We found our way to the Terroir Club, Budapest's newest wine shop, via a friend-of-a-friend relationship and, to be perfectly honest, that's probably the only way would would ever have found it. The small store is located in a giant warehouse in an industrial estate to the north of Óbuda - so it's strictly for the wine connoisseur with the GPS navigation system. That's not to say the friendly, wine-loving staff don't welcome shoppers off the street, but it's most likely Terroir Club customers will come here knowing exactly what they are looking for.

The small shop front houses a variety of Hungarian and Foreign wines mostly unavailable elsewhere in Hungary, including a fine selection of organic varieties, some with interesting stories to tell and others from hard-to-find regions.

We say shop "front" because around the back is a giant refrigerated wine storage area built to store hundreds of thousands of bottles, much like Wunderlich's bortrezor. According to our contact, Mark Csepreghy (a Hungarian wine buff flown in from Seattle), the space will be used to preserve wine belonging to collectors, as well as stocks owned by restaurants who have bought in bulk but lack the requisite refrigerated space of their own. The club even offers a delivery service for those that don't want to leave the house to pick up their stock. Whether this will catch on in a country where cellars are a dime a dozen is another question. So what about the wine?

The "club" opened in November and is aimed at the discerning drinker eager to experiment with new and interesting flavors. In line with the techniques used to produce the wines in the store, the idea is to build up a following "organically" by picking only more obscure international and Hungarian vintages (some of which are available only in very small volumes), organizing tastings and liaising closely with local producers. Among the wines open for sampling, we enjoyed a great value Raspi 2004 Kékfrankos (Ft 1,920), a mysterious red dressed in white, and an unusual cloudy organic soup from Slovenia - all of which you certainly wouldn't find in your local Tesco. It's certainly worth dropping by - if you're ever in that neck of the woods.