WINES BEHIND THE IRON CURTAIN: HUNGARY

The year 2023 begins a special series for the Monthly Amaro Wine Club. We will be exploring wines from countries with rich winemaking histories that were out of reach of most of the wine-consuming world for 50 crucial years when the wine industry was just truly starting to become global, from 1941 to 1991. The countries whose wine industries we will cover in the first four months of 2023 were countries that were metaphorically "behind an iron curtain.”

Not long after the Second World War, which put pretty much all luxury goods trade in limbo, the “Cold War” began in which diplomatic relations between communist countries and non-communist countries became hostile and trade and travel was essentially severed, accentuated by a nuclear military standoff led by the Soviet Union, or Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), on the communist front and the United States on the non-communist front. The USSR itself was a federation that are now 15 countries, the most prominent being Russia.* Travel was severely limited on the part of the communist countries to prevent their inhabitants from defecting, hence the metaphorical term “iron curtain” that prevented fluid movement across borders, but more detrimentally, it prevented trade flow between communist countries and non-communist countries.

How does the wine industry figure in? Well, in Europe, on both sides of the iron curtain, humans had already developed a centuries-old wine-consuming habit. In most of the countries that were then part of the USSR, with a few very notable exceptions, Vitus vinifera did not thrive. Georgia and Armenia are those notable exceptions, but they were forced to adhere to draconian USSR economic policy that mandated that their vineyards be plowed under to be replaced with crops that were deemed by the authoritarian state to be more essential for the economy. Among the communist Eastern European countries, most of which were essentially satellite client states of the USSR, there were a few with rich winemaking histories, but, again, centralized economic policy resulted in plowing under vineyards, and wineries lost control over quality to volume by edict of collectivization and industrialization. Yet Vitus vinifera grew in enough abundance in some of these countries that it behooved many of them to include winemaking as at least part of their economic engines, especially as they had the sizable USSR as a consumer. Unfortunately, these wines became unavailable to the rest of the world for 50 years until the end of the Cold War in 1991, and as such we’re only just now seriously getting reacquainted with them. And these regions/countries have had a lot of catching up to do after 50 years of their winemaking industry being quasi-isolated and developmentally stifled.

As such, we start our series with Hungary.

Source: Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, by Anne Applebaum

We thought Hungary was an appropriate start to our series because less than a century ago, it was one of the most important, prestigious wine producers in Europe. Hungary’s many terroirs and microclimates are ideal for cultivating different expressions of Vitus vinifera, and its inhabitants are thought to have brought a winemaking culture from outside of Europe thousands of years ago. Anthropologists and linguists note that the Hungarian word for wine, “bor,” is exceptional because in every other European language, except the Basque language and Greek, the word for wine derives from the Latin word vinum because the Ancient Romans were largely responsible for spreading winemaking throughout Europe. Hence, scientists believe that winemaking in Hungary predates that of most other European cultures.

Hungary is officially divided into 22 wine regions, and these are grouped into seven: Balaton, Duna, Eger, Észak-Dunántúl, Pannon, Sporon, and Tokaj. Each of these regions and their subregions produce distinctive wines due to a wide variance in terroir and climates. Since we’re confined to three wines for our January Wine Club, we had to limit our offerings to be from three regions, so we settled on wines representing Balaton, Eger, and Tokaj. Full disclosure, most of the research, and even some choice wording, for this discussion was heavily borrowed from the writing of Athena Bochanis, an expert in Hungarian wine who has written an informative and entertaining article for the excellent wine information source Wine Folly. And even more full disclosure: Athena is the importer for all three of the wines that we feature in this month’s wine club. 

Source: https://www.offbeatbudapest.com

TOKAJ HAS THE MOST NAME RECOGNITION FOR GOOD REASON

The fame of Tokaj dates back centuries and has been intertwined with royalty from across Europe during these centuries, particularly France and Russia. Louis XIV called the Aszú Tokaji wines “the king of wines and the wine of kings.” Similarly, the Russian czar Peter the Great was so enamored with Aszú that he had an Imperial Russian military unit stationed in Tokaj to ensure that wine imported to Moscow was never interrupted. Because of a unique microclimate in which the autumns are long and warm with mists that spread out from the Bodrog River, the region provides wide variability for grape growing including a “happy accident” from a fungus called botrytis. This fungus, also called “noble rot,” reduces the water content of grapes and can damage them unless they are managed and picked correctly to create a concentrated sweet wine. Hence, when sweet wines were all the rage, which has been the case for most of the history of winemaking, Hungary was producing the most nuanced, the Aszú, using a system of unit control, puttonyos, for regulating the amount of residual sugar to create gradations of sweetness. Wine made with this system has been mentioned in documents dating as far back as 1571.