokaj as well.  We later learned that he was a writer headed to Tokaj for a Hungarian writer’s conference.  Yet most interestingly, he was born in a Yugoslavian village, somewhere in modern-day Serbia, that doesn’t exist anymore.  He said that where he was from was a purely Hungarian village and that when the [Yugoslavian] war started and the minorities were being exterminated, he was 19 and fled to Budapest, where he’s been ever since.  We never caught the man’s name, so I’ll just call him Writer.

                Without Writer our trip to Tokaj would not have been nearly as smooth.  He helped us find the right bus outside of the train station, but he helped us even more later on.  Not 15 minutes into the bus ride, the bus stopped in the middle of an intersection.  It had broken down.  Just our luck.  Writer, told us to get out of the bus and had called one of his friends who was on his way to pick him up and take him to Tokaj, he said that we could tag along.  Yet before his friend arrived, a replacement bus showed up, so we hopped on that instead and finished our journey to Tokaj.

We checked into our hotel, which looked very similar to a seedy-roadside motel somewhere in the Midwest.  Yet it was sufficient, and cheap.  Then we set out onto the town, grabbed a pizza for lunch, and went to our first Pince (Wine cellar).  The Racozi Pince is the oldest cellar in the region, dating back well over 400 years.  We took a tour of the cellar, which was really cool, and then tasted six of the regions wines: two dry whites, three sweet whites, and the aszú.  The aszú is graded on a 1-6 scale based on the number of puttonyos used to create it.  A Puttonyo is a barrel (25 kg) of aszú berries.  In creating the wine, the same amount of grape juice is always used, yet the differences arise from the number of puttonyos added to that grape juice, with 6 being the best.  The aszú we had at Racozi was a 5 puttonyos aszú.  It was pretty good, but we had already tasted a 5 puttonyos aszú in Budapest that was far better.

After the Racozi cellar, we went to the Tokaj museum, which was an absolute waste of time.  After a quick power-nap, we trekked out past the railroad station to the vineyards themselves to walk around.  Seeing all of the fields of grapes covering the hillsides was pretty spectacular.

Upon returning to the city intent on tasting more wines, we were quite distraught to find that, although all of the signs in the city state that things are open until 20:00, all of the cellars close at 4:30!  It was just after 4:30 resumed our quest for wine.  Yet we lucked out once again.  We walked into the Hímesudvar Pincészet and the vintner told us that typically he would love to give us a tasting, but he had a meeting with the owner, who happened to be a very nice English lady.  Yet, he put a call down to one of his friends who runs the Sauska Pince and said that she would let us taste wine there.

We found Sauska, but from the outside it looked just as closed as any of the other cellars.  Yet Kati pushed open the large double-doors and we timidly walked into an empty marbled room.  We found a young lady in an office and she said they were closed, but she was allowing us to attend a private tasting with two of her guests that would be done in English.  Her guests turned out to be a gay couple from Poland.  The first man we met, a physician, was very nice and very friendly.  But his partner did not seem happy about anything and refused to speak in anything but Polish.  Yet the three of us had a great time.  The Polish couple were clearly wine connosiers and even knew the last manager of the winery we were tasting.  We had six wines, the last of which was the much coveted 6 puttonyos aszú.  It was worth the wait.  It was fantastic, yet Kati and I both agreed that the aszú wine we had in Budapest was far superior.  When we get back to Budapest we’re going to have to find the name of the winery that made it.  Apparently the Polish guys and the Hungarian woman thought it was pretty humorous that we were staying at the Hotel Tokaj.  Each time I told them where we were staying they gave me this look and said, "Oh...that's a nice place."  But they all seemed very amused when I responded, "I don't care where we sleep as long as we have great wine to drink."

After the wine tasting we also had a very intriguing discussion about the Hungarian language.  As I’ve stated earlier, Hungarian is unique in Europe and unrelated to any surrounding languages.  Linguistically, its closest relative is Finnish.  The Polish physician agreed with me on this point, yet our host told us that she couldn’t understand any Finnish.  She also told us that there has been a lot of modern research as to the origins of Hungarian and many now dispute that Hungarian is similar to Finnish at all.  While the dinosaurs in the field still adhere to that belief, she said that she does a lot of research on the topic and she, along with many more modern scholars, are convinced that Hungarian originated from the Asian languages; specifically from a precursor to Japanese.  Overall, despite the traveling issues, it was a great, and informative, day.