Although I believe that wines can be fully appreciated when tasted hours after your last meal (desserts excluded), I recognise that wine and food pairing is an important business and very few sommeliers are actually good at it (Budapest’s Four Season’s Italian sommelier is one of them). On the other hand, a meal or indeed, a tasting menu can be more exciting with a glass of well paired wine. This is probably stating the obvious but I had to write an introduction to this post so you don’t realise immediately that I’m not going to write wine reviews today, but about a related topic which is dining at good restaurants, more precisely at Budapest’s supposedly best.
When I first dined in Costes (aka the only Michelin star restaurant in Hungary as of 2010) 2-3 years ago I wrote that it was the best Hungarian restaurant, full stop. It wasn’t an overstatement, I felt quite confident about it for Costes had been so much superior to any other local restaurant in terms of innovation, preparation and presentation that it was undoubtedly the best in town. I also knew that it was just as good or even better than some Michelin star restaurants elsewhere (notably, certainly better than a particular one star restaurant in London’s Soho, as long as food is concerned although I’m not so sure about the atmosphere). Now that the Portuguese chef Miguel Rocha Vieira is back (Seja bemvindo!) I was lucky enough to visit Costes three times in 2 weeks lately so I hope you’ll forgive me if I jump to some conclusions here.
A major problem with their heating system was apparent on my first visit and unfortunately they couldn’t (or didn’t) fix it in two weeks, but the front desk people were even cooler than the December frost outside. The arrogance and negligence of the waiters remained the same as two years ago, in spite of the owner sitting next to our table in one occasion (with a former Lou Lou employee who I happened to recognise). This could have been a good sign, because if the kitchen folk didn’t change much either then I could have been expecting a terrific performance from them. But this time the waiters’ arrogance was combined with a sort of carelessness and even incompetence that was already a bit scary (when serving the plates, one fella insisted to interrupt our rather important (well, let’s face it, rather important to me) discussion to tell us exactly what’s on the plate in front of us, feeding us with information we’ve already wknown or just seen (I’m sure you can recognise lentils) as if there were subspecies thought to be extinct of an already rare exotic deep ocean seeweed, whilst he seemed not to be enjoying himself too much either). I’m used to getting humiliated by clerks and waiters, they do it all the time with you in Hungary but sometimes it only costs you one Euro or so but for a hundred Euros, it opens a whole new dimension, believe me!
More importantly, the food was OK. Yes, it wasn’t terrific. The amuse bouche were the same every time, and I loved them every time. I don’t want to go through the menus, there were some well made courses too but some were below expectations. The chicken, for instance, may have been organically fed Poulet Noir but it was a bit boring. Good, but boring, and being simply good might be too little from someone aspiring for a star or two.
The sommelier was the friendliest of the staff but Costes’ wine selection is a bit disappointing. The wines not just don’t represent the best of Hungary as one might expect, they don’t even get close to it but few (Szepsy Furmint 2008, to give you a for instance). And in total there are maybe 20 or 30 wines in their cellar, or at least on offer, and that includes whites, reds and sweet wines and even a Port. I wasn’t particularily disappointed by the pairing they offered with the tasting menus and I made my own choices most of the time anyway, but there’s not much chosing to do from a list of 20, is there?
The overall conclusion is that Costes remains one of the best retaurants in Budapest which in itself doesn’t guarantee you any standard. I remind you that we’re talking about a country where no one, literally, no one is able to make a proper baguette and if I want to buy a half decent croissant on the corner it costs me more than at Ladurée. There isn’t a decent bakery in the whole country (Villa Bagatell included), so why would there be good restaurants, one might wonder? (To be fair, the bread I had at Olimpia restaurant today was OK, but this was a once in a month occasion)
Further to the improvements in the kitchen, the whole Costes experience could be so much better with a working heating system, some well trained, polite and helpful waiters and a carefully selected, well stocked wine cellar. The U-turn Costes appears to take might not be as sharp and quick as, say, the democracy takes in this country, but it doesn’t look very promising either.
Twenty years ago, in a much simpler world (with the eyes of a teenager) I had ready answers for the questions of “best of” lists. Metallica was the best band (before the black album, of course), Catch 22 was the best book ever and black skinny jeans with a converse and a skinny The Cult t-shirt was the best outfit. Some years ago the world stopped being black and white and so straightforward. There’s no best of. And there’s no favorite either. I don’t have a favorite book or album any more or band, for that matter. There’s plenty of good stuff however, and there’s even more rubbish. Why would wines be any different?
Still, there could be best of some things. Like the best label quality and best technology wines are undoubtedly Sauska’s. But all the rest would be too obscure. Best terroir wine? Nonsense. Best winemaker? Let’s set up the criteria first. Or better not. Best wine? Who could tell?
I was thinking about the best hangover for a few minutes, but I gave up. Then more interesting questions came to my mind. Like best pairing of beetroot and wine, what would that be, anyone?
And eventually a vague conjecture’s become a more and more objective, clear and transparent recognition, a rock solid conviction that the best blog about Hungarian wines written in English language is Budapest Daily Review. Let’s face it, it’s also the worst blog about Hungarian wines written in English language, but that’s another list.
Instead of the best of list, here’s some very personal thoughts to wrap up this year.
- Bad news for red wine fans: good white wines in Hungary still outnumber the good red wines. Good news: I’m no longer a hard core red wine fan.
- The best white wines still come from Tokaj, and still come sweet. This, unfortunately, does not fit the current wine consumer trends.
- My interest in Furmint and Olaszrizling have increased, while Riesling remains my personal favourite white varietal.
- Some regions are more and more exciting: Somló and south of Balaton are definitely worth to be followed closely.
- I no longer think that Hungarians should not produce Pinot Noir and Syrah. There are good examples of both out there.
- There’s still no such a thing as Hungarian style as long as wines are concerned. In fact, we have no clue what Hungarian wines should be like, except maybe the tiny Tokaj region but even there are major issues, and here we come to our next serious problem which is
- the lack of a much needed proper classification system in Hungary. I suggested a system similar to the German, especially the Rhine region’s system some time ago and I stil believe in it.
- I’m still convinced that Hungarian wines, especially the reds, are overpriced and are not competitive on international scale. And they’ll continue to be. That’s because we’re too introverted, narrow-minded, coward and assertive to face this all, and we have a very selective memory as long as history is concerned.
- I’m convinced that the best Hungarian wines are those which are unique, or at least different, in some way, or otherwise interesting.
Thank you very much for reading this blog. Although I’d be much happier if you’d participate more in the discussion (this is a blog, after all). I don’t know for how long this blog will be going on, 2010 was all about Facebook, Twitter, Kindle and iPhone apps so blogging’s become a bit outdated. But I’m not on facebook and I’m not Lady Gaga either to use Twitter to spread my thoughts so if you come back tomorrow, you probably going to see me writing about the 3 sparkling wines I’m planning to finish off today and tomorrow morning (a Kreinbacher rosé Brut, a Moet Imperial and a Szentesi Pinot Noir rosé Brut).
I wish you all a very happy new year and a full glass of good Champagne for tonight!
Ps: read more printed books!!! Or simply read more books! And buy vinyl!
This bon mot (clearily a wisdom) of the former regional CFO of a well-known multi-national company’s Hungarian leadership describes best my thoughts about this:
Someone in the Hungarian wine industry has gone mad once again. Well, why wouldn’t…
After a series of database crashes and the website being unavailable Sunday whole day and Monday morning, Hungary’s by far the best (and only) wine blog in English language was moved to a new server. Now it’s up and running but for how long I cannot tell (it became available and disappeared several times this morning). I’ll try to pump this information through into the RSS feed before the next crash.
So after a new visual some other minor changes will be introduced as of now and some you may have already noticed.
Scoring. First of all scoring will be changed but I don’t know exactly how and until I find out there will be no scores at all. The 10 points scale I invented is good enough for regular readers but many visitors aren’t familiar with it so it becomes a bit confusing (5 looks like a low scores but in fact it’s not that bad if you read the description). I considered a 100 points scale several times but I don’t want to seem so arrogant as to think that I can distinguish two wines tasted two years apart by one single point on a scale of 100. That’s only possible if you drink maybe 10-15 different wines a day.
Evaluation. As there will be no scoring some direction about the quality and value of the wines will be given by some verbal evaluation and using tags like fairly priced, overrated/overpriced or best buy. I also introduce the term “recommended” any perhaps some others to indicate if a wine is worth buying even if it wouldbe overpriced based on traditional scoring.
Pictures. Photos have been missing lately. This is because I lost the cable I need to connect the old Cannon apparel to the computer. As soon as I find it there’ll be pictures again. In fact, there will be more pictures. I like pictures. I like taking pictures. I hope you’ll like them too.
Style. The blog has become sometimes a bit personal. Unforunately that won’t change. Some of you may prefer short wine reviews instead of boring stories but this is an independent blog and I’m writing it because I’m enjoying it. Although this is not a catalogue of wine reviews, I still hope you’ll find good and useful reviews in the posts.
Searching and browsing: browsing hasn’t been made much easier recently but at least I found a way to put a search box on the pain page. Until I find a better theme which makes browsing simpler I’ll try to rearrange a bit the category and tag structure, make some consolidation and we’ll see.
Content: I’m a little bit tired of drinking low quality wines, to be honest with you. Therefore there may be fewer posts about cheap wines in the future (I can’t promise there will be more reviews about good or expensive wines).
Thank you for reading this all and thank you for reading the blog. Please keep on reading and participating, a comment from you is always very much appreciated either we have different opinion or not.
I found this very cool theme and fell in love with it. It has some disadvantages though. It doesn’t support searching, pictures on the main page and a decent category display, to name a few. I know it’s annoying, I should know: I’m the most loyal reader and user of the search function of the blog. So please don’t get frustrated, if you find it horrible just drop me a message and I’ll rethink a compromise between look and functionality.
There’s other fantastic news too, for Facebook lovers at least. Now you can like or recommend a post and share this joy with hundreds of your friends. I’m expecing that this will boost traffic to my blog and I can finally get filthy rich (the reason I started it in the first place), leave my miserable job, buy my own winery, get a massive follower base of attractive females and retire. I’d like this to be happenening soon, so please hurry up with the Like buttons.
First I couldn’t think of anything in what Pannonhalmi Apátsági Pincészet could possibly excel but their inclination to hypocrisy. I still can’t. So I turned to Google who doesn’t seem to know anything either, so either this is really the beginning of the end of Google or, as I’m now inclined to believe, the Hungarian Wine Cellar of the Year award is just another example of mushroom management practice (keep them in the dark and feed them with rubbish) by wine PR geniuses. Madness doesn’t stop there. Guess who are the folks behind this obscure prize?
The mission statement of one of the organisations responsibles for the award is this:
“It is one of the major assignments of the organisation to guarantee the protection of origin. Therefore it regulates and controls planting as far as location, variety and other specific regulations are concerned. Through preparing and controlling the implementation of rules for the wine communities, it regulates those factors of grape and wine production and partly even of trade, which have major importance and largest impact on the quality. It is the head of the wine community that issues the certificate of origin for each quantity of grape produced, which is the basis in the control of the origin of the wine.
Producers have to declare their production and stock to the wine communities, which process the data electronically.
Another important field of the wine communities’ activity is the formation of the image, or, where it is already established, its protection.
The National Council of Wine Communities acts as a product council, i.e. it is consulted by the government when questions of legislation or market measures or other issues concerning the wine sector are discussed.”
The justification of the award goes something like this:
“… the winery which achieved the utmost publicity for the Hungarian wine, wine culture and highbrowed wine consumption in a given year…”
D’you know what I mean? It’s like the BSA voting for the “software company of the year award” based on the arguments above (or based on whatever criteria, for that matter). Or like Customs officers electing the best transportation firm of the year, awarding the company who did the utmost to publicise transportation.
Rosé wines come and go these days as temperature stabilises above 25 degrees in the evenings but I’m losing my appetite for them this summer. I’ve become a fan last year, well, many years ago in Provence actually but I dared to admit it only last year. My scores don’t seem to reflect my preferences but that’s not relevant. And in the past few days bottles of Légli Ottó, Kreinbacher and Szőlőskislaki Bormanufaktúra all marked their presence in my glass but only the latter did leave good remembrances really and even that wasn’t so impressive. Is it me or the vintage 2009 I don’t know. But I miss the good rosé wines of the previous years.
I feel like a whistle-blower again, and many, well, most Hungarians reading this post (there are a few of them) will think it’s a treason, I’m betraying my homeland once again.
I didn’t feel like posting, or indeed, tasting lately. I’m not very good in essay writing so I’m getting straight to the point.
I opened a bottle more or less randomly from the cellar (not exactly true, I wanted something from South Africa á propos de la FIFA World Cup – and btw please introduce instant replay for referees!!!). I didn’t remember why I bought the bottle or whether it was expensive or not. As I opened it I almost regretted it because I was stunned by it for being the first Pinotage I actually like which is, as it happens, an understatement, anyway, so I had to share it with a couple of guys (it was an instant success) when I wanted the whole bottle for only myself. I loved it. It had an exciting exotic, complex bouquet (yes, with a hint of burnt rubber) and a very elegant, also complex palate with many layers of flavors and texture, mature but lively, with vefry polished components. This wine is also known as a Pinotage 2002 of Stellenbosch winery Beyerskloof. I could buy this wine at around EUR 7, according to wine-searcher.com. You may want to search this blog to find out what do you get for that much in Hungary. Wake up, shall we.
I’m currently in New York, I’ve been here for almost 2 weeks now and I had a couple of great wine experiences but none of them Hungarian. It’s not that I would order a Hungarian wine in a Meat Packing District restaurant (not only because Spice Market is better known for its cocktails) but apparently Hungarian wines are totally absent in Manhattan, as opposed to, say Slovenian wines which are everywhere. No kidding. I’ve been browsing the wine list of some fine restaurants and the shelves of wine stores (I even passed by a Balfi van today in the SoHo) for some days now but I didn’t see any Hungarian wine. Slovenia is, however, present in many establishments of NYC.
I’m not complaining, I’m just confirming my reinforced idea that Hungarian wines are world famous only in the mind of Hungarians. And I doubt Hungarian wines will ever play a somewhat more important role in international wine drinking. The only problem with this you see is that Hungarian producers have no other choice than turning their attention to the domestic market, which they’ve been serving so far anyway. The realisation that they have no chance abroad combined with a biased (patriotic) domestic demand and little sofistication of the internal market will result in slower development of quality. This is my concern. This doesn’t help preserving the diversity of wines either because there’s little to be preserved here.
Today the hippest buzzword in hungarian wine marketing is versatility. This doesn’t seem like a strategy we chose. The is the only way left apparently, at least until dessert wines become fashionable again.
I don’t want to write a long post about this topic (I’m on vacation after all) so let’s just finally have a picture here from Les Halles (a bistro I highly recommend to anyone visiting the city btw), where half a bottle of Sauterne (sic!) cost appr. USD 250. The question you may ask yourself is why there couldn’t be an Aszú there too, perhaps at somewhat lower cost, to start with?
For most people Brazil is football, samba and Rio. To me, Brazil is an important piece of my past, present and future. It’s my second homeland. But according to my friend Paulo Queiroz, Brazil is also an emerging producer of white wines, especially sparkling wines which are getting better and are already beating foreign competition in value for money in the lower segments, Paulo explains. In an effort to collaborate on certain wine topics, Paulo sent me some thoughts about Brazilian wines some months ago which I now could like to share with you. Why now? It’s overdue actually but I didn’t want to publish it before I write my part for Paulo’s blog nossovinho.com about Hungarian wines. But I was looking at a picture of Ronaldo celebrating the combined 4 x 2 victory of my beloved Corinthians over Internacional in the two final matches of Copa do Brasil (giving the seventh national title to Corinthians only equaled by Flamengo) yesterday and I thought this would be the time. I couldn’t identify the brand which Ronaldo was drinking but I can recommend a couple of other wines based on Paulo’s evaluation.
About Brazilian wines (by Paulo Queiroz, translated by me)
Brazil has about 60 000 hectares of vines which makes it the third largest producer in South-America. Mostly concentrated around the area of Serra Gaúcha in the southern part of the country, varietals such as Chardonnay, Sémillon, Gewürtztraminer and Riesling of Italy (I’m not sure if this is the same grape as the Hungarian “Olaszrizling” , but I know that Hungarian experts were active in Brazil’s viticulture in the 1990s – admin) are produced on high altitude. The volume of sparkling Brazilian wines have shown tremendous growth in recent years. According to Madia Mundo Marketing the yearly output increased to 14 million liters in 2007 from only 6.6 millions in 2002. The quality of these wines has been improving a lot in the same time resulting in various international awards in Italy and in France. These winners include:
Espumante Garibaldi Moscatel (Gold medal winner of Effervescents du Monde (Dijon, France))
Clean and appealing with numerous medium-sized bubbles and with terrific foam shape of bright color with greenish reflections. The nose has clean and powerful aromas of melon and passion-fruit and white floral notes with a hint of honey. It has a delicate and clean palate, with good balance of sugar and acidity and elements of ripe citrus fruits.
Amadeu Brut Rose (Silver prize from Effervescents du Monde)
Made using Champagnoise method, it has a lovely cherry color with intense aromas of red fruits like strawberry. With good acidity on the palate, the wine goes well with many foods. Made of Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir.
Still in the southern region of Bento Gonçalves from Rio Grande do Sul state (serra Gaúcha) there are several good options of red wines too. Salton Talento 2004 is an intense red wine with light and inviting aromas on the nose, even sweet a little bit with a hint of wood. On the palate it’s all different, intense, perfumed, with a bit too aggressive tannins and a bitter finish. Made of 60% Cabernet Sauvignon, 30% Merlot and 10% Tannat. Aged in oak barrel for 12 months and 12 months in bottle.
All three wines (and more from Brazil) are available in Europe.
I’d like to thank to Paulo for his contribution and congratulate for his great blog.
