Hungary wine

Tokaji Aszú is made from grapes affected by Botrytis cinerea, which are hand-picked individually, and it has a documented history as a classified sweet wine region stretching back to the eighteenth century.

The same grape, Furmint, is now widely made as a dry wine — high in acidity, structured, often with a smoky or waxy character — and this dry category has become the more commercially significant one.

Kékfrankos, known as Blaufränkisch in Austria, is the country’s most planted red variety.

Tokaj holds the oldest vineyard classification of any wine region: the sites were ranked in 1737 by royal decree, more than a century before the 1855 Bordeaux list and around the same time as the Douro demarcation.

Forty years of state control after 1945 did considerable damage. Vineyards were consolidated, yields raised, and Tokaji was made in an oxidised, sweetened style bearing little relation to what had made it famous. The recovery began with foreign investment in the early 1990s and is still under way.

The country's current interest is as much in dry wine as sweet. Dry Furmint has emerged as a serious category since the 2000s — high in acidity, smoky and capable of age — and Somló, a single extinct volcano in the west, makes some of the most distinctive white wine in central Europe.

The reds are led by Kékfrankos, the Hungarian name for Blaufränkisch, in Villány and Eger.