Abasár, Matra (Hungary)
Levente (given names follow the family names in Hungary) is part of a vibrant group of young winemakers who give a new impetus to the small wine region of Matra, a hilly area north of Budapest dotted with extinct volcanoes. Levente was a school teacher and director in his previous life, and he still is to this day. In this region everybody used to grow
grapes and make wine for the family, as a kid he saw his father making wine for home consumption and he later went to the university (the wine school is at
Corvinus University, Budapest) to learn the basics of winemaking. When he started hiw own production (Levente Pince) back to the wine school he still had many questions without answers, so he tried different things by himself, learning through trials along the years.
The village of Abasár east of Gyöngyös is a typical wine village sitting at the foot of the hills in view of the vineyards with lines of cellars here and there, dug into the slopes. The area had its vineyards destroyed by phylloxera in the late 19th century and the village was helped by a generous and entrepreneurial man, Hanak Kolos, who helped the growers of the region replant and learn a new grafting technique thereafter known as the Abasarian grafting (source).
Levente says that people here don't consider making wine as a future and dream of getting to Budapest for a better life. He considers it's one of his duties to make them love their heritage and consider they can both have a better life and live here making wine, there are still lots of vineyards to cultivate and slopes to replant with beautiful terroirs. He sometimes brings his students in the cellar to show them around and try awake vocations for this job. Levente, who years ago would teach in Budapest, communting back and forth here to make wine, came back in his home region and now heads the school around the corner, teaching there too.
The first time I met Levente was at a tasting of József Szentesi wines just outside Budapest a couple years ago, B. and i had the luck to be invited along a small group of Matra winemakers to taste József's micro cuvées made with forgotten Hungarian varieties. That's when I discovered that beyong the
three growers/winemakers of Tőkések there were quite a few other artisanal producers in the area that were samely focused on quality and good vineyard work. There are many other wine regions in Hungary (22 in all), often tiny and little-known, but the volcanic Matra hills which is often on my way when I move through Hungary has a good potential for growth and quality.
I met Levente on a hot september day at the door of his cellar. This is central Europe and summers are summers unlike the Paris or Loire regions where clouds and rain come easily from the Altantic, the closest wine region for the climate in France is probably Alsace, known for its cold winters and stable, hot summers. Levente's cellar is typical of what you find in Hungary, the cellars are often next to each other, certainly initially dug in the hills for stone extraction and construction purpose and then turned into cellars. People have been making wine for at least 1000 years in the area and many are very old. Looking for information about cellar I found a notice about this one which was for sale, only 2150 €, looks great !
That's the whole thing, the cellar and the chai with on the left the two basket presses, this is basically a very long cellar, all in a single room, the good thing with this kind of facility is you can just dig more when you
need additional surface and storage room, no
one will complain and no roof needed. The cellar is dug into volcanic, andesitic tuff and pyroclastic sediment with also some compressed lignite (like on the wall just down the stairs). Right now both reds and whites are vinifies and get their élevage here but levente plans to buy another cellars or two next to this one and do the reds & whites separately.
There are different sizes of vessels in the cellar, from 225 to 400 liters and some of them were already filled with fermenting juice when I visited. Levente had still a couple of parcels to pick at the time. His total vineyard surface is 3 hectares and he recently planted another 3 hectares with Kékfrankos, Olaszrizling, Rajnai Rizling, Kadarka, Furmint, Hárslevelű. These planting will need years for the first real harvest because the soil is very rocky and poor. He plans to have yet another hectare replanted in the future. Otherwise he does everything by himself in the vineyard and the chai.
This is where Levente as a school teacher (he has himself two children, girl and boy, aged 11 & 10) occasionally brings schoolchildren (pic on right) so that they understand the excitement of this job, I think this should be done everywhere, especially to promote the artisan-level wineries : Here like in certain regions of France there are tons of opportunities for willing entrepreneurs, you can find affordable vineyards and great abandoned terroirs to replant. Some of the kids on the picture will maybe follow his path and keep reviving the wine culture here....
Picture on left : Bielik István / 24.hu
Picture on right : Facebook Levente
As we look at the barrels, Levente shows me the one with the 2017 Olasz Rizling still in barrel, it took one year to ferment, but the wine is now dry at last. This wine
will have a total of three year
élevage time, including one year in bottles before being sold on the market. Levente's wines can be found in demanding restaurants and bistros of Budapest, like Costes Downtown on Vigyázó Ferenc utca 5, the Kispiac Bisztró on Hold utca 13, Kuglóf Bisztró on Piarista köz and Fricska Gastropub on Dob utca 56-58.
Otherwise in Hungary and on the Internet he sells his wine through the major retailer Bortársaság and also through Radovin.
The picture on the right (shot in another village of the region) is your first lesson in Hungarian : Bor means wine, you'll read that all over as local producers invite you to taste and buy their wines (like in France, choose your producer carefully though, being a small winery isn't a guarantee of quality and tasting randomly can be treacherous...).
__ Szentanna 2015, Olaszrizling, 3-year élevage including in bottle. Soon n the market. 4000 Forints retail price at the cellar (12 €). Lightly filtered, 12,8 % alcohol. Ample white, nice umami, goes down easy, not oaky, Levente says the barrel which is made of Hungarian oak is 10 years old. No batonnage, here, the wine just sit on its lees. This is only fermenting grapes here, just got this light filtration and a little bit of sulfites. Filtration must be very light indeed, it looked unfiltered to me, Levente says he uses bentonite for filtering.
__ Judas 2015, also made from Olaszrizling, unfiltered this time, the color is more yellowish. More character, more edgy wine, there's this bitterness at the end of the mouth and an obvious minerality. Levente says that when he bought this parcel the vines were a very bad shape, he needed 10 years to have them recover and back into production. Speaking of SO2
I ask how much there are, Levente says that the average is between 30 and 80 mg/liter. These are old vines, like 60, they are among the ones he got when he started with the 3 hectares, Levente says that the Olaszrizling bunches are very small on this parcel with berries having very thick skins. He gets 0,2 to 0,8 kg of grapes per vine. He does short pruning in spring, no plowing on the parcel, he mows the grass twice a year. This year he didn't spray, not even sulfur, no need, these old vines are now in good condition and the wind is always blowing there, keeping the disease away.
__ Szentanna 2014. Very different, sharper wine, more mineral than the 2015. Very classy, super sharp. This vintage had a very very cold weather (lots of rain and no real summer) with only a good late season and autumn at the end, and Levente says he really loves the result in the wines when the weather is colder, this wine is his favorite. Regardless of the weather Levente says that he lets the nature do its job, trusting the vines to produce grapes that will turn well in the wine, he feels that even speaking to the vines is important. In the cellar, nothing needs to be done really, the wine will build by itself.
He made 900 bottles of this and only has 30 left. Super nice wine.
At this point of the interview we were joined by Kata Koklács who came to help for the translation. Kata knows well the wineries and the winemakers of the region and speaks good english. An Eger native (Eger is the capital of the namesake region just north of Matra), Kata moved to Budapest where she started Internet businesses before moving back to Eger where she felt better. She is the CEO of Colorandcode, a marketing web design company and she set up an online wine shop, Wine&Go through which the bottles can be delivered by bicycle (Kata was cycling all the time when in Budapest). She also organizes special events around wine and she also has put up a Wine Walk in Eger (named Pohárral Egerben in Hungarian, means "With a Glass in Eger") where you can drink wine and meet interesting winemakers while strolling in the old city of Eger. I can't but recommend this kind of event, especially when you're a foreigner, it's fun and a great way to discover a city and its people. Call the phone number on the linked page (prefix +36), there will be other Wine Walks soon, in november & december (there are 10 of them per year, and special groups accepted, in English as well).
Kata also at one point helped her father plant a vineyard a couple years ago, she might get directly into the wine one of these years...
__ Saár 2015; Olaszrizling Batonnage (printed on the label), also dry (száraz) white. By the way, when you're looking to buy a wine in Hungary, in a shop for example, learn how to differentiate the dry from the sweet wines : you'll see on the label printed somewhere either száraz (dry) or édes (sweet).
This wine had
batonnage once a week for one year, that's why he put it on the label. There's a skin contact feel here, good balance. Batonnage is not the rule, in 2017 he didn't make any. This cuvée was filtered. Still has about 1000 bottles of it.
__ Barabás 2015, also Olaszrizling, same grapes but 10 % unfiltered. Speaking of filtration, Levente says that he prefers the unfiltered version but he says that because it's difficult to have sommeliers and consummers understand that turbidity is not an issue, he has to continue filter the whites. Hungary as a market is not yet mature enough to be ready for unfiltered whites, he thinks.
Nice inspiring nose. crystal sharp feel, super nice, love it.
__ Saár 2014, filtered. Acidulous nose, citrus notes. Light tannin feel. Got some daily batonnage. 800 bottles made. Speaking of closures, after having several problems with regular corks, levente switched to Diam corks, which are are a safe alternative.
__ Rajnai Rizling 2015, made from 40-year-old vines which were in normal condition when he bought them in 2014, he just pruned shorter to lower the yields to under one kilogram per vine, the yields were much higher under the previous owner. Filtered wine. Very nice, balanced with minerality and character. He still has 1000 bottles of this.
__ Irsai Olivér 2016, this is a strange variety, Irsai Olivér is an hybrid, Levente doesn't like it much but as he has some (a 40-year-old parcel bought in 2014), he still makes wine from it. This variety is usually used to make basic wine in Hungary, it is easy to cultivate and early ripening, making fruity wines with unusual aromas for a wine. This is usually the first wine to reach the market every season, it's a cheap table wine in Hungary and people take it as is, just for fun. Still, Levente vinifies it as seriously as his other varieties, here he had one day skin contact, no additives either, just a bit of batonnage on the juice. The smell is really different, like raisin, funny indeed. Along Levente's cuvées, this is the cheapest, but still the mopst expensive Irsai Olivér compared with what you find in the shops, 4000 Forints (12 €) compared to 1200 for the usual conventional version.
Through Kata, I learn the standard procedure for the vinification : The grapes are picked by hand in boxes which he moves here with his pickup truck, the grapes are destemmed at the door and left macerate in one of these plastic tanks (pic on right) for 2 days. then he presses the grapes with the basket presses, they're entirely manual, no motor, so the pressure is not that too high. Then he has the lees settled for two days,
after which he pours the juice into barrels where it'll stay for one full year. Levente loves to do all by himself in the vineyard but he now relies on elderly
ladies of the village for some of the vineyard tasks, and the odd thing is that in some instances they know a lot about the trade, having work on the vines since their childhood even before the communist era (you can see on this video several of them working in the vineyard in winter).
__ Kékfrankos 2014, the first red we have here, a Blaufränkisch. Levente made 300 bottles of this, all gone by now, Kata says that's the best Kékfrankos she ever had and she still has a few botlles of the 2013, she plans to open one of them for a Wine Walk soon. Wild boars and other animals ate much of the fruit that year, and understandly, only his fruit, not the ones of his conventional neighbors... He bought the parcel in 2004, the vines are 45 years old. The wine stayed 3 years in the barrel and one year in bottle before reaching the market. Unfiltered wine. Character, nice tannic touch on the sides of the mouth. Kata says that a few years past the trend was to grow Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot but these varieties are not adapted here and now people realize that and come back to varieties like Kékfrankos. In Eger for example there has been a new set of rules for its iconic Egri Bikavér blend (means Bull's Blood of Eger), it must have at least 60 % of Kékfrankos. As for why this wine was named Bull's Blood, it dates back from the invasion of Suleiman the Magnificent around 1552 : To motivate and support the small group of soldiers during the Siege of Eger castle they were served delicious food and a lot of red wine. Among the Turkish soldiers it was rumored that bull's blood was mixed into the red wine, as otherwise the strength and firm resistance of the town and castle of Eger could not be explained. Finally the enemy gave up... [Wikipedia]
__ Kékfrankos 2012 (from another bottle), same variety. Generous nose, appealing feel. 90-day skin contact here. Been in barrel for 3 years. 2012 was a very nice vintages, the grapes were beautiful. Levente says that at the time he just wanted to play cards with friends and didn't really look after the wine which nonetheless turned beautiful just by itself... After the 3-month skin maceration it was actually tasting
quite bad in the barrel, almost all along the 3-year élevage with a dry mouth and no fruit, just astringency.
Only after 3 years it eased, became enjoyable and 6 months later he decided to bottle it. Then it tasted bad again for a while after bottling before at last reaching the perfect stage for drinking. He sold this cuvée to individual buyers, 3000 Forints apiece only at the time (9 €), great deal ! Lovely wine, all is now so well integrated, thank you Levente for opening this bottle ! Now if he still had some he could sell it for big money. Since then he does shorter skin contact, like one month.
__ Kékfrankos 2016, from a barrel, still has another year to stay in barrel, malolactic on its way. Still very lively for a 2016, fruity, vivid, lovely nose, lovely tannins, you just feel they're in their infancy, would be wise to buy this when it reaches the market (in 2020 I suppose). Kata says that this is for her the real Kékfrankos of Hungary, meaning I guess much better than the generic Kékfrankos found in the wine aisles of the supermarket here. There's indeed a great fruit and energy here.
I ask Levente about the weather this year, he says there was no spring, the winter turned into summer suddenly with hot temperatures, The blooming came and everything was moving very fast, everybody was happy about it but he thought this was going to fast. As a result the picking took place much earlier than normal. I ask about the drought (France has gone through a long drought this year) but he says they had rain here but with the wind it was no problem.
We then made the short drive to the vineyards right above the village of Abasár. Some of these vines were in such a poor shape when he bought the parcels that Levente cut them pretty low to start anew. Levente says it's
easy to see where his parcels stand, that's the
ones with yellowish leaves, the other, conventional parcels around are much greener, possibly because of fertilizers and also because they spray more stuff against disease (see picture on right). Kata explains to me that the Hungarian language which is resourceful has a term for this kind of dubious green, they say méregzöld which means poison green (méreg means poison and zöld green)... That's something I saw many times along my vineyard visits, and I guess conventional growers are happy to see their vineyard foliage look greener in autumn but that's not as good as it looks, it means that instead going to go rest gradually as it is natural at this time of the year, the vines are so much artificially energized by the chemicals to got soaked with, that they still run aimlessly like the Energizer Bunny...
Nice picture work and article by 24.hu on winemakers and vineyard workers of the area, including Levente
Great video report on the area, shows at one point Levente in his cellar and later in his school among schoolchildren.
Later that day I stopped in the town of Gyöngyös where there happened to be a wine festival (this was the weekend) and I bought there fermenting juice made from Othello, a hybrid variety that is also supposed to have been uprooted by 2000 in Hungary but still survives in a few micro vineyards ownd by villagers. The juice which the sellers put into various soda bottles including Coca Cola was a typical Bernache new wine, sweet like grape juice and already with some surfacing alcohol, easy velvety drink. I also stumbled there on a performance by Marika Oszvald who is a well-known Operetta singer in Hungary (she is the older of the two singers on the linked video), these songs remind us that Austria and Hungary have a common cultural history, you'd almost feel in Vienna here...
Thank you for this article. I have to visit this area too!!
Posted by: Gottfried Lamprecht | January 02, 2019 at 07:19 PM