(Manfred Klimek / animated pic: runwayml)
On Sunday, Hungary will elect a new parliament. For the first time in years, pollsters and political scientists believe the opposition could oust Viktor Orbán’s Fidez government. Before I take a look tomorrow at the political influence exerted by Fidez in the wine industry – which I also witnessed myself – today we are going back to 2023, when I visited two female winemakers in Tokaj. This text also appeared in another form in WELT am SONNTAG, which commissioned the on-site report.
There is an old story. It held for several centuries and read, until 1945: The world’s best wines are made in France, Germany and Hungary. But then came the twentieth century and its murderous ideologies. Of the three wine-producing countries in that story, only France remained after the end of the Second World War. And new wine nations – Italy, Spain, the New World – were added.
After the decline of the ideological regimes, nothing was as it had been. The places at the world’s wine buffet were reassigned, at the latest after 1990. And that remains the case. So the winemakers and wine merchants in Hungary’s best-known wine region, Tokaj, also had to reinvent themselves. Over the past ten years, this reinvention – in a country where machismo is part of everyday life, especially in rural regions – has increasingly been placed in the hands of female winemakers and wine managers who, very quietly and unobtrusively, are repositioning Tokaj’s wines: more elegant, more precise, quieter, more European and, above all, more approachable; a development that would do some western wine regions good too.
Judith Bott knows a thing or two about cows. The 47-year-old agricultural scientist wanted to breed cattle; she envisaged a cattle farm, happy ruminants on natural pastures in eastern Slovakia, where Judith and her husband Jozef come from – from the small, forgotten part of the cross-border growing region of the same name.
But then came winegrowing, this “overarching interest”, as Bott puts it, probably to avoid the overused word passion. Judith Bott’s overarching interest is focused above all, and almost exclusively, on the Tokaj region and the Furmint and Lindenblättriger grape varieties, and on what these indigenous varieties can tell the wine world when made as dry wines. Of course Bott can also make sweet wines; everyone here can make sweet wines. But the queen of disciplines in Tokaj for the past ten years or so has been dry Furmint and Lindenblättriger – today there are more dry Tokaj wines than the fruit-sweet wines celebrated for centuries. Can one say that Tokaj has reinvented itself? “One can say that,” says Bott, who now also holds Hungarian citizenship, “because without the dry wines, Tokaj would probably have little significance today.”
Judith Bott and her husband Jozef have lived for six years at their winery, their Bott-Pince in Bodrogkeresztúr – previously, financial hardship had forced them to keep their home and workplace separate. The house was once a cultural meeting place, with a former ceramics factory attached; a large, partly unused site that the Botts were able to acquire cheaply. Anyone who wants to know how to establish a winery with little money that is also known internationally can learn from the Botts. Once literally poor drinkers, over the past twenty years they have built a stable business which, even today, sources most of its grapes from leased vineyards – little property, plenty of reputation. Has winegrowing in Tokaj become more female? “I don’t know whether one can generally put it that way,” Bott replies, “but I can name around fifteen female winemakers in the region. For Hungary, that is a very high number.” Not only for Hungary.
Female winemakers? There were hardly any in winegrowing forty years ago. And when there were, it was because there was no male heir who had been designated by the parents – that is, by the father – to carry on the winery. Winemakers’ view of wine was an entirely male one, because working in the garden and cellar is hard, physical labour that takes its toll on the bones over the years. Winemakers were men who often could no longer stand upright by the age of sixty – if they even reached sixty.
But as winegrowing, the world’s only cultural agriculture, began to generate more and more money, even small wineries could delegate arduous work. And when this new winegrowing – the kind that made money – additionally sought intellectual potential, meaning reflection on sites, microclimates, cellar techniques and the businesses’ sales policies, female winemakers’ daughters around the world also saw themselves called upon to participate in the business or take sole charge. This led to different, much, much better and more digestible wines. And it also meant that many winemakers realised they were making wine for women too; now above all for women who order, buy and drink their wines themselves.
Another story of going out into the world and returning to Hungary is also told by the winemaker Vivien Ujvary, but there is a great deal that is singular about this biography, one that is not otherwise readily or similarly encountered in the wine world, because 39-year-old Ujvary is responsible not only for the wines of Barta-Pince in Mád, but also for the wines of her old family winery on Lake Balaton. This family winery has only 0.65 hectares of Welschriesling and Pinot Blanc, which is practically nothing, since these few rows of vines can produce grapes for only around 2,000 bottles a year. But because Ujvary’s Balaton creations are served in Hungary’s top-star restaurants Winekitchen and Textura and are regarded as an insider tip in Hungarian wine shops, she is considered an exceptional winemaker in the country. That, and her international career, which began as a winemaking apprentice in California and New Zealand, prompted the owners of Barta-Pince to entrust their business to a female winemaker who not only immediately displays a winning personality, but can also speak with exceptional insight about the region, the soils and the climate. And in the Barta wines she consistently puts into practice a winemaking culture that can quite reasonably be labelled female and which is now established as part of modern winegrowing. In other words, elegant, complex craftsmanship that uses the wood of the barrels with absolute subtlety but effect, leaving the roaring wines of yesterday far behind. Is there such a thing as a female revolution in Tokaj? “What I can say,” Ujvary replies, “is that here in Tokaj female winemakers probably face less scepticism than elsewhere in Hungary. And, at least in my case, no one has put obstacles in my way of doing what I believe is right.”