About the 99%. I know it’s shockingly high and I know it sounds like a figure that just popped out of my head like that. So I did a quick math (with very rough estimates!). Hungary’s yearly production is almost 4 million hectoliters per year from 80 000 hectares (that yield is btw just below the EU average). That’s equivalent of roughly 500 million bottles of wine!

I’ve been sampling the wines for a couple of years now, although I reckon there’s so much more to see and taste. I’ve been to hypermarkets as well as to specialist stores (many of them), visited wine regions (many of them) and I found no more than maybe 100 producers (smaller cellars and larger wineries) on my radar whose aim is to produce quality wines. On average let’s assume 50 000 bottles yearly production (certainly not more) for these 50 wineries (many of them have less than 10 hectares) which adds up to 5 000 000 bottles of quality wine a year, which is roughly 1% of Hungary’s yearly output. The conclusion is twofold:

- Either there’s a huge reserve of good quality wines out there completely unnoticed by wine merchants or the quality wines’ share is really that low.

- Rubbish is really a harsh expression especially if applied to the result of someone’s hard work. I will not withdraw what I wrote but I must state that by rubbish I meant quality below standard, i.e. scoring less than 4- according to the rating system I am using.

Please keep up the great work on your site.