Tokaj From Budapest: Is It Worth It?

The honest arithmetic first

Tokaj is about 230 km north-east of Budapest. That is two and a half hours in the car each way on a good day, so five hours of driving before you have tasted anything. Add two cellars, lunch and the walk between them and you have an eleven-hour day.

That is not a criticism, it is the shape of the thing. If wine is a reason you came to Hungary, it is worth every hour. If you want “a day in the countryside”, there are much better options ninety minutes away.

What makes Tokaj different from other wine regions

Two things, and neither is the sweetness.

It was classified in 1737. A royal decree ranked the vineyards by quality — first growth, second growth — which makes it the first classified wine region in the world, ahead of the Douro in 1756 and Bordeaux in 1855. The rankings from 1737 still broadly describe which hillsides make the best wine.

The cellars are cut into volcanic rock, and the walls are black with Cladosporium cellare, a noble mould that lives on the alcohol evaporating through the barrels. It looks alarming and it is part of the process. Do not let anyone tell you the cellar needs cleaning.

The region has been a UNESCO World Heritage cultural landscape since 2002 — the landscape itself, not a building in it.

Aszú, and the thing about puttonyos

The famous wine is Aszú, made from berries shrivelled by noble rot, picked individually, and steeped in base wine. Sweet, high in acid, and capable of ageing for a very long time.

You will read about puttonyos, the 3-to-6 scale measuring how much botrytised fruit went in. Know that the labelling rules changed and modern Aszú is made to a higher minimum than the old 3 and 4 puttonyos wines were — so a bottle today is not directly comparable to the scale you read about in an old book.

Above Aszú sits Eszencia: the juice that runs from the berries under their own weight, so sweet it ferments for years and barely reaches a few degrees of alcohol. Almost nobody sells it by the glass. If a cellar offers you a taste, take it.

The wine Hungarians actually drink

Dry Furmint. This is the part visitors never expect and the part that has changed the region in the last twenty years.

Furmint is the main grape, and vinified dry it makes a high-acid, mineral, smoke-and- green-apple white that belongs in a conversation with Chablis and dry Riesling. It is what the growers drink and what they are proudest of.

If you go to Tokaj and taste only sweet wine, you have seen half of it. Ask for the dry Furmint first, while your palate is clean.

Also worth asking for: Szamorodni (“as it was born”), whole-bunch, made dry or sweet depending on the year, and the dry version is a strange oxidative wine closer to a fino sherry than to anything else in Hungary.

Getting there

By car is the only sensible way to see more than one cellar, and it raises the obvious problem: Hungary has a zero-tolerance drink-driving law. 0.00. Not a low limit — zero. This is enforced and the penalties are severe. Someone has to not taste, or nobody drives.

By train from Keleti to Tokaj is doable in roughly two and a half to three hours and usually involves a change. It works if you are staying overnight. As a day trip it leaves you a couple of hours in one village with no way to reach the cellars on the hillsides.

Go to Eger instead, if this is you

If what you want is “a nice day out with some wine in it”, Eger is the better answer — about two hours each way, a baroque town, a castle that held an Ottoman siege in 1552, and the Valley of the Beautiful Women, where the cellars are cut into the hillside in a row and you walk between them.

It is not as serious a wine region. It is a much better general day.

What we do

Our Tokaj day is a private car, a guide who drives so everyone can taste, and two cellars chosen for what you actually like rather than who pays commission. Tell us before you book if you would rather have Eger — we will say so honestly.