Brassy beige hue. Meadow floral bouquet, fresh but rather restrained with notes of acacia and boiled parsley. Weighty palate with a creamy texture and very subtle acidity. Restrained aromas at the entry, short and a bit dull character at the finish. Yet it’s a pleasant drink, with gently composed marzipan and pistachio. It’s an overall decent effort from (my preferred?) Mátraalja winemaker.

Szecskő - Szürkebarát, 2008

For introduction please read this post. For a Concubina white retrospective please refer to this post written almost exactly a year ago.

I never read my previous posts before I taste a wine and neither check it’s bottle. I didn’t even remember how much I liked Concubina 2006. Still, these are two different wines so keep reading.

The review

This cuvée is medium dark golden yellow. Lovely. The nose is very charming, intense, full of warmth and liveliness, a bit perfumy, with notes of pineapple and litchi with a rosemary(!) accent mingled with a hint of very light honey. The very same character’s found on the palate, gentle, warm and soft and certainly could have more acidity. At this point I realise it’s a semi-dry wine with some well integrated residual sugar. The wine will become better and better with more and more minerality which I simply adore. First a mouthful of chalky minerality then rocky minerality, it’s the whole Cenozoic and Precambrian era happening at once. Add a velvety melted butter finish to it. Later on the nose some pistachio. Nice linear finish.

This wine’s at it’s peak or a bit over it no doubt about it. It’s a huge best buy.

Score: 6/7-

Price: HUF 2000

Up and coming talent Németh N.A.G. Attila Gábor is one of the titans who are trying to re-establish the reputation of Mátraalja as a region capable of producing excellent white wines and fine red wines. The efforts to prove the latter have not been very convincing so far but white-wise some prominents of this generation have already proved their point. Still, the region’s post-WW2 history is a heavy burden. For how long terroir wine merchants will be able to sell red wines like Karner’s at such a ridiculously high price is another question.

This Concubina has a pale hue with pale purplish reflections. On the nose forest berry fruits with hip dominance. On the palate it has layers of spices with underlying woodyness. Very raw structure. The wine lacks determination and it has badly integrated components.

Unfortunately I call this Mátraalja character. This style lacked the instantaneous appeal and it still does.

Whether Concubina white 2007 is as good as in previous years we’ll find out soon.

Score: 3+

Price: HUF 2000

Well, for an hour at least, as we’ll see, part of the formula will look like this: 60%-27%-13% (the last two combined) and the “substance” is called Concubina in 2006, from the Mátraalja wine of Németh Attila Gábor.

Relatively pale golden color. The nose is pleasantly sweet and fruity, with a chalky mineral undertone and fresh citrus aromas.

On the palate this wine is crispy with fresh, robust but nice acids in huge quantity. Only when I realise the sugar content I come to conclude how acidic this wine is: it’s semi-dry but the sweetness keeps it in balance, even in spite of the medium body. It’s fruity (ripe Mediterranean fruits mainly) with a salty mineral underpinning. Later more ripe exotic fruits like date fruit. The wine matures a lot after opening starting to develop a palate of dry leaf character. The finish remains very short though. Freshness and good acid-sugar balance are the well recognizable strengths of this wine. As many Hungarian white cuvées however, the wine suffers from blowing into bits of its components only a day after opening it. Still, it’s a good wine, fairly priced from a region that started to draw my attention lately.

Score: 6-

Price: HUF 1760

This wine found me when I least expected it. There’s been a niche in the Hungarian wine offering I’d been very much looking forward to be filled and I was sure that when it was to happen Villány would have  something to do about it. But it actually came from Gyöngyöspata, from the Szecskő winery and it’s called Turán, and was made in 2007.

The review

Very deep cherry-ruby color like one I’ve never seen in a Hungarian wine before. It’s move is slow and robust but it was nothing compared to what was about to come.

The first sniff was absolutely amazing and I didn’t quite believe it. I never tasted a Turán before and I didn’t see this coming. The intensity of the nose is unbelievable and the fruitiness of it has no peer in my memory. A light salty undertone, cocktail cherry and a marzipan-cherry chocolate brownie aromas make the bouquet even more interesting. And the finest Belgian chocolate.

I was looking forward to a major disappointment after the first sip but it didn’t come.

The palate was just as intense and concentrated as the nose. Very fruity and mouthfilling, with mostly very ripe cherry building up a huge body with the most polish, elegant tannins I’ve seen for a long time. It’s very unfortunate that the wine doesn’t have enough acidity to support this huge body and concentration of extract materials and this combined with a high alcohol (15.5%) makes the wine a little bit sweet over the top. The wine was obviously made of very mature grapes resulting in this fat juice and was probably aged in large barrels. Excellent texture and the wine is well integrated which is further evidenced the next day when the fruitiness mostly disappeared but the structure’s the same. Already few hours after opening some berry fruits (mostly very ripe blackberry) and charcoal will appear on the nose and the next day the grape’s aromas and some spices will become dominant.

The wine is so heavy with a level of concentration that you cannot drink more than a glass of it at a time, it’s just too much.

This is the first time that I will not give out score for a wine not because it’s so wrong.

Many people will like it and I believe that just as many will dislike it too but no one’s going to be disappointed.You’ll find it very interesting and I’m sure that most of you will appreciate its strengths.

Score: you write it to me, if you can judge!

Price: HUF 3 200