A Special Event to Taste Wines Made from Old Hungarian Grape Varieties

The Association for Old Hungarian Grape Varieties will hold a tasting of Csókaszőlő, laska, Bakator, and several other, little-known, old Hungarian grape varieties at the Szent Angéla High School in Budapest on Thursday.

The tasting will feature about fifty wines from over twenty Carpathian Basin wineries. While twenty years ago only a few people were working with old Hungarian grape varieties, today a few dozen winemakers have planted these varieties in various wine regions of the country, reads the organizers’ press release.

As they recall, at the beginning of the 2000s, winemaker József Szentesi rediscovered several forgotten grape varieties when he tested their positive and negative characteristics in his experimental plantation of ten white and ten blue grape varieties from the Research Institute for Viticulture and Enology of the University of Pécs.

Not only did he search for the relevant literature, but he also shared his experience and later the vineyards of the old Hungarian varieties with interested winemakers.

Thanks to this, several producers can now offer a very wide range of wines from old Hungarian varieties, including József Szentesi, László Andrási from Somló (wine region in western Hungary), and Oszkár Maurer from Szerémség (Syrmia, southern Pannonian Plain), who are also intensively involved in the preservation.

Thanks to their common interest, several winemakers have been meeting regularly for years, tasting and thinking together, and as a result, the Association for Old Hungarian Grape Varieties was founded in February.

This community form will enable them to provide greater support for these grape varieties in the future and to achieve their common goals in a more organized way. The association has several objectives, which the members will be happy to share with the guests at the Old Hungarian Varieties Tasting, the first milestone of their joint work, the release concludes.

Via MTI, Featured image: Pixabay