Bálint Losonci (Matra, Hungary)

Bálint Losonci Gyöngyöspata, Matra foothills (Hungary)
When you think to Hungarian wines, the region of the Matra mountains north of Budapest is not the first wine region you think about, but until not so long ago it was an active wine-producing region with deep roots in the villages, every family tending a vineyard and making its own wine. The village of Gyöngyöspata east of the mid-size town of Gyöngyös (picture on left) saw along the recent history its wine culture dwindle until a small group of young winemakers led by Bálint Losonci invested themselves in this volcanic hills with a philosophy of reflecting the terroir and add no additives during the vinification.

Initially, Bálint Losonci wasn't at all in the wine trade, he was living in Budapest and was considering without real passion to study and work in the usually prized field of law or informatics as these were options of choice at the fall of the communist regime. So from 18 to 22 he studied foreign trade at college but he wasn't really happy about the cursus. Already when he was in primary school, while other boys said they wanted to be astronauts or firemen he was the only one around to say peasant. When he reached the last year of his foreign-trade school in Budapest, he had to spend 6 month training in a business of some sort with some relation with foreign trade. He just saw at that time in 2001 an interview of István Szepsy who was not yet then the famous winemaker he would soon become, and Balint was really deeply impressed by what Szepsy said, by the realities evoqued by his words on terroir and vineyard work. After this, he found a book by Alkonyi Laszlo where many Hungarian estates were profiled and he saw in this book that while major, famous wineries didn't get very good rates there, István Szepsy who was still unknown then got 5 stars. Alkonyi Laszlo was then also running a wine magazine named Borbarát (Friends of Wine) and Balint asked if he could spend training time there. He tasted plenty of wines there and learnt a lot, including about what's behind a given wine : the vineyard work, the yields, the vinification details, all of which not being then questions to ask in the conventional wineries and tasting events. He ended up working full-time for this magazine, and it lasted 5 years, after which he quit because he was setting up his own winery.

Matra volcanoes in the background Bálint Losonci began to make wine in 2003 with a surface of 0.3 hectare planted with 20-year-old olasz riesling, and he had also bought bare land that he initially intended to plant immediately. But following the idea of his wife he began with a small parcel to see if he was comfortable with winemaking and the tending the vines before doing the planting. They still lived in Budapest then, 80 km away at that time. Retrospectively it was a good thing that they didn't plant the bare fields because they were located in an area with lots of thefts (including fruit and trellis) and they realized that only later. In between he found other vineyards, reaching 2 hectares in 2008 which was already a big surface to manage alone and also while still living in Budapest 80 km away. That was the turning point where he decided to come live here in the village, and his wife had to quit her job in Budapest for that. Now he works on 6 hectares, half of which is rented. After he moved here he realized that renting vineyards was very convenient because there are lots of elderly people who own a small parcel and are ready to rent it for revenues.

You have to know that in the communist era the regime had to make concessions because of the agriculture and viticulture traditions in the countryside, so each adult could own 0,3 hectare of vineyard and make his/her own wine with it. This said, the communist planners destroyed much of the good vineyards of the region using powerful soviet-made tractors in order to plant high-yield crops, and they also moved the vineyards to Eger and to the flat land for productivist reasons.

The Tokaj region was more lucky as the steep slopes there were not fit for these tractors, allowing the local vineyards to survive more or less. In the Matra region everything is almost to reconstruct from scratch as the great vineyard-planted slopes of the early 20th century were erased or abandoned and conquered by woods and bushes. You can still today see the vertical stripes of bushes on the hills which materialize from afar the former parcels, like on the picture on left showing the excellent terroirs above Gyöngyös. Among the young people in this town, few probably know that these slopes were not so long ago yielding excellent wines.

Bálint says that these terroirs with a thin layer of earth have a great potential for wine if someone dares to revive them, and that's what he and his friends are doing in Gyöngyöspata. Balint says that the planting in the flat land that was made in the 2nd half of the 20th century needs more sprayings, like 7 or 8 times a year while on steep slopes, along his own experience, you can do with one ot two sprays, because the breeze, the draining soil makes the diseases unlikely. On the flat land the soil is too rich also, making bigger fruits and yields with softer skins, which makes them vulnerable to disease. A conventional grower in the region typically plows the rich, dark earth and sprays herbicide underneath the row, letting all the fruit grow for as big yields as possible (see picture of this parcel lower right). This conventional vineyard has yields of about 40 tons for its two hectares, and just to compare with his own two-hectare parcel he made only 3 tons of grapes. No need to say that you don't make the same wines with such different yields (not to speak of the heavy correction with additives to polish the former)... The grower sells the grapes to a large winery/negoce. A large part of the very cheap wine found on the market in Hungary comes from Italy, it was particularly true 2 years ago when the yields fell down because of the weather conditions, and bulk wine was imported illegally from Italy and labelled as Hungarian by large wineries which were short in juice.

the volcanic rocks in the soil In this context, Bálint is quite isolated in the region, with 99 % of the cheap and medium-priced wines being made using extensively additions of both sugar and acid (sometimes even must concentrate) to correct the unbalanced juices. For his own experience along the 10 years since he started to make wine, there was not a single vintage where he corrected his wines, be it in hot years or cool years, but he is farming along wholly different principles, using soils that are fit for vines, no fertlizers and pruning in order to keep yields low : 1 kilogram of grapes or lower. Speaking of yields he favors the weight-per-vine against the hectoliter/hectare because depending of the density of the vines per hectare, the latter ratio can be meaningless. Here with soviet-tractor-adapted vineyards having sometimes 3 to 4 meters between the rows, you could display low yields in ha/ho but still have each individual vine bendind from an overload of grapes. His (and his colleagues') new plantations have a density of 8000 vines per hectare but they also work on wide inter-rows vineyard with a third of that number per hectare. This region has average precipitation of 600 mm per year with dry summers. The well-located vineyards have a soil with high-clay content which keep the humidity 20 cm deep along the dry summer. The stones found in the vineyard are diverse, andesite, chalk, compressed sediments which is very friable and crumbles in your hand, and other volcanic stones that weigh nothing and look like pumice. This is all excellent for the roots of the vines. When you look at these Matra foothills this looks green but actually the vines are struggling with only a thin layer of soil, after which you find the rock and mineral table (see picture on right) through which the roots will dig deep.

Asked if he plans to add surface to his present 6 hectares he says he's not sure, there's a limit in the surface he can handle alone, but he's possibly open to add a half hectare if he falls upon a great opportunity. He could hire but the quality of the vineyard work is so important that he prefers to do it himself. The pruning is one of these important steps in the management, he begins early january when he is sure that the sap went down to the roots, but it is sometimes slow because of the weather conditions. snow, melting snow, mud, advancing slowly at the pace of 0,3 hectare a day. He uses 2 part-time employees when needed, they're always the same and know his vineyard well.
The picture above was shot in his 2-hectare parcel, planted with 45 year-old olasz riesling, it is not yet in the best conditions but he says it's the best terroir he has with all these volcanic stones in the soil, which landed in this mixed manner because there was a volcanic geyser above in the geologic past..

Olasz Riesling Hungary like other countries is also going through a renewal of the winemaking philosophy, which starts as you know with the vineyard management. I asked Bálint how many are they in Hungary, these new, demanding winemakers who tend their vineyard the right way so as not to use additives in their wines, he says about 50 in all. Most of them are located in the Tokaj region. There are a few internationally-known artisans like István Szepsy but others are appearing. Of course there's also a rush of wealthy investors who heard about Szepsy and bought vineyards next to his to try copy his success, thus bringing the land prices up, but genuinely-motivated winegrowers can find cheap and as-excellent terroirs in a lesser-known village of the region. That's what did Alkonyi Laszlo, the former wine magazine editor who set up his domaine Kalaka Pince [pince means domaine in Hungarian] in a nearby village, Tallya, away from the flashy crowds. Tokaj enjoys a boom in terms of new organic artisan wineries with something like 3 domaines being started every year there.

Villany, the other wine region of Hungary is less interesting, the terroir is not so good, there's no clay and the mainstream wineries are still quite rich, making high yields and polishing their wines with enolgy techniques and additives. There's not a movement of artisan winemakers there, barely 3 interesting, newly-created wineries, like Wassmann for example. Balint says that international experts have found little character in the wines of the region, writers like Jancis Robinson, Tim Atkin, Wojciech Bońkowski or Isabelle Legeron didn't find interesting wines in Villany.

The picture above shows one of his rented vineyards (35-40-year-old olasz riesling), he took it over in a very bad shape, it was abandoned for a few years and he made an arrangement with the owner to begin pay the rent when it is back on track. He has also to partly replant the missing vines and refurbish the trellis system

Abandoned vineyard Balint tells me an interesting thing about the things you have to do in Hungary when you set up a new winery here : by law, when you establish a new vineyard, you have to bring soil samples to a state laboratory (or a state-acredited one) and follow their guidelines following the analysis of your soil, meaning inject nitrogen or soil nutrients or whatever chemical they say the soil needs.... Fortunately, there's no enforcement about the implementation of the recommended soil corrections. This laboratory advice is now also compulsory for the new orchards. The problem is that the philosophy behind this lab analysis and recommandations is 100 % conventional and productivistn it targets high yields and volumes, which is alien to quality winemaking.
A few years ago the market for grapes was very bad, with very low prices, and the European Union gave out subsidies to uproot. And now with the market price in better shape (doubled compared to 5 years ago) it's all the way around, the EU is subsidizing the new plantations. We passed one that had received the money but the vineyard with its baby vines looked unkempt with even lots of missing vines. I'm not sure that the EU subsidizes the right farmers (same problem in France), especially that the EU-paid replantings are usually on flat, uninteresting land.

Balint studied in a wine school for adults prior to setting up his winery but the teachers there only taught conventional winemaking and if a student spoke of the possibility to have the fermentation start by itself without lab yeast they would be looked upon as fools. This nonetheless helped him for a few things, even though on the winemaking issue he didn't use the recipes he was given there.

Finetuning the soviet tractor Bálint just bought an old soviet-made tractor which will allow him to do the plowing when he needs to, but he will use the plowing card moderately, doing it only when he thinks the vineyard needs it. He plowed for example the 2-hectare parcel of rented olasz-riesling this spring to aerate the soil because with the clay the ground is too compact after some time. He may do this plow every other year to keep the ground from getting compact and air-tight. He of course doesn't spray herbicides, while 99 % of commercial growers in the Matra region do. In the past the elderly people prefered not to spray herbicides, even if they hadn't strong opinion about it, but they followed their feel and intuition and prefered to plow and take care of the soil with tilling, especially that under the communists they couldn't get more than 0,3 hectare and herbicide wasn't available as well as other systemic products. On one side you had the kholkoz system where farming was horrible and on the other side private family winemakers who more or less kept their morals clean. This formerly-abandoned parcel which he rents for the 3rd year wasn't too damaged on the soil side because the owner hadn't money to spend on chemicals (the problem being that now every one has free access to chemicals and find them easy).

Two weeks ago he made the shoot selection manually, taking off the shoots he considers are in excess, as well as leaves in order to aerate the foliage and the future grapes. I noticed that this area at the Matra foothills is always windy and he nods, saying that it helps avoid disease and keep the grapers safe. Also there is almost never a frost on these slopes, the occasional frost occuring on the flatland further down.

KekFrankos We're now with Balint in a parcel he loves, this is a vineyard of Kekfrankos (Blaufränkisch) that overlooks his village of Gyöngyöspata. There is also a small parcel of recently-planted Pinot Noir along this one, another reason he loves this parcel.
As you can see he lowered dramaticly the height of the vine, it was definitely too high, with the shoot hovering well beyond the wires. He then cut the wood at 50 cm so that the shoots could be comfortably at the average height of these wires and rest on them after the tying. Also, acidity was a bit too high and whith more heat from the neared ground he can have a more balanced fruit.
The hole in the ground is not some kind of tilling of his, it is the work of wild boars who were apparently smelling something particular at this spot, Balint suspects it could be truffles... There's a lot of clover that grows naturally on this place, and he likes it because it's synonym with natural nitrogen. The soil has a big clay component and with the drought of the summer, like elsewhere in the region's vineyards you see cracks in the ground, which aerates but also dries it. In this regard, he likes to keep this weeds cover because it brings a bit of humidity on the soil in spite of the drought. He may also sow weeds with long roots so that when they die in winter the void in place of the roots further aerates the soil.
Here the yields is around 0,6 or 0,8 kg per vine, depends of the vine, a stronger will make 1,2 kg while a weaker one 0,5 kg. He is satisfied with the color of the leaves, they look healthy and happy.
When he took over this parcel he discovers afterwards that there's also a row of dark Kadarka, a variety used here to bring color in the wine. The wineries here compensate the light color of their excessive yields (7 to 8 kg per vine) by using the trick of Kadarka. He vinifies it with a parcel of Turan, another coloring variety has further in the south.

These rows are planted at a 3,5-meter distance (they were planted with big tractors in mind) and he plans to plant an additional row between them, as this is a loss of surface. For the 0,3 hectare of young pinot noir that he planted recently (picture on right) he chose a higher density, the rows being planted close to each other. He plans to buy some day a small tractor, and for the time being, he relies on a friend in the village who lets him use his own (picture on left), an Italian-made Antonio Carraro. He fenced the pinot noir to keep the deers or wild boars away. The pinot noir is a clone 777, a good quality clone.

The facility - The presses It's been a year and a half that an appellation system has been set up across Hungary, along the guidelines of the EC. The system is very loose and not quality oriented, even the high yields pass the appellation test, and their own wine with yields as low as 0,5 Kg per vine aren't even sure to get the appellation, it's been designed from the start with a brand mindset, in order to please the mass bottlers and industrial wineries. Balint decided to do it without, and as a result he can't write the name of the Matra region, he can't write the village name and neither the parcel name, although he's been working precisely to bring the expression of the terroir.

He has also outstanding colleagues in Eger or Tokaj, working with the most demanding principles on the vineyard and a non-corrected vinification, who samely were singled out in the appellation tastings because their wines were too different from the conventional wineries doing high yields and corrections. What happens, he says is that typically they fail two times and the thirs year they opt to stay out of this weird appellation system that rewards the industrial wines.

Balint's facility is located in the same village of Gyöngyöspata, at a short walking distance of the house where he lives with his wife and two young boys. He purchased this large house a few years ago, after making his wines elsewhere in less-favorable conditions. The house is not in perfect condition but is perfectly fit for winemaking, plus it has a nice vaulted cellar. It was in the early 20th century or possibly before that, a csendőrség post (police quarters), and you can still see the prison cell with a small window with bars overlooking a corridor...

Tasting Olasz Riesling We walk down to the vaulted cellar, the place is cool and has the right humidity. To reach the cellar you have to go down incredibly-steep stairs (see picture on right), proving that wine was a serious thing when this house was built 170 years ago.
Inside the cellar, there are both barrels and plastic vats, these white tanks are Hungarian made, by a company named Turk. They're very economical compared to stainless-steel and are easy to move around. With the floating lid they can keep whatever volume safe and they exist in different sizes. Very easy to clean too, and very cheap. I'm sure they would do a killing in France too, stainless steel is quite expensive.

We taste a first wine :
__ Olasz Riesling 2013, from one of these white vats. Turbid, still working. The yield that year was 0,8 kg per vine for his Olasz Riesling. He tries in te previous years both oak and neutral vats and he prefers the expression with the vats. In 2013 the acidity was high, so he doesn't mind if the malolactic is done. He doesn't check the occurence of the malolactic anyway.
Olasz Riesling 2013 from other white vat. Turbid. Selection of vines here, with lower yields. Still sweet, like if we were still in october.
Zöld (Grüner Vetliner) 2013, another white. Not turbid, nice golden color. Low acidity, it seems to me. Almost finished.

Pinot Noir We now taste a few reds.
__ Pinot Noir (not sure of the vintage, 2013 I think). Superb nose, nice color. Clone 777, planted in 2006, yields : 0,8 kg per vine. He didn't like the wine stage 2 months ago and he notices a big change. Mouth : refined, with aromas of alcohol-soaked cherries, prune too. 400 bottles of this (small parcel and young vines). His top pinot noir will sell for 13-15 € retail.
__ Pinot Noir 2013, from a 17-hectoliter white vat on the street level. The base pinot noir, entry-level wine that will cost 8 €. All his reds are unfiltered and unfined. Nice wine too, and good acidity. Onctuous wine. This other pinot-noir parcel was supposed to be uprooted because the former owner couldn't get his targeted yields of 4 kg per vine in spite of all the fertilizers he dumped there. When Balint heard about this "problem", he jumped on the opportunty and volunteered to rent the parcel, and now he says it was his best move, the clone was a low-yield clone, exactly what he was looking for...

Balint tells me that as a manager of a small winery he has to maneuver through the difficult task of filling the paper work for the administration. The workload is the same that for a large winery and almost every year comes some kind of new regulation [I suspect the EC has to do with this...] even though this new government took some steps to simplify the hurdles. The problem is that the administration is a power by itself and resists the political orders, finding ways to make the businesses feel who is the real master. Balint tells me about an interesting comparison in this regard : there's an Austrian winegrower (Weninger Weingut) who happens to have two estates, one in Austria and one just on the other side of the border in Hungary's Sopron region (one kilometer away), everything is the same, the weather, the varieties, the soil, but Franz Reinhard Weninger said that the administration formalities are 10 times more difficult on the Hungarian side. Austria, Balint says, is probably a model in Europe for their dealing with small wineries (and business), they made it very easy for artisan wineries to avoid administrative hurdles not adapted at their size and quality-centered farms, there are much less controls and it really boosts the artisan producers.

Walking back to the house with a few bottles __ Kekfrankos 2011, from barrels on the street level. Had its malolactic made on the 2nd summer only. He will bottle it soon, now. This is the vineyard he lowered the height to 50 cm. This is actually the wine that brings him the biggest success among the Hungarian wine amateurs. Nose : focused fruit. Color : dark. Powerful and silky wine, with a delicious saltiness on the palate. Goes down gloriously, good warm feel down the throat. These old vines are doing a good job even though they probably didn't appreciate the sudden lowering and cutting. Costs about 17 € retail.
__ Turan, the red coloring variety. Flower, rose aromas. Mouth less seducing. Yields are too high here he says, about 2 kg/vine.

Time to go back to the family house and have dinner with his wife and the children, Balint grabs a few bottles so that we can taste bottled wine while having dinner.
__ Kalaka Pince, Tökösmal 2013, 70 % Hárslevelü 30 % Furmint, this wine is not hios, it comes from his fried in the Tokaj region. He used only 30 % of the press juice (the 1st press). Very pure and elegant. Balint says that it is very difficult to make a dry Furmint that is elegant. Nice wine. Costs about 25 €.
__ Furmint 2013 (back to his own wine). Thin glass paper feel on the palate, I like this mouth touch. Very good balance. Costs 7 € only retail. Acidity (natural of course) is 9,5, he says. 2013 was a good year for acidity, he adds, the previous excellent year in that regard being 2008, after that the summers were too hot. Balint Losonci uses only screwcaps as closures on his whites, he says that it seems that the natural cork shipped to Hungary is more prone to TCA and other problems, so he decided to stop buying them and use the very safe screw system.
__ Riesling 2013. Free So2 : 40, because there's 40 gr of residual sugar here. 12 % alc. Tastes much less than 40 gr, and when he brought the sample to the lab for analysis he expected to find 15 or 20 gr. This wine is the first to be totally organic. In 2014 all the wines are made from organic vineyards. But anyway, from the start of hiw winery, he never used any herbicides or chemical fertilizers. Regarding the SO2 he routinely sprays some at the surface of the incoming grapes by security, although I noted that he uses 10 kg boxes for the hand picking. This is not my role but I kind of lobby for the use of smaller amounts of SO2...
Speaking of spraying on the vineyard, he uses some biodynamic preparation and he also uses an homeopatic organic product gathering many plant and mineral extracts (60 or more) that has the color of the earth and is staying a long time on the leaves when he sprays it. It's called Biomit Plussz and he can do without other spraings including copper and sulfur.

The abandoned cellar street at Gyöngyöspata Earlier in the afternoon, Balint had showed me a very interesting aspect of the history of wine in this village of Gyöngyöspata : the cellar street, it is an alley at some distance of the village with cellars in the foot of a hill, and a small house in front each time. Men would often go there both to make or look after their wine, but also to drink some with friends, a whole way of life that has alas vanished today. Balint hopes that these cellar houses in such a beautiful setting can someday be revived, why not maybe to serve artisan products and wine and simply enjoy the place with friends...

__ Nyitni Kek 2013. The name is a play of words. Kekfrankos. Blend of Kekfrankos and Magyarfrankos actually. Balint says he is the only one in the whole Hungary to make wine from Magyarfrankos. It is a hybrid that was experimentally planted in the village. Partly fermented with skins 6 or 7 days, with cap punching, then the rest of the fermentation continued after pressing. Aromas of coffee and kirsh. So2 total 60 or 70, but often less, he says (he puts some both on the incoming grapes and before bottling).
__ Urrateszi Kekfrankos 2011. Color, paler, evolved. Interesting bitterness at the end of the mouth.
__ Cabernet Sauvignon 2011. He quit renting this parcel because the region is not ideal to ripe cabernet sauvignon. Interesting nose with dust notes.

Losonci Bálint 3035 Gyöngyöspata Vári utca 32 phone +36 30 8286 804 balint [at] losonci [dot] hu www.losonci.hu

A fence in Gyöngyöspata

Comments

[Justin]

Tasted his wines at an organic wine fair in Prague. Really enjoyed them! Great to see this pleasant man appearing on a great blog.

[Franz Weninger]

here the right link to weninger: www.weninger.com, by the way i love you site!

[Carlos Alberto Coelho]

Congratulations!, great wines