Hungary Annual Report: Landing On A New Planet of Wine

After tasting more than 200 Hungarian wines and visiting with dozens of the country’s winemakers during my first trip to the country in more than a decade, I reached the conclusion that not only is a major renaissance happening here but also that the best new bottlings are something special in a wine world awash in standardization.

The noble grapes of Bordeaux, Burgundy and the Rhine grow in Hungary, just like they do in many other wine-producing countries around the globe, and some of the wines from these grapes are excellent. However, for most of the leading winemakers of Hungary the focus is firmly on indigenous grape varieties. The best of the new wines of Hungary not only taste extremely good but are also wonderfully different from the wines of France, Germany or even neighboring Austria.

In spite of it being a back-to-the-roots movement, it is also a dynamic one. As Philipp Oser of the Villa Tolnay winery in the Balaton region said to me: “Since the last turn of the century some things really changed for the better. The leading young winemakers here make me confident Hungary will produce some 100-point wines within the next decade – maybe sooner.”

My research into the Hungarian wines for our first report on the country stretched over four months. Some of the regions I visited were familiar, others were real journeys of discovery. But the dynamism of this evolving wine scene quickly became evident. Never was this clearer than when I tasted the wines from Szepsy in the Tokaj region in the far east of Hungary with Istvan Szepsy Jr. I felt like he was introducing me to a new planet of wine.

“Tokaj is famous for sweet Aszu wines, but today 80 percent of the Tokaj’s production is dry,” he said. “When we started we didn’t know how to make great dry wine, so we did a lot of experiments. We have only been consistently making the current style since 2015.”

Szepsy’s dry wines are made exclusively from the native furmint grape. They are matured in 300-liter casks of local oak and all do full malolactic fermentation, after which they still have plenty of acidity. The best are very delicious and totally original.

The Szepsy Furmint Tokaji Szent Tamás 46 2017 has the richness and complexity we expect from a Grand Cru white Burgundy, but the aromas of smoke, wild flowers and floral honey are totally different from Burgundy.

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Of course, one rose doesn’t make a summer, but I also tasted excellent dry furmints from other producers in Tokaj, notably Demeter Zoltan, Sanzon and Tokaj Nobilis. I also encountered some stunning dry furmints from the northern shore of Lake Balaton in the northwest of Hungary from Gilvesy and Villa Tolnay. So furmint is not only about Tokaj.

I asked several of these producers how they would describe the taste of furmint, and all of them mentioned both the grape variety’s naturally bright acidity and its ability to give good to great dry and dessert wines.

You could say that about riesling, too, as Szepsy observed, although he added that “riesling has a distinctive varietal aroma, while furmint does not. The strength of furmint is how strongly it reflects the vineyard, the terroir.”

In Tokaj that often means vineyards with volcanic porphyry soils and, occasionally, loess, which is a wind-borne sediment. In Balaton the bedrock is either volcanic basalt or marine sediments. So, furmint clearly likes volcanic rocks and poor, stony soils in general.

Furmint is the fifth most widely planted grape variety in Hungary, covering 3,862 hectares. At No. 1, with 7,260 hectares, is the red kekfrankos, which is the identical grape variety to blaufrankisch in Austria (the names are direct translations of each other).

However, Central European history is complex. Austria’s blaufrankisch vineyards are concentrated in the Burgenland region, which was part of Hungary until 1920. So this grape variety is actually Hungarian, or at the very least Austro-Hungarian (the two nations formed the core of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the end of World War I).

For a long time kekfrankos was a grape variety desperately searching for star winemakers, because right after the end of communism in 1989 many of Hungary’s leading red wine producers went for the Bordeaux grape varieties big time.

Now, kekfrankos has several champions, most notably Zoli Heimann of Heimann & Fiai in Szekszard, a couple hours’ drive south of Budapest. “Kekfrankos is the best common denominator among the red grape varieties of Hungary,” Heimann told me, “and the best for expressing the terroir differences of the Carpathian Basin.”

“From the 2018 vintage I reduced the amount of oak aging because through too much time in barrel they lose the characteristic vibrant aromas of sour cherry, flower petals and marzipan,” he said.

My experience with the Heimann wines from a decade and more ago meant that I clearly saw a massive shift when the introduction of their new style for kekfrankos came with the 2018 vintage. The Heimann & Fiai Kékfrankos Szekszárd Szivem 2019 is the most exciting expression of this to date, with a fantastic interplay of elderberry, smoky and wet earth character, plus remarkable concentration and vitality.

Heimann’s revolutionary new wines are not entirely without precursors in Hungary. Berlin-based lawyer Horst Hummel has been making a single-vineyard kekfrankos called Spatz (“the sparrow bird”) matured only in used oak at his winery in the Villany region since 2007.

Villany, a limestone ridge dusted with loess close to the border with Croatia in the far south of Hungary, has long had a split personality, with some producers still focusing on big, rich reds while others, such as Malatinszky, favor a more restrained and elegant style. The latter direction succeeds spectacularly well in the mind-blowingly concentrated and super-fine Malatinszky Cabernet Franc Villány Kúria 2013, the highest-rated Hungarian red in this report.

Red cuvees are also important for the new wines of Hungary, nowhere more so than the Eger region to the northeast of Budapest. Eger now focuses on the traditional bikaver red wine cuvee that has long been known in the West as Bull’s Blood. bikaver is always based on kekfrankos with kadarka, another indigenous grape. It usually includes at least some wine from Bordeaux grapes.

The striking thing about bikaver, which can also be made in other regions of Hungary, is how the character of the indigenous grapes almost always dominates that from the imported varieties.

The best examples of this style belong to the highest level of the Eger appellation, called Egri Bikaver Grand Superior, which must be single-vineyard wines. Look out for the amazingly concentrated and structured Gál Tibor Egri Bikavér Grand Superior Sikhegy 2017, which has a wonderfully creamy finish.

Although there are other excellent producers, such as St. Andrea and Kovacs Nimrod in Eger, the young Tibor Gal is the leader of the region’s back to bikaver movement, as well as its chief promoter and philosopher.

“I was making varietal wines as my father did until I had a moment of revelation about three years ago,” he explained to me. His father was the winemaker for Tuscany’s Ornellaia in the 1990s. “Then I suddenly realized that a bikaver blend is always more interesting than any of its components. I instantly shifted the focus of our winery to bikaver!”

Not every region in Hungary has been able to orient itself as clearly and systematically as Eger. The next-door region of Matra is clearly struggling to follow this example, although there are still dynamic winemakers to watch there, including Centurio and Kerekes.

So, although Hungary already has a slew of new wines that offer a lot of delightful surprises, many more and even better examples are on the way!

– Stuart Pigott, Senior Editor