When you Drink Hungarian Wine, Spare a Thought for Those who Make it
Martin Bukovics discusses the many obstacles faced by Hungarian wine producers.
Hungarian wine is one of the few real success stories since the democratic transition in 1989/90. At least that's what they say. Apart from the fact that there are some particularly good wines, this is nonsense. The Hungarian state over-regulates, punishes and demotivates. Peasant culture has virtually disappeared, the villages in the wine-growing region are, with a few exceptions, on the periphery of the country. Few succeed in exporting, the domestic wine trade is lame, and gastronomy is not open to local products.
The Hungarian wine regions are not like the Chianti region in Tuscany, where you can drink famous red wines under centuries-old castles in stylish clothes. Nor is there a culture like that of Austria or Friuli in Italy, where every village in the wine region has at least three or four wineries open, serving their own meat and cheese in their gardens to accompany the wines. And there are no huge chateaux in the wine regions. Vineyards only.
Complaining is a real Hungarian thing. When I write that the Hungarian wine sector has some huge problems, I do not complain. I state facts. I have neither an advertising agency for which I want to get benefits, nor a winery that I want to kindly ask you to support. As a simple member of the Hungarian Wine Writers' Association, I am doing what I have to do: I write what I see. Hungarian wines are good, but I would like to briefly highlight a few important problems, in spite of which these wines are good.
Depopulated countryside, shrinking vineyards
The articles about Hungary's 20th anniversary as a member of the European Union this year, and the huge amount of cohesion funds it has withdrawn since then, were for some reason, not illustrated with pictures of Hungarian villages. One-fifth of Hungarian villages are threatened with slow extinction. They are not attractive, no one wants to move there, either because of the lack of infrastructure or because of geographical isolation. Not all villages can be as attractive as the village of Kán in Baranya, which was bought up by Western Europeans and transformed into a charming and vibrant community.
Some villages are so short of money that they have only been able to raise funds for a bus stop through a tender for a lookout tower – so they have installed a lookout tower on the roof of the bus stop. In most places, it is impossible to live without a car, as train services are constantly being cut back and buses only run a few times a day. Most of Hungary's wine regions are in the most backward, underdeveloped regions of the EU in the south and east of the country.
In 1990, there were 140,000 hectares of vines in Hungary. It has since decreased by more than fifty percent, to 58,000 hectares. This is partly because of some flawed EU decisions, which, as some suggest, have made it more profitable for years to grub up vines in exchange for subsidies than to cultivate them, in order to keep the advantage of the wine-producing countries of Western Europe against the Eastern newcomers.
But there are some other reasons for the disappearing vineyards. Many small farmers have simply died and have no one to carry on their work. In more fashionable wine regions, holiday homes with nice swimming pools are being built to replace the vines. Those who cultivate grapes have to face the fact that, while prices have risen tenfold in twenty years, the purchase price of grapes has remained practically the same, while costs are approaching Western European levels. This means that Hungarians produce the most expensive and sell the cheapest: it is not worth it. Many winegrowers are depressed because they see the way of life built around wine culture, together with Hungarian rural peasant culture, as dying out, and they will soon be the last witnesses of a bygone era.
The Tokaj problem
Chinese President Xi Jinping was sent home with a carton of Tokaj aszú by Viktor Orbán after his visit to Budapest in May. It was not because the Prime Minister's family owns a winery in the wine region, nor because of the state-owned giant winery there – whose wines Xi received – but because, although everyone knows about Tokaj, no one actually buys it, and it is hardly ever sold.
Tokaj is one of the best wine regions in the world, producing the sweet wines that the French royal court once declared to be the wine of kings and the king of wines. These sweet wines, made from grapes shrivelled by a special type of rot, are unmistakable because, although they contain a lot of natural sugar, the Furmint grape variety adds a high acidity to the sugar. Such wine is expensive to produce because of the extensive hand selection and compulsory ageing, which is why they are not cheap. With the better ones starting at over €30, the sky's the limit. Anyone who has tasted a good Tokaj wine knows that every drop is worth the money they paid for it.
However, it's not the price or the quality that makes sweet Tokaj wines unsellable, but the fact that sweetness itself has been inflated over time. Today, sugar is our enemy. It is no longer a luxury. On the contrary, people pay to have as little sugar as possible in the food they put in their mouths. In post-socialist countries, there is a snobbery about sweet wines that tries to imitate Western patterns: consumers want dry wine because they think sweet wine is prolific.
And let's not deny that in the socialist era, bad wines were artificially sweetened to cover up the various taste defects. These were cheap wines that basically only tasted sweet. Unfortunately, in the post-socialist countries, these are still the wines that sell the most – if you look on the shelves of any Polish-Czech-Hungarian-Ukrainian-Romanian supermarket, you will find most of them. As a result, the boundary between sweetened and naturally sweet wine has become blurred: the biggest victim of this was Tokaji, whose brand was ruined by the socialist-era wineries themselves who sold sweetened wines under the name Tokaji.
In the EU, it will soon be compulsory to label wines with their calorie content: good luck selling a six-puttonyos aszú with 300 g/l of natural residual sugar! This is no longer a dessert wine, it is the dessert. Tokaj's last chance could be to communicate their sweet wines as such.
Unintelligible wine marketing
Today, autochthonous grape varieties are the hottest in the wine world. These are grape varieties that serve practically as a postcard if they are grown in the village, region, area or country where they originate: if you taste them, you immediately know where they are coming from and they are still mainly grown in these regions. Such as riesling in the Rhine Valley in Germany, syrah in the Rhone Valley in France, pinot noir in Burgundy – and Olaszrizling (Welschriesling, Graševina) and Kékfrankos (Blaufränkisch) in the successor states of the former Habsburg Monarchy, including Hungary.
The GROW du Monde international competition for Olaszrizling is currently taking place on the shores of Lake Balaton, with scores of wine writers and experts, including many from the UK, flocking to Hungary to select the best of over 300 wines at the invitation of the Croatian-Serbian-Hungarian organisers. This is a great thing, as Olaszrizling is one of the most widely grown grape varieties in the countries of the region, and the ability to sell it at a good price and with high prestige, even on export markets, is a basic need. Having a wine competition with a large number of experts communicating about the variety on social media platforms is a huge boost to its visibility.
This wine competition is held in different places every year: first, it took place in Serbia, then in Croatia, each time with the generous support of the host state. The Hungarian state, however, did not want to spend money on it, saying that the purpose of the event, the promotion of Olaszrizling, was not in line with the Hungarian wine marketing strategy, a document which, despite being financed by taxpayers’ money, is secret. Even leading wine writers have not been able to look into this mysterious strategy and those who have seen it can hardly write anything about it. The only thing we know about this strategy is that they want to sell Tokaj. But it is not selling.
The presence of the Hungarian state
The Hungarian wine-loving upper classes are funnelling their own money into wineries or channelling EU subsidies into a friend's newly founded winery so they have a place to take their mates to a party. A phenomenon that is not only observed in Hungary, but throughout Central Europe and even more so in the Balkans. In Serbia, winemaking is a presidential affair, given that it is President Aleksandar Vucic's hobby, and a lot of vineyards are planted in the south of the country. In North Macedonia, which was called the wine cellar of the former Yugoslavia, the wine sector is a major GDP-generator.
But the Hungarian state is not only encroaching on the wine sector. It is also distorting the market: in Tokaj-Hegyalja, designated by the state as a prestige wine region, the state owns one of the country's largest wineries, Grand Tokaj. In other words, the state is using one hand to impose all kinds of regulations and quality requirements, taxing and possibly punishing winemakers. With its other hand, the state produces wine that competes with the other winemakers. Finally, the consumer pays twice for the products of the state-owned company, because Grand Tokaj has never been profitable, and it needs support from public money.
Too many wine regions, chaos of names
In almost every Hungarian winery, you will find a map of the historic Greater Hungary, or more precisely the Hungarian part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. Not because they are revisionists and want to undo the Trianon peace treaty – of course, there are such producers too – but because the 19th-century map shows that, apart from the higher mountain ranges, grapes were grown everywhere in the Carpathian Basin and wine was made from them.
The area under vines in Hungary today is roughly half the size of the Bordeaux wine region. While Bordeaux itself denotes a style – full-bodied red wines – there is no association with Hungarian wine. This is not a problem, of course, it means that Hungarian wine marketers have been given a complete canvas to draw something nice on. But you don't see that ambition.
Today, good wine can be produced practically anywhere after buying the proper technology. Just when the world was getting tired of South Africa, Australia, and California being called the New World, the Balkans kicked in the door to say they were the 'new Old World.' Moreover, thanks to the increasingly warm climate, reliable, and even highly-priced wines and sparkling wines are being produced from Poland to Germany and southern England. The Hungarian wine industry is facing unprecedented competition and does not know who or what it wants, nor what it should sell. More precisely, we do not know if it knows that because the government’s strategy on the subject is a secret.
In Hungary, there are too many wine regions, which means a lot of unnecessary administration and bureaucratic requirements for the producer communities. As I have written, Hungary's wine area is smaller than that of the Bordeaux wine region, and it is shared by 22 wine regions. Unnecessarily. There are so many regions that the consumer does not know and does not want to remember. Lake Balaton, Hungary's largest lake and a favourite holiday destination, borders six wine regions. Each of them has its own system of protection of origin and brands. But why brand them separately when there is already a brand that is known everywhere in the area: Lake Balaton?
I have a vineyard in one of the smallest wine regions, Pécs, which is a monster in itself: they have put together the loessy Mohács area near the Danube with the chalky-soily Mecsekalja – instead of integrating all of this into one big Villány-Pécs wine region. It's chaos, even the producers don't understand how it all came together, but here the community initiative is still in its infancy, so everyone is producing completely different things: some high-alcohol reds, some elegant whites, some light wines for a spritzer. Fortunately, the wine community here is incapable of any kind of unity, because it would be impossible to find a common denominator.
There is a very good Hungarian red wine brand: the bikavér, the famous Bull’s Blood. Let's forget about all the things that have been added to it, and forget that you might have drunk bad ones. The essence of bikavér is that it is a red wine and that it is a blend, i.e. made from the wines of many different grapes. Since most Hungarian wine regions work with many different grape varieties, it would seem obvious that blends should prevail everywhere. This is not the case, however: wines can be called bikavér only in Eger in the north, which considers itself a cool climate wine region, and in the increasingly Mediterranean Szekszárd in the south. In both regions, wines with a completely different character are called bikavér – but in the other 19 wine regions, red blends cannot be called bikavér for historical reasons. It's a pity because it could be a good national brand if it were accompanied by the same quality standards everywhere.
The lack of wine culture
For years, I have lived in Prague, the capital of the Czech Republic. The Czechs are very proud of their beers, with every district and small town having its own brewery. Beer is mainly enjoyed freshly draught, in company, in one of their many pubs. These pubs also serve snacks with the beer. Not main courses, just snacks. Not crisps, but appetisers from Czech cuisine, specially prepared to accompany beer. Marinated cheese, fried sausages, sliced bacon, cream with bread. These make the beer go down better and allow the alcohol to be absorbed. A Czech pub is all about flavour, company and experience.
There are pubs in Hungary too, but the parallel with the nearby Czech Republic stops there. Hungarian pubs hardly offer any food, even though they could. Freshly baked white bread smeared with lard and sprinkled with paprika. Bread slathered with pâté, sausage cream, or aubergine cream, all of which could be excellent dishes. But most places don't serve anything but chips or roasted, salted peanuts. Anything else is supposedly a pain to prepare. They say you need a special licence. They don't want to bother with it. Pubs are therefore only and exclusively about alcohol, the quality of which is a secondary issue.
One of the most popular drinks in pubs in Hungary is not beer, but fröccs. It is a wine-based drink. Carbonated water is mixed with wine in varying proportions. High-acid wines with a neutral character made from autochthonous grape varieties - Olaszrizling, Kövidinka - are a perfect match. The so-called hosszúlépés (1 dl wine, 2 dl water) is also an excellent thirst quencher. But if you think you can get local wines in a pub, you'd be wrong: it's very rare to find a pub owner who is so demanding, even though they might be better off financially. Instead, they make fröccs from bigger nation-wide wine companies who sell worse wine.
Not to mention the sustainability aspect: bulk wine from a nearby wine region hardly needs to be transported and doesn't waste so many bottles, it can be filled in a bag in box or even a jug, not to mention the money stays in the area, helping local families to make a living. But mostly, convenience and laziness win out.
So, most Hungarians don't go to the pub to absorb pub culture, they go to the pub to drink alcohol. Instead of tasting and drinking in a cultured way, they go there to get drunk as quickly as possible, and there is nothing to stop them. Not to mention wine culture. In most places, there are no decent wine glasses or local wine, and no decent wine either. The pub owner's concern is to keep the purchase price low – and cheap wines from the big national wine companies are the main way to do this. This is why, even if you live in a wine region, unless you have a family or friends who are wine producers, you simply won't have access to the wines of the area and you won’t even have the chance to be curious about those wines.
Idiotic restaurant-owners
I mentioned above that I have a small vineyard in the Pécs wine region. In the village it is based, there are three restaurants. Two of them are very well known and are listed in the Michelin guide. These three restaurants are conscientious and offer local wines, but it is not enough for the winemakers in the village even though two of them are among the best in the wine region. There are several reasons for this.
I lived in Italy for many years and travelled a lot. One day, by chance, I was taken to lunch in a restaurant in a small village in the Marché region. It's not one of the best-known regions for tourism, nor is its wine that well known. I asked for the wine list, because in Italy, as in Hungary, grapes grow almost everywhere. Only local wines from their village were listed. Ten white wines, a few reds and some sparkling. There were twenty tables in the restaurant, all with wine, some with more.
So, in a day of lunch and dinner, 50 bottles of wine would certainly be consumed here in a lower register, 300 in a week, 1200 in a month, 14,000 in a year. That's more than the average family winery in Hungary produces in a year. Here, the small ones can typically produce 5-10 thousand bottles a year. So, a restaurant in Italy could absorb the entire annual production of two cellars in Hungary, but in Hungary three restaurants cannot buy the significant part of the production of two cellars.
How is this possible? The first reason is the attitude of the average Hungarian restaurant. Because they don't understand wine, they often see it as a snobbish drink instead of as a logical accompaniment to a meal. They see it as a product to be bought, just like Coca-Cola, which unfortunately they also keep instead of offering their guests only farm-produced syrups and juices. They try to order their drinks from one place. Bring them from the liquor wholesalers, preferably only a few, so as not to have to store a lot. And the cash that is coming in can be used to pay for it quickly. What kind of wine? Whatever sells best. It's never the local one.
What the average restaurant doesn't realise is that if they could just take half a day in a year to find the wine producer nearest to them, taste their wines and negotiate a good price and quantity, they could not only save money overall, but stand out from other restaurants that contract with the same drinks wholesaler. In fact, consumers have no particular demand for wine in most places. As Hungary has a zero tolerance policy for drivers, i.e. they cannot drink any amount of alcohol before driving, many restaurants cannot even sell wine, as it is typically drunk by the head of the family and the wife will not drink wine alone. And because of this, wine is not selling, the price is high, as it takes up space and is expensive to store.
So we have screwed this up.
The wines are good, though. So when you drink Hungarian wines, feel the struggle behind them and appreciate that we're still making them despite all this. Cheers.
Martin Bukovics is the editor of the Central-Europe-focused Hungarian newsletter Gemišt and a hobby wine producer.