It is unthinkable to talk about Hungarian wine and not talk about Tokay Aszú, one of the most internationally coveted wines. Louis XIV himself described it as “wine of kings, king of wines” and it filled the glasses of royal families all over Europe since the 19th century. XVII.
This wine-growing area located in northeastern Hungary, a few kilometers from the borders of Slovakia and Ukraine, takes its name from the homonymous mountain and town. Included in the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage, the vineyards in the Tokay region extend over more than 5,000 hectares on south-facing slopes to the Slovakian border.
The Tisza and Bobrog rivers irrigate the plains, creating the right climatic conditions for the development of the three best known grape varieties from which Tokay wine is made: the hárselevelü, rich in sugar and aromas, the thin-skinned, late-ripening furmint and the lunel muscat.
But it is not only the climatic conditions that confer these exquisite particularities to the most famous wine of the Tokay region, made from dried grapes called Aszú. Tokay is the first wine known to have been attacked by the famous
Noble Rot
This is the action of the fungus botrytis cinerea, which attacks and penetrates the grapes to extract as much water as possible from the interior, drying it and concentrating the sugars.
This special process, together with the varieties of vines, the volcanic soils, the long aging in subway caves 8 meters deep and the original puttony system used, which gives the wine its peculiar sweetness and musty taste, close the circle of Tokay Aszú production.
Considered one of the great sweet wines of the world, one of its main characteristics is its considerable alcohol content, which ranges between 11º and 15º, together with this, they are very glyceric wines, intense and with very complex aromas, preserving a perfect balance between acidity and sweetness.
