A History of Central Eastern Europe

Tokaj-Hegyalja
Tokaji – Tokay – Tokaj wine (pronounced toh‐KAY) is a sweet
wine first produced around 1570. It is made using aszú grapes –
which is not a rare variety but grape with fungus! Aszú does not
mean fungus either; it means “dried” and is used as a way to
hide the whole infected‐with‐fungus thing. If they were dried,
wouldn’t they be raisins? There are strict regulations governing
the making of this wine –types of grapes, where grown, the ratio
of dry‐to‐wet grapes, how long it must be aged…and so on.
When these were drawn up in the 18 th century, the whole
growing area for this specific wine, the Tokaji Hegyalja, was
within the Kingdom of Hungary. While almost all of the area
defined in the 1700s remains within Hungary, the area itself
grew over the years and with the changes over the last century,
the area spreads from Hungary, across Slovakia and into the
Ukraine. Hungary has held a tight grip on the product and after
decades of disputes, an agreement was recently reached with
Slovakia which will help insure quality. Considering that this
agreement took over 50 years to reach this agreement, it is
anyone’s guess when the same will happen with the Ukraine.
Six varieties of grapes are allowed to be “dried” – most common
are Furmint (60%) and Hárslevelű (Lipovina in Slovak, 30%) which
adds a spicy quality. The 4 other varieties are Yellow Muscat,
Zeta, Kabar and Kövérszőlő. The services of an ampelographer
(botanist concerned with the identification and classification of
grapevines) are often required to insure conformity.
The still‐on‐the‐vine grapes are “dried” by botrytis cinerea, a
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