If you’re fed up with overcrowded, overhyped, wet wine festivals then try out this one. Unlike the flood of wine festivals in Budapest and all major cities this time of the year, artisan beer festivals are rarity or indeed, non existent (that’s why they call it The first I guess). I wasn’t aware there were as many quality artisan breweries in Hungary that could make up a festival but there you are. The festival that will take place between 24-25 September will have 8 breweries present and with different tasting coupons there’s a chance that you can taste many of Hungary’s fine artisan beers and still manage to walk out strtaight to check out what else one of the chicest and most bohemian neighbourhood has to offer. And they promise not just good beer rarities but food that’s different from the clichés so annoyingly polluting the air (and palate) of all wine festivals. The neighbourhood’s restaurants will be responsible for good food. I don’t know which ones exactly but there a couple of local  restaurant worth some credit, I’m thinking M, Shalimar and Klassz primarily but I doubt we’ll be lucky enough to see them there. Still, this event sounds interesting enough just for the sake of beer alone.

This is how to get there: http://www.fozdefeszt.hu/megkozelites.html

This is going to be a bit personal and maybe even sentimental post. For a good recommendation only just skip to the bottom, I won’t take it personal (because I won’t know).

Whereas Balaton is the prime summer destination of Hungarian working class and a gangsters’ paradise, Balatonfüred is the last major city with some charm and also the starting point of a coastline of less than 50 kilometers actually worth visiting. I don’t know how they achieve that while being one of the most crowded places of the lake, but even the tourists are different here. You can walk on the most aristocratic promenade sipping your wine whilst spotting hundreds of  women wearing their best dresses (cheap, of course, sometimes provocative but always clean, ironed, selected carefully and with no taste at all). They often walk calmly with their partner hand in hand, the men usually wearing a sandal (still often with socks). Charming, adorable. There are very few drunk people, mostly the youth, who are loud and drunk but the landscape is different. The buildings are, of course, the main source of elegance of this city, the old villas of the Monarchy’s bourjoisie and the similarly old commercial buildings. All of these are getting renovated and refurbished, villas turned museums and wine stores opening here and there. Only for a good meal you need to cross the lake otherwise you have to rely on the local kiosks’ offering (usual suspects: lángos, palacsinta) and, especially in the row of wine kiosks’, sausage and fish, the suspiciously tasty deep-fried Hekk (of which a larger portion with some potato and kovászos uborka costs as much on a paper plate than a 3-course menu at Budapest’s Gold Bistro, for two persons!).

Balaton is nostalgy to me and for many of us I suppose (why else would people go there?) and I love it. For an hour or two at least. It gives me an enormous pleasure to be there, to smell the burnt oil of the food kiosks’, to watch the lake with the sailing boats, the hills, the gangsters, now the hypsters too, the inevitable remembrances of the communism (every employer in the country form the 60s on owned one, or sometimes a dozen buildings granted to their employees fora  week or two, especially to those who had children) but mainly the heros of communism, the working class, and I mean it in a very positive way.

The Balatonfüred wine festival is not a place for the yuppies to show-off and hence its charm. The wines are poor but who cares. They’re very well chilled (much better than at any other wine festival I’ve been at) and the people are relaxed and funny. A good reason to grab a glass of wine at one of the kiosks’ is that it’s the only place around Balaton where you’re not cheated, where the prices are more than reasonable, where a decent Fröccs comes cheaper than a mediocre, warm beer.

I wasn’t impressed with the wineries present but one: Koczor’s Sauvignon Blanc was so good I had to buy their most expensive bottle which, guess what, was very good too, for HUF 1 300 I think, an Olaszrizling from 2007 (!) of which I’ll post a review when I tasted it properly.

What have had the organisers in mind when they decided to relocate the event to a venue which apparently lackse air conditioning in the warm Budapest summer I can’t know. The red wines displayed “as-is” were simply undrinkable, about 35 degrees celsius warm. The white wines were chilled but the line-up was rather pool (the Tokaj wines were simply gone by mid-afternoon). It was so hot in the main hall that going outside to the 31 degrees was quite refreshing.

I’ve never been this close to stop blogging about Hungarian wines anyway (blogging is sooo last decade anyway). Not exactly the fault of Vinagora, of course.

Not so much of a wine festival than a bazaar and a venue for crappy stage performances (folklore meets hungarian pop music followed by salsa dancing schizofrenia) I strongly recommend everyone to avoid it. A huge crowd stuck in an apparently too narrow promenade encircled by booths of wineries completely make it impossible to enjoy drinking here. Plus you’ll only find one good and one half decent winery anyway (these two being the less popular among the drinkers – only this fact says it all). 

I wanted to go to Balatonfüred’s wine days (now weeks actually) as almost every year because it’s more airy and Balatonfüred’s small historical centre is a nice place and the event takes palce between it and the Balaton. This was the plan, but for reasons I won’t disclose here we never made it to Balatonfüred this year. 

What saved the Almádi festival was, besides the best lángos I had for many years (not even sold at the festival actually but like 200m away in a regular booth), were the following wines. 

Gál Sauvignon Blanc 2008 is a pale wine very fruity on the nose, fresh and light with notes of ripe apple and plesant acidity (also fresh and young). Excellent for hot summer evenings like this. Gál Chardonnay 2006 is a thicker, although also not too heavy wine of an oaky-character, with lots of melted butter on the palate and on the nose but supported by very well integrated and rounded acidity. Firm but soft (almost creamy), this is a very decent techie wine expressing smart use of oak. Gál’s Leányka 2007 is a very simple wine, ultra-light with a bit harsh character and it’s easy to forget. They sold out the red I most wanted to taste on the first day (more than 100 bottles, so the festival is commercially not so unsuccessfully after all) so I went for the Pinot Noir 2004 (I think). After I  was positively surprised by the 2002 recently I found this year’s Pinot more dominated by the oak, but overall pleasant, spicy, with soft texture and relatively well balanced and with at least a few years ageing potential. I’ll definitely try this later. I sampled Bárdos Imperiál Cuvée 2007 which is an interesting blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Pinot Noir but I was unable to taste it properly but surely a review will follow soon here.

Sziget Fesztivál has become a must-go event on the yuppie calendar from students’ island 16 years ago. So has changed the line-up, the cultural offering and gastronomy of the festival too. I arrived late from work so I missed the Ting Tings gig and just in time to see the warming-up of the crowed for Bloc Party so I didn’t hesitate and went straight to the closest tent in front of the main stage and bought a very decent chicken tikka with a simple naan, before taking position near the sound control tower to see Bloc Party, where I immediately was almost peed on by German punks apparently fighting pre-mature incontinency. 

The real milestone in the shift of Sziget towards a more civilised event (and this is a double-edge sword) to me was the opening of Ászár-Neszmély’s prominent Hilltop winery’s booth a few years ago. Strategically located just 1 minute from the main stage so you can run to it during an act for refuelling, the booth’s relatively calm and shadowy atmoshpere made it an ideal spot for longer stays as well, especially for drinking and hipster-spotting – one of my favorite pass-times on Sziget. Hilltop’s price policy on the festival makes them very attractive to me, they’re by far the fairest gang on the island. 

Near the World Music main stage area I ran into a surprisingly empty stand of various wines also fairly priced and I went for Royal Tokaji Furmint 2007. Drinking from a plastic cup, I found it smoky and barrel-dominated on the nose but fairly fruity (however very Furmint-like) and rounded, interesting enough for a wine which cost you HUF 2 500 or so a bottle on a festival so I decided I’ll buy a bottle and write a proper review of it later.

This year’s big hit however is Pálinka – and Rézangyal dominated the scene. Their success lies mostly in their artificially flavored, wide offering, many of them mixed with honey which I simply don’t understand. Today, Pálinka is chic again among urban youngsters and middle-aged middle class people but I’m afraid that moving away from the current trend of flavored pálinkas will take just as much time as it took to get here.