🇭🇺 Hungary · North and east
There are few places in the world where wine and landscape blur into each other as much as in Tokaj. In north-eastern Hungary, where the Bodrog flows into the Tisza and the volcanic hills of Zemplén are covered with terraced vineyards, this small town gives its name to Tokaj-Hegyalja, one of the oldest and most prestigious wine regions on the planet. It was demarcated by royal decree in 1737 — more than a century before Bordeaux — and it has been a Unesco World Heritage cultural landscape since 2002.
Tokaj is, above all, the birthplace of Tokaji Aszú, an amber sweet wine born of a natural miracle: the morning mists from the rivers encourage Botrytis cinerea, 'noble rot', a fungus that dehydrates the grapes and concentrates their sugars until they turn to raisins (the aszú berries). That nectar led Louis XIV to call it 'the wine of kings, the king of wines' and made kings, tsars and popes fight over its barrels. Walking through the centuries-old cellars cut into the rock, coated in a black velvety mould, and tasting a six-puttonyos Aszú is one of the great wine experiences in Europe.
But beyond the wine, Tokaj is a town with charm: fine old houses, five churches of different denominations within five minutes of each other, an imposing restored synagogue, a good museum and Kopasz hill crowned by an aerial, from where you take in the whole Great Plain. This guide explains what aszú and puttonyos are, which wineries to visit, what a tasting costs, how to get there by train and how to plan a trip around the region of the king of wines.
The history of Tokaj is the history of its wine. The place name appears for the first time in 1067 and the town is documented in 1353; in the Middle Ages there was a castle here above the river, destroyed by the Mongols and rebuilt in stone. Winegrowing, brought and improved by settlers — among them monks and, later, Greek and Armenian merchants — flourished for centuries. The great leap came in the seventeenth century, when the making of wine from botrytised grapes (aszú) was systematised, traditionally credited to the pastor and estate manager Máté Szepsi Laczkó around 1630; there are already mentions of selecting those grapes in 1571. In 1700 the vineyards were classified into first, second and third class, and in 1737 a decree by emperor Charles III officially demarcated the Tokaj-Hegyalja region, one of the first closed appellations in the world. The phylloxera plague at the end of the nineteenth century and, above all, communist collectivisation after 1948, which put quantity before quality, almost ruined its reputation. With the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989 came foreign investors (Royal Tokaji, Oremus, Disznókő) who restored the region's shine, crowned by Unesco in 2002. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The northern Highlands and the eastern Great Plain: the fortress of Eger and its heroic siege of 1552, the vineyards of Tokaj and their wine of kings, Debrecen, the "Calvinist Rome" where Kossuth declared independence in 1849, and the endless puszta of Hortobágy.
Read the history of North and east →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Legend has it that when prince Francis II Rákóczi gave him some bottles of amber wine from his vineyards, king Louis XIV of France raised his glass and named it for good: 'Vinum regum, rex vinorum', the wine of kings, the king of wines. That wine was Tokaji Aszú, and it came from a corner of north-eastern Hungary where the river Bodrog flows into the great Tisza, at the foot of the volcanic Zemplén hills. There, on volcanic soils and under a microclimate created by the river mists, stands Tokaj, a small town that gave its name to one of the oldest and most celebrated wine regions in the world.
The place name Tokaj is documented as early as 1067, and the town is mentioned in records from 1353. In the Middle Ages there was a strategic castle here above the river: a first fortress of earth and timber was destroyed during the Mongol invasion of 1241-1242 and later rebuilt in stone. Between 1450 and 1526 the area belonged to the powerful Hunyadi family and became a royal domain under king Matthias Corvinus. Winegrowing, however, is far older than any of those castles: vines had been cultivated on these slopes for centuries, and settlers, monks and merchants refined the craft generation after generation. After the battle of Mohács (1526) and the fragmentation of the Hungarian kingdom, Cistercian monks fleeing the Ottoman advance settled in Tokaj and helped improve winemaking. The stage was set for the birth of a unique nectar.
Tokaj's great secret is a fungus. The humidity of the morning mists rising off the Tisza and the Bodrog in autumn, followed by sunny, windy afternoons, encourages Botrytis cinerea to develop on the ripe grapes: so-called 'noble rot'. Instead of rotting the berry, the fungus dehydrates it and concentrates its sugars, its aromas and its acidity until it turns into a shrivelled raisin. Those botrytised grapes are called aszú in Hungarian, and they are the raw material of Hungary's most famous wine.
The systematic making of Tokaji Aszú took shape in the seventeenth century. Tradition credits its 'invention' to the estate manager and pastor Máté Szepsi Laczkó who, around 1630 — according to the popular story — delayed the harvest for fear of an Ottoman raid and, on picking the already shrivelled grapes, decided to vinify them anyway, obtaining an extraordinary sweet wine that he offered to princess Zsuzsanna Lórántffy. The story is probably more legend than exact fact, but it records a truth: by those decades the practice was already established. In fact, the first written mention of separating out aszú grapes appears in a contract of 1571, and by the middle of the seventeenth century exports to Poland and a law requiring the noble grapes to be harvested separately confirm that the method was common.
The result was — and still is — a wine the colour of old gold, sweet but with an acidity that keeps it alive and able to age for decades, even centuries. Its sweetness was measured in 'puttonyos': the number of hods (baskets of about 25 kilos) of aszú raisins added to a 136-litre gönc barrel of base wine. A six-puttonyos Aszú was, and is, among the most concentrated and golden. Above them all, the extremely rare Eszencia, the juice that runs out under its own weight from the heaped raisins, with a sugar concentration so high that it barely ferments.
Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Tokaj wine conquered the courts of Europe. It was the favourite of kings of Poland, of tsar Peter the Great — who, the story goes, ordered hundreds of barrels a year and kept a detachment of Cossacks to guard the shipments — of empress Catherine the Great, of popes and of aristocrats across the continent. The Transylvanian princes of the Rákóczi family, who owned much of these vineyards, made Aszú an instrument of diplomacy and prestige; hence the famous phrase attributed to Louis XIV.
That prestige made it necessary to protect the wine's origin and authenticity. Already in 1700 the vineyards of Tokaj-Hegyalja were classified into first, second and third class according to quality — 155 years before the famous Bordeaux classification of 1855. And in 1737 came the decisive landmark: a royal decree by emperor Charles III (Charles VI of the Holy Roman Empire) officially demarcated the Tokaj-Hegyalja producing region, establishing it as a closed production district. It is one of the first demarcated appellations of origin in the world, a direct forerunner of modern wine appellations. In 1772 the classification of the plots was refined further still. Tokaj was not just a wine: it was a brand protected by law centuries before the concept existed. For generations, Greek, Armenian and Jewish merchants drove the prosperous wine trade, leaving their mark on the town's mansions and synagogues.
The nineteenth century ended in catastrophe. Phylloxera, a small insect from the Americas that devastated vineyards across Europe, appeared in Tokaj in 1885 and destroyed most of the region's vines. Rebuilding the vineyards — grafting the European vine onto resistant American rootstock — was a slow and hugely expensive task; Tokaj is said to have taken almost a century to recover its pre-plague production levels.
The twentieth century brought new wounds. The two world wars, the dismemberment of Hungary after the Treaty of Trianon (1920) and the Holocaust hit the region and its people hard. The Jewish community of Tokaj, which by the end of the nineteenth century made up close to 40% of the population and was a key part of the wine trade, was practically wiped out: in 1944 the area's Jews were deported to Auschwitz, and the great synagogue of 1890 was left empty and in ruins. But the deepest and most lasting blow to the wine was still to come, and it would come not from a plague or a war but from an economic system.
When Hungary ended up on the other side of the Iron Curtain, from 1948 onwards, the communist state took absolute control of wine production and trade. Private wineries were expropriated, vineyards were collectivised into cooperatives (TSZ) and, in 1950, the great state wine combine of Tokaj-Hegyalja was created (the Tokaj-hegyaljai Állami Gazdaság Borkombinát). The system's watchword was quantity over quality: the aim was to produce large volumes for export to the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc, with little interest in excellence.
The consequences for Tokaj were disastrous. The best plots, on steep slopes where tractors could not go, were abandoned as unprofitable, while flat, accessible, lower-quality land was favoured. More productive but less fine varieties were planted, everything was homogenised under a generic state brand and the Aszú was often made industrially, oxidised and standardised, a long way from the legendary wines of the past. The Tokaj name remained well known, but its reputation among experts collapsed: for decades, the 'king of wines' was barely a mass-produced shadow of itself. All the know-how built up over centuries by the winegrowing families was frozen or scattered. It was, in the words of many wine historians, a lost interval for one of the world's great regions.
The fall of communism in 1989-1990 opened the door to Tokaj's resurrection. With the privatisations of the nineties came investors from France, England, Germany and Spain, drawn by the region's enormous sleeping potential. The first private company was the Royal Tokaji Wine Company, founded in 1990 by the famous British wine writer Hugh Johnson together with Danish investors and local Hungarian producers. It was followed by names that are world references today: Disznókő (backed by the French insurer AXA), Oremus (of Spain's Vega Sicilia group), Grof Degenfeld, Dereszla and dozens of family wineries that recovered vineyards, techniques and quality standards.
The change was radical. Producers went back to working the noblest slopes, cut yields, took care over vinification and gave Aszú back its character as a great sweet wine, on a level with the best on the planet. At the same time, a new generation of dry Furmints flourished — the region's star white variety — which today compete with the great dry wines of Europe. International recognition came in 2002, when Unesco inscribed the 'Tokaj Wine Region Historic Cultural Landscape' on the World Heritage list, in recognition of more than a thousand years of living winegrowing tradition, with its terraced vineyards, its villages, its centuries-old cellars cut into the rock and its wine culture.
Today Tokaj is a small town of a little over 3,600 inhabitants that lives on wine and wine tourism. Its tastings, its museum, its restored synagogue, its Kopasz hill and the cellars of the 27 villages of Tokaj-Hegyalja receive travellers from all over the world who come to taste, in its place of origin, the wine that kings, tsars and popes drank for centuries. The king of wines, after a century of wounds, reigns again.