Wine Around The World

 Focus on Nothern Hungary and Tokaji Wines:

The best-known and most prestigious of all Hungary’s wine regions is Tokaj-Hegyalja in the foothills of the northern mountains against the Slovakian border. Tokaji wine takes its name from the local town of Tokaj, and is generally called Tokay in English. The wines can be split into two distinct groups, the Quality Wines, bottled into 75 cl bottles, and the Special Quality Wines, bottles into the traditional 50 cl dump bottles.

These latter rank among the world’s greatest sweet wines and are strongly affected by noble rot. It is the mists from the rivers that create the conditions in which the Botrytis cinera flourishes.

The one wine in the Quality group of note is Tokaji Furmint. It is made entirely from the Furmint variety, is unaffected by noble rot and is either medium-dry or dry.

Tokaji Szamorodni (literally, “Tokaji as it comes”) describes the vinification process whereby the wine is produced by putting together all the grapes as harvested, with no separation of healthy and botrytised grapes. Consequently, the wine may be dry (szaraz) or sweet (édes), depending on the amount of noble rot that is present, but even the dry wine will show noble rot characters. The wine is aged in a traditional cask, called a Gönc.

The world Aszu means nobly rotted grapes. In the production of Tokaji Aszu, healthy and botrytised grapes are separated in the vineyard, after which the healthy grapes are made into dry white wine and the rotten grapes are stored. These can be so rich in sugar that they hardly ferment.

The Aszu grapes are then pounded into a paste before being added to the dry wine to produce the sweetness required, which varies with the amount of paste used. In accordance with tradition, the paste is measured in puttonyos.

Originally, Aszu grapes were collected at the vintage in a 20 kg hod or puttony. Now the measurement refers to the residual sugar content n the finished wine and this qualifies the wine for its designation. On a label you may see a wine classified as containing between three and six puttonyos.

They will have the following residual sugar contents:

3 puttonyos :	60 g/l
4 puttonyos :	90 g/l
5 puttonyos :	120 g/l
6 puttonyos :	150 g/l