Last week our sister site realdeal.hu had an interesting story about Tokaj Kereskedőház Zrt., the state-owned trading firm that has dominated the market for Tokaji wines since communist times. On the surface the piece is very positive, being an announcement of a 10-year deal the company signed with American mega-retailer Costco under which the latter will buy a quarter-million bottles of wine a year. But if you take a slightly closer look, it's not very positive at all. Consider the following:

The first orders will be for the 2001 vintage of Tokaj 3-puttony aszu, in gift boxes… Tokaj Kereskedohaz has 2m bottles of the 3-puttony aszu from 2001 in its cellars. It will deliver another vintage to Costco when its stocks dry up.

So let's get this straight. The Kereskedőház has so much surplus wine that a big deal with one of the biggest American retailers is only big enough to get rid of one type of wine from just one vintage, over the course of eight years? Mark Twain was right: denial ain't just a river in Egypt; it's a giant lake of wine under Eastern Hungary!

Seriously, this is just crazy. It's an open secret that few if any winemakers in region are profitable, and here we have a state-owned firm continuing to flood the global market with surplus product, much of it of the sort that is hardly going to burnish the region's reputation.

Of course, any solution to the long-simmering "Kereskedőház question" will involve getting rid of all these stocks. But the real objective has to be finding a buyer for the company rather than its products, even if it means throwing the whole thing, Costco-style, in the 90% off discount bin. Good grief.