Around Hungary and the world, even some educated winos continue to think of Tokaj as a region lacking in innovation. While there are good reasons for this – especially the whacky appellation rules that result in some otherwise delicious wines being barreled to death – there even more that confirm this prejudice to be as faulty as the worst, dried-out aszú. One is the 2004 dry Furmint from Dobogó, the Tokaj HQ of well-known Hungarian wine ambassadress Izabella Zwack.
Since Zwack is a friend (we first tasted the wine at a dinner at her place) we’ll go easy on the praise. But it’s hard, because this is a very, very interesting and rewarding wine. Fermented half in oak and half in steel, it is both bracingly crisp and round enough for even the biggest butter-Chard freak. (We confirmed this by giving a glass to someone who lives for oak; they loved it.) And for something just north of Ft 2,500 on the shelf, it represents serious value when you consider what you’d have to pay for a halfway decent bottle of Viognier, the apple-scented non-Hungarian (for now) varietal that may be the most directly comparable wine to a good dry Furmint.
About the only thing bad we can say about this wine is that there isn’t that much of it. Roughly 8,000 bottles of the 2004 were made, and it has already gotten several important plugs in big wine publications abroad. The Wine Enthusiast said it “could herald a bright future for Hungarian dry wines,” while it led Decanter to ask whether Furmint could be the “new Grüner Veltliner,” a now very popular (mainly) Austrian varietial that until a few years ago was as anonymous as, well, dry Furmint is now. In any case, this wine is not only worth snapping up, but worth keeping around, so you can pop it out whenever someone tries to tell you that nothing new and interesting is happening in Tokaj.
