Speaking of Bikavér-bashing, an interesting brouhaha recently broke out over a high-end version of Eger's most famous red made by Gróf Buttler. Setting it off was this post on Index.hu's Művelt Alkoholista blog, in which the writer wondered whether he should "laugh or cry" over the fact that some expensive wines he had recently bought had been put on steep discount by the Bortársaság, a big local retailer of high-end bor. Prominent among the marked-down wines was Buttler's 2005 Bikavér, which big retailer Bortársaság had chopped from almost Ft 8,000 a bottle down to just over Ft 4,000.

In the long and spirited comment thread attached to the post, various readers sought to explain the reason for the dramatic re-pricing. Among the theories was that the wine had gone off, or that the Bortársaság had determined that no one would pay Ft 8,000 for anything from Buttler, under any circumstances. (The Bortársaság had also apparently just become Buttler's primary sales channel, after he switched from another distributor; there are also rumors that a to-the-trade tasting saw an entire case of a Buttler white quietly withdrawn due to some major fault.)

Having enjoyed a Buttler or two in the past - and always enjoying a big discount - I grabbed a bottle on the way to a blind tasting I was attending, to see how it would show. The answer, in short, is very well indeed.

Out of eight premium reds tasted that night, most of the tasters thought it was in the top three, and beat out a number of (albeit older) wines with no such whiff of controversy surrounding them. (The most pedigreed of the Hungarians was a 2000 Gere Kopár, while the foreign wines were "led" by a bottle of '98 Château Pavie-Macquin, which at one point had nabbed 95 points from Robert Parker.)

As for the lesson of this story, it's not to believe the worst everything you read about a particular wine. Except for the worst thing about this one, namely that when I went to go pick up my 50% off case last week, there were only a few bottles left.