When European leaders sat down for lunch at last week's summit, their conversations about debt buffers and corporate-tax rates may have been familiar, but the wine was not. Királyudvar Tokaji Sec 2007, a Hungarian white wine feted by oenophiles, graced the menu: redolent of minerals and fruit, a hint of honey, with the texture of a Chardonnay and the aromatic tang of a Riesling, yet also a singular taste of somewhere else. (With an alcohol content of 12.5%, it is also not a bad choice for easing differences over the finer points of the stability and growth pact.)
The wine was chosen by a panel led by Helga Gál, a wine expert and now the official sommelier of the Hungarian presidency of the Council of Ministers. The presidency will serve 51 different wines at around 260 events (in addition to the meetings of European leaders).
The appointment of a sommelier is no accident. A presidency has always been about more than writing up the minutes of meetings of member states' ambassadors. It is also a chance to impress others with history, culture, identity and tradition. A wine neatly captures all these elements in a glass.
“Wine is a very good way to communicate,” says Gál. Another aim is to promote an industry that is getting back on its feet after 40-odd years of communist-dictated flavours. Indeed, János Martonyi, Hungary's foreign minister, mentioned promoting wine as a presidency objective when he met journalists last month.
Wine has been grown in this central European region for centuries, but two world wars and communism smothered some legendary wines, most notably Tokaj, a sweet dessert wine drunk at the court of Louis XIV, and ‘Bull's Blood' (Egri Bikavér), an easy-drinking red that declined towards the cheap-and-cheerful end of the market. Hungary went from supplying celebrated wines for the Hapsburgs' table to funnelling thousands of hectolitres of sweet, bland wine to the Soviet Union.
“During the communist period, everything was uniform, the same quality, the same appearance, the same wine,” says Gál. This was a disaster for fine wine. The emphasis was on quantity, not quality, she recalls. “As a communist country we were a little agricultural centre and we had to serve the big brother, the Soviet Union, with wine.”
Italian adventure
Gál was born into a wine-growing family in northern Hungary, where her grandparents owned a vineyard. But it was not until she moved to Italy in the early 1990s that she really discovered wine. Her older brother, Tibor, was taking an apprenticeship at the legendary Tuscan winemakers Antinori. He became one of Hungary's most influential winemakers before his untimely death in a road accident in 2005.
Gál's Italian stay proved to be a turning point. Thinking back to the early tastings she attended with her brother, she recalls: “I had never heard people talking about wine as if it were a real person.”
Her love affair with Italian wines led to a job promoting them at international festivals in France, Italy and Hungary. When she returned to Hungary in the mid-1990s, interest in fine dining was blossoming again. She became head sommelier at Gundel Restaurant in Budapest, the first woman ever do the job at this fashionable Budapest institution. After a 50-year hiatus as a state restaurant, Gundel today serves up the goose liver and rich chocolate dishes that royalty and aristocracy dined on during the fin de siècle days of the Austro-Hungarian empire.
But re-building a wine industry is a bigger task than recreating the aristocratic grandeur of Gundel's dining room. “This past 40 years have left their fingerprint on winemaking,” says Gál. Centuries-old vineyards were “tragically” torn up, new ones were created in fields that had never seen grapes before. Meanwhile, investment in new wine-making technologies stagnated. Fragments of the old vineyards can still be seen in some fields, a few sticks of wood in a hedge. “Among the trees you could find pieces of wood that people used for cultivation of grapes, and then you know that 60 years ago that bush was a vineyard.”
Gál is proud of the high-quality wines that diplomats and ministers will enjoy during Hungary's six-month presidency. But re-building Hungary's wine region will take time, she says. “We are able to produce really good quality wine. But we have to understand the terroirs, a lot of things that only come with time. We are still discovering new crus and new production areas.”
The Királyudvar Tokaji Sec 2007 is a good example of this still-unfolding story. Tokaj is known as a sweet wine, but the Királyudvar Tokaji Sec is a late 20th-century invention. Wine experts are taking Hungary's “characterful”, “unique and intriguing” white wines very seriously.
It is a time of experiment and rediscovery for Hungarian wine. The EU might be converging on economic policy, but Hungarian wine is a reminder of the treasure of local differences.
