Tokaj Wine Region

The Tokaj wine region occupies the northeastern corner of Hungary where the Zemplén hills descend to the floodplains of the Tisza and Bodrog rivers, a landscape of volcanic cones called hegyek rising abruptly from the valley floors, their lower slopes entirely covered with vineyards that have been continuously cultivated for at least five centuries, creating a cultural landscape whose visual character — steep vineyard hillsides rising from river valleys, the low stone winery buildings and village houses built from the same volcanic stone — has changed remarkably little since the eighteenth century and was recognised by UNESCO in 2002 as a cultural landscape of outstanding universal value. The region produces the famous Tokaji aszú, a botrytised wine that has been prized across Europe since the sixteenth century and was for centuries considered one of the great luxury wines of Europe alongside Champagne and Bordeaux.

The winemaking character of Tokaj is defined above all by botrytis — noble rot — a fungus that attacks the skins of the grapes in the humid autumn conditions created by the confluence of the Tisza and Bodrog rivers, concentrating the sugars and acids in the remaining grape flesh and producing the complex flavour profile of aszú wine that ranges from bright acidity and dried apricot and saffron notes in younger vintages to extraordinary depth and complexity in wines aged for decades in the cellars of the historic producers. The aszú grapes are individually picked as they become infected with botrytis, requiring multiple passes through the vineyard over several weeks, and the wine is made by adding the botrytised aszú berries to a base of fermenting must in a technique called vendange tardive that is shared with the great sweet wines of Sauternes and the Rheingau.

The cellars of the Tokaj region are as significant as the vineyards: the historic producers have carved kilometres of passages directly into the volcanic rock of the hillside below the town of Tokaj, with constant temperatures of 10 to 12 degrees Celsius and near-total humidity creating the ideal environment for slow ageing of the wine in bottle, and some of the oldest bottles in the world of still wine have been found in these cellars, preserved by the consistent temperature and the density of the volcanic tuff stone. The oldest of these cellars date to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when the wine trade was already established on the slopes above, and the network of underground passages continues to be expanded by the current generation of winemakers.

The physical landscape of Tokaj — the sharp contrast between the flat river plain and the steep volcanic cones, the way the mist from the Bodrog collects in the valleys on autumn mornings and burns off by mid-morning as the sun rises over the hills, the sight of the harvest workers moving through the steep vineyard rows picking botrytised berries by hand in the October cold — creates a setting for winemaking that is as visually striking as it is viticulturally unusual, and visitors who arrive at harvest time in October witness a working vintage that has changed little in its essential rhythms for three centuries. The traditional village architecture of Tokaj, Mád, and Sárospatak — houses built from the same andesite volcanic stone as the vineyards, with wine cellars at ground level and living quarters above — reinforces the connection between the landscape and its product.

The Tokaj region has two principal appellations — Tokaji aszú and Tokaji szamorodni — and within these categories there are several levels of sweetness and complexity determined by the number of puttonyos of aszú grapes added to the base wine, a system that dates to the eighteenth century and that gives the region a classification structure that is one of the oldest in European wine. The current revival of Tokaj wine, driven by a new generation of Hungarian and international winemakers investing in the historic cellars and replanting abandoned vineyard parcels, is bringing back into production vineyard sites that were abandoned during the twentieth century and is rediscovering the full potential of a terroir that has been producing extraordinary wine for five centuries but was severely disrupted by the collective farm system of the communist period.

It is one of the world's oldest designated wine regions and the source of Tokaji aszú, one of the great sweet wines of Europe, with a documented reputation stretching back to the sixteenth century.

The volcanic landscape — steep vineyard cones rising from river valleys, carved underground cellars, misty autumn mornings — is visually distinctive and unlike any other major European wine region.

The UNESCO cultural landscape designation (2002) recognises a viticultural and architectural heritage that has survived essentially intact for centuries despite political upheaval and economic disruption.