Tokaj:
The mold covered every surface of the cellar, coating the walls and ceilings in layers of loose black gauze. On one shelf, sheets of mold had grown so thick that it was nearly impossible to tell what was underneath, making the ancient wine bottles seem like ash-colored homunculi, an army of toy soldiers made from fungus.
Walking farther into the cellar, I ducked under a low ceiling and felt dangling fingers of mold touch my head.
"The mold is fed by the wine that evaporates," said my guide, Zsuzsanna Szobonya, leading me into a hexagonal tasting room where even the arabesque chandelier overhead was adorned with more black fluff. "Try this," she said.
Standing in the dim light, I sniffed, then tasted. Though the cellar air was damp and musty, the scent from the glass was richly aromatic and floral. The wine, a Tokaji aszu, was full of citrus blossoms and fruit in the nose. In the mouth, crisp flavors of apricot and orange burst forth, followed by an invigoratingly sharp finish that begged for another quick sip.
Lucky mold, I thought.
"Can you imagine?" Ms. Szobonya asked, taking a sip. "So light and fresh, and yet it's about 20 percent sugar."
Though not all wines from the region are quite so saccharine, the legendary aszu sweet wines were a large part of what had brought me to this corner of northeastern Hungary. Known by the name of the region's main winemaking town, Tokaj, the moist and moldy area at the confluence of two mysterious, slow-moving rivers is the oldest classified wine region in Europe -- older than Bordeaux in France, older than Porto in Portugal, older than Chianti in Italy. In fact, many of the stone wine cellars here date to the mid-16th century.
And now, 20 years after the changes that brought democracy, market capitalism and wide-open borders to the former Eastern bloc, Tokaj is emerging as one of the most interesting wine regions in Europe, not just for its sweet aszus and distinctive dry whites, but also for its unusual blend of history and cultures -- Jewish, Russian, Hungarian and Greek -- and for the low-key experience of a less-traveled wine trail where the curious and enterprising can easily rub shoulders with working winemakers, often right in their homes and vineyards.
"You can taste the wines right where they're made," said Carolyn Banfalvi, the author of "Food Wine Budapest," who also provides culinary tours of the Tokaj region. "There's a real range of wines in Tokaj. There are the sweet wines that everybody thinks about first, but there's also the excellent dry wines, which are becoming more and more well known."
That renown seems to have spread faster and farther than the wines themselves, which remain a relative rarity outside their homeland, making a trip to Tokaj a near necessity for travelers who want to taste the full range. So, armed with several tips from Ms. Banfalvi, I made a wine-tasting road trip to the region this spring, driving there in just over seven hours from my home in Prague.
Dusk was falling as I arrived, creating a mysterious twilight zone out of the rolling Carpathian foothills: with tractors often occupying the road and small farmhouses surrounded by vines and impressive oaks, the setting was a far cry from the overtouristed wine trails of Beaune or the Napa Valley. In fact, the wide horizons and tree-lined country roads felt closer to the place where I grew up in rural central California.
What we don't have a lot of in the long San Joaquin Valley, however, are luxury hotels run by European aristocrats, like the Grof Degenfeld Castle Hotel, a chateaulike property owned by a German-Hungarian family of counts and earls located in Tarcal, a traditional winemaking village on the western side of Kopasz-hegy, also known as Mount Tokaj.
After checking into a surprisingly large room and admiring the view over the well-tended grounds and vineyards, I went downstairs to the Degenfeld wine cellar, where the hotel manager, Pal Visztenvelt, had a selection of the estate's own bottles waiting for me as part of the wine-tasting package I'd booked.
Though the stately "castle" looks a lot like a chateau, he explained, it was built as a winemaking school in 1873, just 10 years after the Hungarian émigré Agoston Haraszthy founded the Buena Vista Viticultural Society in Northern California, helping to create the wine industry there. Now in the hands of the Degenfeld family, the former school operates as a combination hotel and winery, producing wine from its own vineyards. High-season occupancy at the hotel, he said, can be fairly busy, but the off-season -- from October to May -- is generally empty, because of the weather.
"In November this isn't a very nice place," he said. "We have so much fog you can't see anything."
With just a few noticeably elegant Continental couples booked in for wine tastings and vineyard tours during my midweek visit in mid-April, the airy, salonlike public areas of the hotel contributed to the languorous feeling that seemed endemic to the region. The damp was apparent, as well. Set at the meeting of the Tisza and the Bodrog Rivers, the Tokaj region's microclimate is a haven for fungus: both the black mold, Cladosporium cellare, which thrives in its wine cellars, and Botrytis cinerea, the so-called "noble rot" that attacks grapes in the vineyard, and one of the secrets to Tokaji aszu and some of the area's other sweet wines.
The majority of the region's vineyards are planted with furmint, Mr. Visztenvelt said, a varietal especially conducive to the fungus. When botrytis attacks, the grapes dry up, becoming nearly solid. This concentrates the sugars, creating a characteristic flavor. Although the result was delicious, I couldn't help wondering who first got the idea to produce wine from moldy grapes.
"One story is that it was because of the Turks," Mr. Visztenvelt said, referring to the era when the Ottoman Empire occupied a large portion of what is today Hungary. "The Turkish border was in the neighborhood, and they used to make raids across the border during which the winemakers had to hide. Afterwards, they came back and they tried to make wine out of the grapes that had rotted while they were gone."
That sounded as plausible as just about any other explanation. Whatever the cause, it clearly didn't happen recently: the Hungarian government's application for Unesco World Heritage status for the region, which it earned in 2002, notes that most of the area's wine cellars were built between the mid-1500s and the late 17th century.
Though all the samples were excellent, I was most struck by Degenfeld's 2008 Fortissimo, a sweet, late-harvest wine made from 80 percent yellow muscat, with the remainder coming from two other types of grapes: harslevelu and dried but not botrytis-infected furmint grapes. It had a nose of syrupy, overripe fruit, with lush spoonfuls of melon, apricot and cinnamon-spice in the mouth, followed by a honeyed finish with just a touch of dry minerality.
"The goal was to produce a wine at the same level and with a similar taste every year," Mr. Visztenvelt said. "With an aszu, that would be impossible."
For a wine that was supposedly easy to produce, it had a meditative complexity, and I soon found myself asking for another glass, which I carried outside. As the sun was setting, I walked through the parklike chateau grounds and considered my options for the next few days. Given enough time, I hoped to visit the nearby village of Mad, partly to see the well-regarded Royal Tokaji Wine Company there, partly to see the town's restored Baroque synagogue from 1795 -- a focal point for the area's once vibrant Jewish community and another draw for cultural travelers. In warmer weather, I could hike or bike the many trails on Mount Tokaj or even rent a canoe and spend time on the river. But the dark clouds scudding in from the west made me think that I should get to know the area with an indoor approach: by drinking as well as I could.
The next morning the front desk arranged for a driver to take me to the village of Tolcsva, a 30-minute journey to the northeast made just slightly longer by a slow drizzle. Through the rain I watched vineyards and isolated hilltop farmhouses roll by before we came to the town and stopped in front of Oremus, one of the area's largest and most famous wineries.
That fame was earned in large part because of its dry white furmint, now called Mandolas after the vineyard where the grapes are grown, which once received a not-too-shabby 89 points from Wine Enthusiast. It was there that I met Ms. Szobonya, who, after giving me a tour of the spotless, laboratory-like winery, led me to the cellar's hexagonal mold-encrusted tasting room. There, we tried the winery's three-, five- and six- puttonyos aszu wines. Modern aszu wines are rated on a scale of three to six "puttonyos," or "baskets," an old measurement originally designating the amount of botrytised grapes in each barrel, now used to denote the amount of remaining sugar in the finished wine (six being the sweetest). We also tried two vintages of Mandolas from 2006 and 2004.
Tasting the wines in the near-dark, I thought the 2006 was stony and crisply dry, while the vintage from just two years earlier had more peach fruitiness in the mouth and far less minerality.
After a two-hour tasting, it was time to follow up the morning's liquids with lunch. But after tasting fine wines, where would I find a meal of the same quality?
About a block away, as it turned out, at Os Kajan, a restaurant that also functions as an art gallery and, with just one guest room, a hotel.
Despite the place's all-trades angle, the food was surprisingly good, merging local ingredients with French techniques courtesy of the Hungarian- and English-speaking French owner, Pascal Leeman, who seemed to have a knack for discovering and presenting the region's culinary ingredients at their best. As a member of the local mycological society, he explained, he had himself gathered the local truffles for his restaurant's fragrant ravioli, served just al dente with a large accompanying salad of fresh mâche and boiled quail eggs. The house specialty, sautéed Hungarian foie gras, arrived in a sweetly acidic sauce of honey and aszu wine, whose tartness formed a nice counterbalance to the rich goose liver. Aszu wine even showed up in a dessert, taking the role of the alcohol in what would have otherwise been a baba au rhum.
Floored by the cuisine, I resolved to find a way to stay in Os Kajan's guest room, if not move in permanently.
The town of Tokaj itself can also feel remarkably homey, provided your home is somewhat monomaniacally focused on wine. That afternoon, I wandered its narrow streets and lanes, stopping into small bottle shops and wine stores, bars and tasting cellars. With just over 5,000 residents, it has an intimate, neighborly feel, though it was hard to find anything not related to the grape. Cherry trees were blossoming next to the town's tall stone walls, while Mount Tokaj loomed to the west, creating a nestled, well-protected air that felt quite unlike anywhere else I knew in Central Europe.
It seemed as if the town had suddenly moved to the Mediterranean, though with even more neo-Classical architecture: restored masterpieces with tall Doric columns supported sturdy triangles; other, wonderfully decrepit buildings displayed ornate arches and facades that evoked Athens by way of Austria. It was Hungary, to be sure, but it somehow reminded me most of Vilia, my grandmother's hometown in Greece.
THIS turned out to be not too far off. As the town's small but colorful museum recounted, Greek merchants came to dominate the wine trade in Tokaj starting in the early 17th century. They were followed by groups of Jewish and Russian wine merchants who were subsequently supplanted by Communist-era state cooperatives, which were ultimately replaced by the international collectives that control much of the production today. The two major players are Oremus, which is part of the Vega-Sicilia concern from Spain, and AXA Millésimes, a large French wine company, which owns the Disznoko winery. After seeing several larger wineries, I was especially curious about the smaller vintners in the region, so the next day I arranged to meet Judit Bodo, the owner of Bott Pince, a small winery in the town of Tokaj with a cultish following among connoisseurs in Budapest. One of Ms. Banfalvi's tips was to schedule meetings with winemakers well in advance, as the undercommercialized nature of the region means that very few wineries have visitors' centers with regular hours.
This can present challenges for the impetuous: if you don't plan, you might show up at a winery only to discover no one is there. But as I learned at Bott Pince, the payoff is often a more intimate, less touristic experience. As Ms. Bodo set a pair of Riedel wineglasses down on a cask, it became apparent we would be tasting her wines directly atop the 16 oak barrels that contained the entirety of Bott Pince's current production, a vintage that had been especially limited because of the caprices of Mother Nature.
"Every year we get three barrels of wine from our Teleki vineyard," Ms. Bodo said. "But in 2009 the birds and the pheasants, they ate everything, and we got just one barrel."
With just one room and a very small amount of cellar space, Bott Pince gave the impression of a mom-and-pop operation. Most of the bottles I saw didn't yet have labels.
"I take them home, 100 bottles at a time," Ms. Bodo said, "and we put the labels on in the kitchen."
Born in a Hungarian-speaking part of Slovakia, Ms. Bodo recounted how she had arrived in Tokaj after first working for a winery in Austria. A bookish brunette, she could have come from just about anywhere in Europe, speaking a crystalline, slightly academic English inflected with words from various other languages, as when she began talking about her favorite varietal, harslevelu: "Sometimes the furmint is too harsh," she said, "too 'gerade' in German, too 'straight,' and harslevelu has more play. It's more layered, it has more nose, it has more nuance."
Tasting her winery's dry furmint-harslevelu cuvée, I thought I got a sense of the difference: while Bott Pince's 100 percent furmint wine had been stony and sharp, the blend brought out more cantaloupe and sweet melon with less acidity, finishing with just a touch of linden blossom.
The sell-it-now, small-scale nature of her business has meant that Ms. Bodo currently has no archival wine to speak of: she recalled that at a recent wine dinner in Budapest, fans of her wine had brought bottles from their own cellars in order to taste and compare earlier vintages. Until this year, Bott Pince had never put out an aszu wine, though she noted that its first, a very sweet six-puttonyos version, was just about ready for release.
Pouring a small glass of aszu, she noted that the wine should age for many years, recounting that the very first aszu she tasted was more than 50 years old at the time.
I sniffed at the wine, then tasted. Despite a light color -- Ms. Bodo assured me that it would get darker in time -- it had complex layers of flavor, starting out with the taste of candied oranges before revealing notes of pineapple and brown sugar. With such wonderful flavors in the wine, it seemed a pity that the production was so limited: just 480 bottles would be available, she said.
After another sip, I noticed that the mold on the cellar walls was also small-scale; unlike the fluffy strata of fungi at Oremus, Bott Pince's more modern cellar had but a few flecks of black. But it also appeared to be growing, with bigger clumps visible on the stone arches, and I imagined that there would probably be a lot more of the fungus by the time her wine was also 50 years old.
"It'll happen naturally," Ms. Bodo said, pouring another glass. "It's nice to see what nature can do. That's why we're here."