Tokaji Aszú

Tokaji Aszú has a claim to being the first deliberately produced botrytised sweet wine in the world, documented in Hungary in the seventeenth century — well before Sauternes or the German Prädikat wines. It was the wine of the Habsburg and Russian courts, and Louis XIV's line about the wine of kings and the king of wines has been attached to it ever since.

The production method is unlike anything else. Botrytis-affected berries — aszú berries — are picked individually and collected into a paste. That paste is then added to a base wine or fermenting must made from healthy grapes of the same vineyard, and left to macerate for a day or two before pressing and a long, slow fermentation. The sweetness is measured in puttonyos, historically the number of hods of aszú paste added to a barrel; modern labelling requires a minimum of five.

Furmint supplies most of the fruit and all of the structure. Its ferocious acidity is what makes the style work, holding up wines that can exceed 150 grams of residual sugar per litre. Hárslevelű adds perfume, and Sárga Muskotály a floral lift, so the wine is genuinely a blend rather than a single variety.

The result is amber-gold, with dried apricot, orange marmalade, quince, honey and walnut, and a long saline finish. It ages for a very long time indeed.

Eszencia is the extreme: the free-run juice that seeps from the aszú berries under their own weight, so concentrated it barely ferments, sometimes reaching only two or three degrees of alcohol after years.