As we reported last week, the ongoing mania for wine tasting events in Hungary has reached critical proportions, leading at least us to suffer from terminal tasting fatigue. But since nothing exceeds like excess, we introduce the Second Miskolc Fröccs Festival, which runs from 14:00 to 2:00 this Saturday/Sunday out in the north-eastern capital.
The event is being organized by the BorNívó wine store and the Ottó Herman Museum, and is held in conjunction with this year’s “Night of the Museums,” the annual extravaganza in which Hungarian museums keep their doors open until the wee hours. If you don’t know the fröccs (“FRU-CH”), it’s a wine-and-soda-water drink that in summer becomes one of our favorite “hungaricums.”
According to the festival’s website, the history of the fröccs (left) in Hungary can be traced to the 1826 discovery of soda water by scientist/inventor Ányos Jedlik. (Yes, Hungarians invented soda water, too.) The drink became fashionable around the turn of the 19th Century when restaurants, bars and cafés started selling it. The words fröccs was apparently coined by poet Mihály Vörösmarty, and it, along with fröccsözni (to drink a fröccs, or many) became infused in the works of such popular Hungarian authors as Gyula Krúdy, Ferenc Molnár, Sándor Bródy, Sándor Hunyady, Sándor Márai and Béla Hamvas, as well as livers throughout the Carpathian basin.
Besides numerous fröccs-themed exhibitions, the festival will feature handicraft presentations, music, dance and kenyérlángos, as well as children’s programs, meaning that maybe the next generation can be properly prepared for all these endless wine tastings.
