It’s embarrassing to admit, but it simply never occurred to me that one of the greatest benefits of the fall of communism in Europe would be a return to the heady days of the 1920s, when Hungarian Tokay was lorded around as the greatest of all the world’s dessert wines. Described by Louis XIV as ‘the wine of kings and king of wines’, Tokay’s pre-eminent status was really only threatened by the legendary Constantia from South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope. Personally, I’m delighted to hear this, since it helps to justify the underwhelming feeling I have usually harboured over the last fifteen years on tasting Hungarian Tokay. It appears I can actually be forgiven. As if confirmation was required, a recent close encounter with the 1993 wines from the Royal Tokaji Wine Company (RTWC) left me in no doubt whatsoever that the present reality of the finest Hungarian dessert wine actually does make its mythical past all the more plausible. With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Hungarian government was able to selectively open the doors of its wine industry to foreign investors. Their task was to take the industry from its post war days of communist administration, to improve production and to restore its international markets. According to Ben Howkins, RTWC’s Marketing and Sales Director, the State Wine Farm which controlled all wine production during the communist period ‘hoovered up’ all the wines, irrespective of vintage and origin, before blending them all together. Hugh Johnson likens the result to blending all the chateaux of the Medoc into a single, featureless wine. The State sold its wines – some of which were acceptable, many at best forgettable – as best it could, usually trading them with Russia in exchange for natural gas. ‘The Russians tended to like the heavily madeirised (oxidised) style and the more they liked it, the more the State Farm made it that way’, Howkins explains. Modern Tokay, especially the renowned Aszu, is a wondrous nectar made from heavily botrytised grapes from both furmint and the indigenous and richly aromatic harslevelu. A small amount of a local golden variant of Muscat of Alexandria is also used to give lift and intensity to the wine’s aroma. Aszu is always sold in its trademark 500 ml bottles. Reputedly made in 1650, the first Aszu predates the first Sauternes by around two centuries. It’s made like no other dessert wine. Heavily botrytised fruit is harvested separately from fruit less over-ripe and taken away as ‘aszu’, a paste-like mix of botrytis and shrivelled fruit. Depending on factors such as the quality of the year and the intended sweetness of the wine, 20-litre amounts of paste known as ‘puttonyos’ (tubs) are added back to the traditional 140-litre barrels containing base wine made from unaffected grapes for fermentation. The wines, whose ultimate sweetness and concentration will relate back to the amount of aszu added, are labelled with the number of puttonyos or ‘putts’ added, usually between three and six. Seven putts is pure aszu ‘essence’, a rare and treasured phenomenon. Once the aszu has absorbed the wine, it is left to ferment itself, a process that traditionally has taken several years. The more the sugar and concentration it has, the longer the time required. One of the first of the new breed of premium Aszu producers, the RWTC was founded in 1989 as a joint venture between such well-known European wine identities as scribe Hugh Johnson and celebrated winemaker Peter Vinding-Diers, with various growers in the top classified vineyards of Mad, one of the most famous of all Aszu-making towns. Just prior to their participation in the joint venture, Johnson and Vinding-Diers were introduced to an old winemaker who had somehow managed to keep his wines separate from the homogenisation of the State Farms. Their intensity and flavour were shattering, conjuring thoughts of the incredible wines that Tokay Aszu had stood for prior to communist control. ‘The whole category skipped a century’, says Ben Howkins. ‘But at least farmers like this were able to loosely connect the threads of knowledge for us.’ In addition to its ‘standard’ blended non-vintage Blue and red Label wines, the RTWC makes four different single vineyard wines: one second growth and three first growth according to the region’s 18th century classification. Although the company had decided that in a normal year most of its wine would be 4 putts, 1993 was such an exceptional year that the standard became 5. ‘Our first growth single vineyard wines reached six putts that year. Everything fell into place for us. Early morning haze encouraged botrytis and then we had seven long weeks of Indian summer to perfect the sugar-acid balance and giving us both good quantity and quality’, Howkins says. In fact, 1993 created the best wines for each of the new Aszu makers since they began. Ben Howkins is already calling it the finest Aszu vintage in living memory, saying it easily defeats the over-oxidised wines from the top seasons of the 90s, 80s, 70s and 60s and amply rivals the best from the early 40s and 20s. ‘But it’s not at all bright to call it the vintage of the century, is it?’ he laughs. Having recently tasted the Szt Tamas and the extra-dimensional Essencia 1993, I’m able to say that as far as I am concerned, Hungarian Tokay Aszu has reached a level of quality we have not seen in this lifetime. The best of its wines lose nothing by comparison with the greatest Sauternes, Rheingau Trockenbeerenauslesen or, dare I say it, the best late-harvest semillon from Griffith. The Essencia is so intensely concentrated, yet balanced with fine fruity acidity that it is difficult to imagine how it would be possible to enjoy anything sweeter. But that’s a problem we can learn to live with for, as Ben Howkins says, ‘We are growing up now. Today we can admit we have sweet tooths; there’s no need to tell everyone it’s smart to drink dry. Just taste this and go “Wow!!”
