Crowd, folkloric music and drank people singing are the main reasons why I don’t like wine festivals (and Bországgyűlés features them all). But I couldn’t say no to a friend’s invitation so I went and did the most obvious thing to distract my attention: took a note book and took notes as diligently as you can when you are standing and being pushed from all sides by unknown people. And guess what, soon I was starting to feel good.And then I suddenly had to leave the scene, but before that I had some nice first encounters.

(On the picture above: a bunch of morons singing pro-national border revision songs)

Font is a 28 hectares family winery in Soltvadkert and known as a reliable source of value wines. Kövidinka 2008 was well located to start with. It’s pale and light with some apple notes on the nose and a slightly unripe and a bit bitter tannic palate. Thick, fresh, and quite like what the wines from Duna borrégió tend to be. Score: 3+ points

Maul Chardonnay Barrique 2007 has a vibrant golden yellow medium-deep color and a dense nose of floral notes and lots of oaky vanilla. On the palate a bit too harsh tannin but the wine’s relatively well-balanced, medium-large bodied. The finish is too short with a tart element. Little fruity wine with hints of quince. A little bit one dimensional and barrel-woody but it’s a pleasant drink. Score: 4+ points

Bujdosó Altanus 2007 is a blend based on Chardonnay with 30% Sauvignon Blanc, Szürkebarát and Királyleányka. Chardonnay and Szürkebarát both have seen barrique. The average yield was 2-2.5 Kg/vine.  Lower-medium deep golden color with Savory notes on the nose mingled with other fresh green spring spices. Complex and exciting in the dimension of spicy vegetables and fruits. Sweet and warm. The palate is sweet but only because of glycerin (with less than 2 grams of residual sugar). Lower medium bodied. Score: 6- points

Bujdosó Szürkebarát 2007 is lighter, with much more closed nose. Medium-small bodied and a bit sparklingly bitter.This one didn’t impress me, remained very closed so I’ll have to try it again.

Degenfeld Furmint Barrique 2007 is relatively closed on the nose with hints of vanilla. Light, a bit perfumy with ultra-light acacia and honey elements. On the palate light punch and vanilla notes with a hint of minerality. Small-medium bodied. This Furmint has a Degenfeld-ish character very similar to their Muscat Lunel. Not a usual Furmint for sure. Score: 4 points

Lelovits’ Olaszrizling 2008 left its mark with some lavage-based vegetable soup notes but not much else.

Sauska Chardonnay Makár 2007 was the the revelation of the day to me. This is the debut of Sauska on Budapest Daily Review, I’d always been repelled by their price tags suggesting lot of ambition from a relatively new brand supported by aggressive marketing.

My senses were blown up by a very determinate, firm, dense but fresh nose of a very clean, soft vanilla pudding character rounded by tons of melted butter. But before that, the bright, vibrant, beautiful color of the wine was already very impressive too. The palate is in perfect harmony with the nose, it gives back the exact same character. Medium-large bodied, slightly lacking acidity but it’s a huge wine with a terrific mouthfilling sensation and a long finish I haven’t seen for a long time. Yes of course many terroir fans and patriots will complain loud about the overuse of oak and the new worldliness of the wine but it’s a perfectly executed task of a class that has just started to build in Hungary. I’d been waiting too long for this school to emerge in Hungary and I always knew that if once it happens, it would be in Villány. It’s pure liquid vanilla with some floral notes here and there, delivered in the finest silky texture supported by very gentle acidity, yet in a firm body. It’s an engineering masterpiece. Score: 6+/7- points

I took some nice pictures of Andrássy avenue on my way to Buda after the festival. They’re here, if you wanna have a look at  Budapest’ (and probably one of the worlds’)  most beautiful main avenue viewed by a drunk photographer.

This is a crazy idea. Or is it! These two come from 200 kms away from each other but they’re thousands of virtual miles away from each other in terms of wine. But this time, this fact in a certain way helped me to put these wines into perspective.

Ráspi – Kékfrankos Selection, 2005

This Kékfrankos has a pale brownish color and the wine has a very quick move in the glass. And indeed, it’s thin and flimsy on the palate. The nose is spicy with salty-minerality. It has some cherry aroma on the finish. Its tannins are powdery. Give it some time (2 hours), and the wine will open a little bit more. But it’s a simple, although not a common wine.

Ráspi could break into the mainstream with this wine, if he wished, although on the lower shelves only.

Score: 4, 4+

Price: HUF 4 900

Bock – Cabernet Sauvignon, 2005

This Cabernet has got a lot of leather on the nose mingled with different farmyard elements.

On the palate, this full-bodied wine has a heavy dry tobacco character, lots of tobacco’s. Not the finest tobacco though. It breaks to the nose from the palate. The structure could be more firm, the tannins and extracts could be better integrated.

I used to get more excited about Bock’s Cabernet Sauvignons in the past. I think we both changed.

Score: 4+/5-

Price: HUF 3 400

What a modest title. I came up with it in only 1 minute of thinking. In my defense: it’s search-engine friendly and it’s true, from my perspective. Anyway, here’s the almost complete list of tasted wines and their score from 2008.

One remark, except the festival notes, all reviews were written based on at least 1/2 bottle of wine tasted by me alone over several hours, at least once over this period. Even wines presented in quick notes. Any occasional exception was mentioned in the given post, but they were maximum 2 or 3, if any.

Tasting Scores 2008

Wine Festival

Tasting Scores

I’m not particularly good in pairing food and wines. Although I became interested in it I’ve never had the time to learn about it. Besides, my major problem is always whether to pick a wine and chose the right food, or the other way around. To be honest, I don’t think the first makes too much sense. And since I think (and maybe I’m wrong) that most wines will show their best values and will be most enjoyable if one didn’t eat anything at all for hours prior to or during drinking the wine, this, most of the time doesn’t cause any problem to me. I usually taste a wine for hours before finishing the bottle off with some food. Restaurants and Xmas are exceptions.

So in the case of the wines in this post, I tasted them first before any meal but eventually we started eating before I could finish my several hours long drinking for only the pleasure of it.

Ráspi – Mithras Cuvée, 2006

Medium pale color. Not very clean, as you can see on the picture.

This cuvée has a very unusual nose. First, its very complex, I felt I couldn’t name one third of the aromas I could sniff. Second, it’s very light and medium fresh. But most important of all, it’s very different. Well, there are  common intense floral and vinous notes an Irsai Olivér would have, but there’s minerality too and this unsolvable thing which is very Ráspi.

On the palate it has the usual salty-minerality character with the above mentioned Irsai elements and a grassy undertone. The wine has medium-small body and a good structure for such. The biting salty-minerality in the middle of the tongue soon moves backwards and leaves a long finish back there, with some bitterness sitting on the salt.

Later the nose develops into a very interesting ramen soup with crab, which is very interesting and pleasant.

Socre: 4/4+

Price: HUF 1 000 (This is how much I paid to the winemaker but the actual retail price is unknown to me)

Hétszőlő – Hárslevelű Late Harvest ,2005

Bright golden color. It has a fruity nose with intense pear aromas. On the palate, stewed pear, peach and later apple elements and a medium level of acidic sensation. Not bad from someone who only really believes in Aszú wines in Tokaj.

Score: 4 points

Bussay – Esküvé, 2006

Everything I wrote here still applies to the wine. Acidic character with a medium-small body, pale color and lively move. I gave it 4 points this time but it really may be just because of the wines and food I had before drinking it. Still a good wine, fairly priced.

Malatinszky – Cabernet Sauvignon, 2000

Medium deep brownish-ruby color with a brick color rim. It has a lively move at opening. I don’t know whether it has any scientific reason or it’s just my mind playing tricks on me but I tend to see old wines getting darker, slower and more concentrated after a few hours of decanting. This is what happened with this wine as well.

From opening it has a chalky-smoky character on the nose mingled with black-currant and later black-berry and sour cherry. Interestingly its tannins are very soft at opening but becoming harsh after a few minutes before finally smoothing again. The wine has a bit more than medium acidity and a sour-bitter character from the beginning until several hours later. It’s relatively small body is made more pleasant by a nutmeat element on the palate.

Score: 5, 5+ points

C. Da Silva S.A. (V.N. De Gaia) – Cruzados (Vinho de Porto)

Drinking Port wine at Xmas is considered a major treason by many Hungarians. I had different plans myself (although I’m not one of them), but my father suggested to open a Port wine which we brought to him from Portugal in 2001. The label has no vintage which in Porto means that it’s a mix of different (sometimes poorer) vintages.

The special about the wine is that unlike most Port wines this one is a white Port but I’m not sure if it’s actually made of white grapes. Anyway, it has a pale rum color with orange-brassy reflections. It also has a very appealing bottle which also reminds me of old rum bottles.

The nose is dried-grape, burnt sugar and cognac and the palate provides further evidence of brandy: the alcohol (19%) burns. This wine spent a lot of time in barrel and this, combined with the above elements doesn’t allow any tannin or acidity to be noticed. On the other hand it has a long praline-like finish with herbs and canned quince elements added.

I’m not sure if it would be fair to compare a Port wine with any other wine so I won’t give any points here. Let’s just say that it’s a very pleasant drink but doesn’t really compare to a Tokaji or a Sauternes.

Stocking Hungarian wines is a bit of a lottery still: during the summer I opened two Gere from the classic year of 2000, one of them (Kopár) was excellent just as I expected but the Cabernet Sauvignon Barrique which was supposed to be the robust, oaky Cabernet of Gere had been falling apart (although the two have never even been in the same league).

Now I opened a Vylyan Chardonnay 2003 which every year was sold with a discount when the new vintages took over the shelves so I couldn’t expect too much improvement from it by now. But in fact, it wasn’t bad after all which makes the durability of wines a bit of mistery to me which was further augmented by a Concha Y Toro Chardonnay from the Casillero Del Diablo series also from 2003. Although having very different character, never having such acidity as the Vylyan (which itself has a relatively low level of it with Hungarian standards) but having had a bigger body and more residual sugar it aged relatively well, or at least didn’t disappoint me so much as the Gere C.S. The Chilian wine had bright, deep golden color and oily move, and an incredibly intense tutti-frutti nose with floral notes and a honey undertone – fresh! Very aromatic but had a deepness, with several vertical layers still. The palate showed more of its age especially that all its acidity had gone, literally, although it was still enjoyable as a drink but not as much as a wine. The Vylyan Chardonnay which would have scored probably around 4 points which would qualify it as a decent wine for appr. HUF 1 400 or so today, lost even less from its values and would be still around 3+ points which is relatively good for a wine which was never meant to be consumed later than 2004.

Note: all wines were kept in the same cellar since their purchase. I know, in a place with humidity visibly above the desirable.

I stopped buying Teleki wines before they existed. I was guided through Kopár dülő by Attila Gere in 2001 and on our way uphill to where his best Cabernet Franc, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon were grown before eventually fulfilling their destiny in the prestige cuvée Kopár, we passed by delapidated plots where grasses grown almost as high as vines themselves. They made a sharp contrast to Gere’s new plantations put in rigorous order and apparently subject to regular manual maintenance. Those were the plots of Villány Borgazdaság, in their decline, the ancestor of Csányi Pincészet.

For sure, Mr. Csányi may have made it the most modern and best run winery of the country (he’s got the funds for it) but why would he do that? He can sell as much of his crap as he wants through the MOL gas  station shops all over the country, a sale channel many winemakers wouldn’t dare to dream of.

On the other hand, Csányi Pincészet has 340 hectars in total which is enormous with Hungarian standards, so he could afford to venture some money with not-so-mass market wines and I did, as a matter of fact, run into some robust Chateau Teleki wines which weren’t bad after all. But this is the first time I got into tasting the lower segment of the sortiment. I must admit that I got this bottle as a present of an OTP employee, although I’m not suspecting that she got (unlike the UPC employees) this particular wine as a gift from OTP.

The review

Csányi Pincészet, Teleki, Villányi Cabernet Sauvignon, 2006

Deep ruby color and a medium lively move, indicating medium body.

The nose is, I regret to say, very common new mass wine of the new world type. There’s no simplest way to put it and I’m not a sophisticated writer. It’s not unpleasant, it’s just extremely undistinguished. It carries some cherry- and plum-jam notes with a little bit of pepper, wood and alcohol.

On the palate the evidences of ripe vine harvest are clear. High concentration of extracts, syrup-like consistency and tannins so plished that they’re actually almost totally eliminated from the formula. Very new world-y. The medium body doesn’t get support of acidity.

I think that 2006 was a suitable year for these kinds of wines and I must admint that for as much as 1 300 forints you seldom can buy better red wines in Hungary.

Score: 4-

Price: HUF 1 300

But you wouldn’t tell. I must admit I opened these wines on a special occasion which also happened to be an open-air barbecue. So my notes are short and include an unusual level of uncertainty.

The aim is clear: how’s been the Gere Cabernet Sauvignon Barrique and Kopár Cuvéé (both from the classic 2000 vintage) evolved over the years. Bot were kept in cellar in equal conditions. Perhaps the Cabernet Sauvignon has a handicap for having spent few weeks in my apartment prior to moving to a proper place.

The review

Gere Attila – Cabernet Sauvignon Barrique, 2000

Dark ruby color with purplish reflections and a brick rim.

Typical cabernet and paprika nose with raspberry underpinning.

On the palate sour, robust tannins and acidity. In my memories this was a full-bodied wine but I had to wait an hour to recover that feeling. In the same time the tannin hydes behind the acidity. Overall the wine doen’t really improve in the decanter.

Too old, the sine hasn’t delivered the expected potential.

Score: 4/5-

Price: unavailable. 2005: HUF 4 300 / EUR 18

Gere Attila – Kopár Cuvée, 2000

Lively deep cherry color. It gets much much deeper with time.

Full-bodied wine with some residual sugar, round acidity and elegant, velvety tannins. On the palate intense chocolate flavor and sour cherry. Huge body. Merlot is dominant. Still fresh and lively.

The wine still has potential for at least a couple of years.

Score: 7+/8-

Price: unavailabe, or sky-high. Newer vintages range between HUF 7 000 and 9 000.

Heumann winery (run by Evelyne & Erhard Heumann) is a small family winery in Siklós in the Villány region. Since foreigners are not allowed to easily purchase land in Hungary even after joining the EU, the couple leases their so far small land but they have very ambitious plans to extend the current yearly few thousand bottle production to 60 000. As so many in Villány, they started with Portugieser but according to their (not so up-to-date) website they have 11.500  Cabernet Franc vines, 3.000 Syrah and 4.000 Merlot are already planted which has come into production in 2006. The planting density is 7000 vines/ha with an expected maximum yield of 1 kg per vine. They also rented some smaller plots with Merlot and Kékfrankos and we are buying-in grapes from quality-oriented producers to gradually increase production. 

It is unclear to me whether the Kékfrankos (better known abroad as Blaufränkisch) I tasted was made from their own of from grapes bought from others, or mixed. 

The review

Heumann Kékfrankos Barrique 2006. 

Almost inpenetrable, dark ruby color. The wine has very dense move, very lovely as I pour it into my glass. 

The nose is intense cherry and live wood, soon paprika (not chilli) and in the empty glass tobacco. Not too intensely other spices are also present, except pepper which is quite intense. 1,5 hours later the nose is tobacco and leather. The aromas and lower-medium sweetness are well supported by round, although young acids. 

The wine opens more after 1,5-2 hours.  You should leave it open for at least an hour otherwise you might be disappointed with the tannins. The nose will keep the wood long after that too. 

Score: 6/10

Price: HUF 3000/ EUR 13

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It’s difficult to avoid to have high expectations if you open a bottle of Merlot from a legendary winemaker even from a not so good vintage. Bock József is one of the best known winemakers who gained his reputation for making some of the revolutionary wines in the nineties (well, with Hungarian standards, of course). I still have a bottle of his Royal Cuvée from 1996, which I found too old 2 years ago when I last opened one, but it’s still nostalgic and an interesting experience. Fortunately even most medium quality red wines’ qality from the new millennium exceed the quality of most “legendary” reds from the nineties. But for those who started to enjoy Hungarian wines in the nineties it’s always gonna be nostalgic to remember those days. But let’s leave nostalgy for another entry, I still keep a dozen or two bottles from that decade so I hope we can discuss them later.

The review

Surprisingly brick color, it looks much older than it is actually. Brick and stewed cherry.

Another surprise to me is the oily texture, the wine is literally slicing in the glass. The wine reminds me of Iporos 2006, a 91 points Parker wine which I did not like that much.

Very ripe cherry taste and lot of wood both is smell and in taste. It’s tannins remain harsh even after an hour. Just like in the nineties. Lot of wood.

I got a bit sentimental in the intro of this post I know. And this wine isn’t even that different from the Bock wines in the nineties. And I know he can do much better than this.

Score:5, 5+

Price: I don’t know how much I paid for it back then. The 2006 costs 13 euros. That would be way too much for the 2002. My perception is that most Bock wines are now overrated. Well, they’ve always been, but some of them are really good at least.

Some would say yes. So let’s check.

About Vylyan

The death of the founder of this relatively new winery hasn’t been unnoticed although his philosophy remained fundamentally the same. 7 000 vines per hectare, 1.8m x 0.8m vineyard density, 30 hectolitres per hectare on average – on 125 hectares, this indicates their commitment to high concentration for their best wines. And a lot of attention to all aspects of the élevage. With so much land in Villány, You cannot expect that all of it is very well located though.

In choosing their grape varieties they lay emphasis on both international varieties (Chardonnay, Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Pinot Noir, Syrah) and local varieties (Kadarka, Blaufrankisch, Portugieser, Zweigelt).

About Montenuovo Cuvée 2006

Montenuovo cuvée is the Minestrone soup of Vylyan: its ingredients vary each season as well as its quality can be somewhat volatile. Still it will be a minestrone. The continuity is brought into this product line by a relatively good value for money and a seek for full-bodied, easy to enjoy, intensely tasty style. Well-done in 2006.

I don’t need to understand the concept behind Montenuovo’s always changing composition to like these wines. However, You might wonder how have Cabernet Franc and Zweigelt replaced Pinot Noir over the years. If you approach this from the other way around then it’s better to say that Vylyan’s goal could be to provide a relatively constant upper-medium quality popular red wine as well as to consume all they can produce in an optimal way. But this would be jumping to conclusion.

Since Montenuovo is an affordable non-entry level wine hence quite popular in restaurants it’s quite possible that You’re already familiar to this name. Here’s my notes, my opinion as of today.

Review

Deep cherry color, almost blackberry. Farm animal smell rather than fruits. Oily but with high acid content (for a Villányi) and medium of tannin. It’s 14,5%alcohol is palpable. It took awhile to realise that the unusual component in taste derives from Zweigelt grapes, which makes it an interesting cuvée but not a very lovely one. But maybe it’s just my habits that make it a bit intolerable in an otherwise quite commonly composed cuvée. Its smell also lack character.

A day after opening the bottle its tannins become smoother, those few fruits gave place to chocolate, new oak and tobacco, but not to the extent of a heavy Cabernet Sauvignon of course. It’s still a good wine if served at good temperature (my guess is around 15 degrees Celsius) although I can smell some rotten, fermenting fruit taste in it at the end.

It’s an overall good wine and good value for money. Don’t expect to buy the same wine with a Montenuovo 2007 label on it, so this could be another reason to purchase it.

Score:6-

Price: EUR 11,5