On the picture Helga Gál Hungarian wine expert.
By John Dunkelgrün.
On December 1st the Embassy of Hungary together with Nyenrode Business University organised a wine tasting at the Carlton Ambassador.
The evening was not a diplomatic event, but as Dr. András Kocsis, the ambassador, said in his welcome speech, its goal was to introduce Hungarian wines to Dutch wine importers and wine experts in The Netherlands.
Hungarian wines used to have a great name all over Europe but during the communist years the planners went for quantity rather than quality. As there are now many countries that produce wines from as far away as New Zealand to neighbour Slovakia, Hungary decided to go for quality.
The embassy had Helga Gál, the wine expert from the Ministry of Agriculture especially flown in for this presentation. She gave a very impressive overview of the Hungarian wine industry.
Hungarian wine production, she said, focuses on quality, tradition and character. Some of the original vineyard owners have bought back their estates and are planting their vines on the hills rather than the flat fields that can produce copious quantities of plonk.
Hungary has a real wine drinking culture and over the last decades wine shops have sprung up all over the country. There people, especially young people, can buy great wines by the glass in modern cool surroundings. They don’t have to fork out big money for a whole bottle and strangely, this mushrooming culture has reduced the consumption of alcohol.
The guests were welcomed with a glass of Garamvári from the Balaton region. It is a fresh tasting bubbly that is much better than most of the Prosecco available here. There are six distinct wine making regions in Hungary, Danube, Pannon, Balaton, Transdanubia, Upper Hungary and of course, Tokaj. Apart from the bubbly there were seven wines to taste.
Your correspondent, somewhat awed by the array of wine experts who attended, will not give you a sip by sip account of the various wines. Suffice it to say that they ranged from the good to the excellent with an aged Tokaj as a pièce de résistance.
In the Tokaj region wines have been made for millennia. It was the first wine area in the world that received defined and protected name. They have even found a fossilised vine leaf dating back to the miocene, over five million years ago. If that isn’t tradition, I don’t know what is.
It is to be hoped that these wines will soon be available to the wine loving public in The Netherlands.
