King of Wines, Wine of Kings

A brief overview and the history of the world's first classified wine region, the home of the famous aszú wine, Tokaj. Wines made here are the culmination of excellence, tradition, heritage, beauty and complexity, made from grapes cultivated on 14 million-year-old volcanic terroirs, transformed into wine with more than 500 year-old procedures, aged in cellars built in the 13th century. Prepare for a travel in time and mouthwatering sensations!

Tokaj, Hungary

Hungary is located in the center of Europe, a country with a long history in winemaking. Hungary has several wine regions, the most well known being Tokaj, that has produced the favourite wine of royal families, emperors, queens, reknown artists, wine lovers for many centuries. The unique bouqet and aromas of Tokaji wines are world famous, the best ones with aging potential of several centuries.

The Mirracle of Tokaj
- Noble rot -

Tokaj’s unique wines were born thanks to a special phenomenon called the Noble Rot which is caused by a fungal disease called Botrytis Cinerea. Botrytis can completely destroy the grapes if they are infected prior to getting ripe, however if it develops once the berries are already mature it will shrivel the grapes turning them into exceptionally flavorful “Aszu” berries, as they are called in Tokaj. With noble rot liquid content of the berries reduces while they encapsulate intense level of sugar, acidity, a high concentration of minerals and aromatic flavors.

The region’s microclimate is perfect for Botrytis to develop in late Autumn when the berries are already ripe. Fog develops in the mornings from the two rivers, Bodrog and Tisza, which are joining together in Tokaj, while the sunny afternoons on the slope of the hills help the berries to become dry, sweet and extremely tasty.

Beginnings

Based on historical evidences, viticulture in the Tokaj region started during the times of the Roman empire, as early as the 3rd century.

A wine cellar in Tarcal, in one of the region’s town, was mentioned to be owned by the Hungarian royal court in a document dated in the 11th century, proving that there has been more than a thousand year of continuous wine cultivation in the region.

Construction of extensive underground cellar systems started in several towns in the 13th century substantiated by documents mentioning the locations of the cellars and also naming some of the best vineyards which are still cultivated as of today.

Golden ages

In the fifteenhundreds Polish merchants recognized the potential of Tokaj, and started the export of the region’s high-quality wines. In 1561 a regulation was issued to officially control the grape cultivation in the region. A document dated ten years later is the first one that mention Tokaj’s most famous wine type, the „Aszú wine” in a written form.

The region was flourishing in the following centuries, Tokaji wine had become a preferred wine of royal courts across Europe, including France, Austria and Russia. Tokaji was the most epxensive wine in the world for over 270 years.

The first Aszú

Legend has it that the first Aszú wine was invented by Máté Szepsi Laczkó, a calvinist pastor and the vineyard master of a major landowner in the Tokaj region in the 17th century. When the Turkish invasion was imminent he decided to postpone the harvest on the Lórántffy family’s extensive vineyards. By the time they got around to the harvest, the grapes on the hills of Oremus had turned into shriveled botrytized berries that looked like raisins. The winemakers decided to try and use them, and the first Tokaji aszú was made. The first bottle was served for Easter to the landowner, Zsuzsanna Lórántffy who was the wife of Prince György Rákóczi I.

Based on this story the invention of aszú wine is attributed to Szepsi, and by most accounts, this happened around 1620. There are however evidences that Aszú wine was known almost 50 years earlier. An inheritance letter of a noble man, called Máté Garai, dated 1571 mentions several barrels of Aszú wines proving that the wine type had existed well before 1620.

World’s first classified Wine region

Tokaj’s magic does not only derive from the region’s microclimate that lets the noble rot flourish, but also from its unique wine making process that has been controlled for almost five hundred years. In 1561 „Regulamentum Culturae Vinearum” was issued to regulate the viticulture in the region.

Tokaji wine became the subject of the world's first appellation control, established several decades before Port wine. Vineyard classification began in 1720, over 135 years before the classification of Bordeaux in France, with vineyards being classified into three categories - first class, second class and third class - depending on the soil, sun exposure and potential to develop noble rot. The region’s best vineyards had been owned by royal and noble families for several centuries. A royal decree in 1757 established a closed production district in Tokaj.

The Terroir

The Tokaj region has 5,500 acres of vineyards across 27 towns and villages. Although the region is best known for its sweet aszú wines, more than half of the wine produced here is dry.

The vulcanic activity that had taken place 14 millions years ago resulted in the presence of a wide variety of rhyolite, tuff, and zeolite in the land. The volcanic bedrocks, that are mostly covered with soils of weathered tuffs and loess make the region's wines truly unique and extremely flavorful. Grapes grown even in the same vineyard can have different characters with the changing structure of the underlying soil layers.

Altough Tokaj is not the only region where grapes with noble rot are cutlivated (on a sidenote there are not many in the world) but it is the only region with such diverse terroirs which, combined with the region's centuries-old winemaking procedures, make the wine of Tokaj the King of Wine.

Vinum Regum, Rex Vinorum

Tokaji wines have been the favourite wines of royal families, emperors, queens, reknown artists, wine lovers for many centuries.

In 1703, Francis Rákóczi II, Prince of Transylvania, gave Louis XIV some Tokaji wine from his Tokaj estate as a gift. The French king said “C’est le roi des vins, et le vin des rois”, „It is the King of Wines and the Wine of Kings“. In reference to this, you will find most Tokaji wines labelled with the latin translation of this sentence: „Vinum Regum, Rex Vinorum.”

Emperor Franz Josef, the Austrian King of Hungary, had a tradition of sending Queen Victoria Tokaji Aszú wine, as a gift, every year on her birthday, one bottle for every month she had lived, twelve for each year. On her eighty-first and final birthday in 1900, this totaled an impressive 972 bottles.

Tokaji wine has received accolades from numerous great writers and composers including Beethoven, Liszt, Schubert, Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Friedrich von Schiller, Bram Stoker, Johann Strauss II, Voltaire and Haydn.

Besides Louis XIV, several other European monarchs are known to have been keen consumers of the wine, such as Louis XV, Frederick the Great, Napoleon III, Gustav III. In Russia, consumers included Peter the Great and Empress Elizabeth of Russia.