Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another edition of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I'm your host, Kristin Ellis, here with Pat Brophy. Hey, how you doing? I'm good, and Greg Versch. Hey. And we've got a special guest with us today. We've got Laszlo Meszaroz. Welcome, sir. Hello, it's nice to be here. How would I do with pronouncing your name? Pretty good. Pretty good. It's a solid B. A solid B. Understandable. Will you say it? Laszlo Meszaroz. Thank you so much for coming today. Where are you coming from? From Tokaji, from Hungary. Awesome. We're super excited to have a winemaker from Tokaji. You're from Hungary. Are you from the Tokaji region originally? I live in Tokaji since 1995. But I was born in the other part of Hungary, in the western part of Hungary. What are some differences between the east and west part of the country that you notice? It's a small country, so maybe the differences are less evident than in a huge country like the US. But historically, we go back to the Antique Times. The western part was part of the Roman Empire, so it was a Roman province. The Viti culture was known there from the Roman times, and eastern Hungary was the country of the Huns. The Viti culture started much later in the Middle Ages. I would say the western part has a little more Austrian influence. It's more Catholic, and the eastern part is maybe more Asian influence. It's a little bit wider, but it's just us for us, but for the foreigners, I think the difference is not a big difference. Okay, so just for the insiders. For the insiders, yes. Yeah, right on, cool. And you have vineyards spread out throughout the country. Hungary is a wine country. We have 22 wine regions. We make white wines, red wines, very good red wines, but the only wine region that is known really here outside of Hungary is Tokaji. And built primarily on sweet wine production. Sweet wine production is the most famous from Tokaji, but in terms of wines produced, 70 percent of the wines from Tokaji are dry or semi-dry, semi-sweet. Are they primarily white? Only white from Tokaji. So now I'm talking about just Tokaji. There are only white grapes in Tokaji. The Tokajászl, which is the most well-known, the famous unique wine of Tokaji, represents less than 10 percent of the whole volume. Wow. What's your favorite wine when you're not drinking Hungarian? I like everything. I like to try everything. And I had the chance to work in a wine group called Axtamilazim, who is the owner of Disznoko. So Axtamilazim has Bordeaux wines, Château Pichon Baron, Petit Village, Pomerol, Sudiro, Sauternes. They have wines from Portugal, Quinternauva. A bunch of slouts as well. Yeah, wow. That's a gozer name someone's never heard of. And now also California, so it's a new thing. I'm happy to taste all these wines, and also we are interested to taste everything and enjoy everything. That's a perfect answer. You have passed my test. It's impossible to have one favorite, right? No, it's impossible. You gotta like them all. But if I have to choose, I always say two, champagne and anything nebbiolo. I'm good to go. Do you like champagne? Yeah, because you're a sane human being, right? So in the Tokaji region, you have a rich history and you've got some really good markers in history in wine. You're one of the first wine regions in the world. When did the wine region become settled? I mean, Tokaji is the oldest delimited wine region. It was made, the delimitation was made by a royal decree in 1737 by Charles III as king of Hungary. He was also the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire at that time. So it was Austria, Germany, and Hungary, and today's Czech Republic. It was a delimitation when they settled the name Tokaji officially to the wine region. They limited 27 villages that can use the Tokaji name, and they set off some basic rules for the viticulture and for the unification. What were those rules? Do you know? How to select the asu berries and things like this. Okay. So let's get into the style a little bit of Tokaji. So you said 70% of production in the region is actually dry, but the sweets are what are the most known around the world. So let's start with what you produce the most of, which is a dry or semi-dry white wines. How is that for you as a winemaker to produce those wines against the sweet wines? What are some of the struggles and the triumphs of the dry category for you? So dry wines were always produced in the region, but the traditional Tokaji dry wine produced until the 90s was a dry wine with quite a lot of oxidized style with biological aging, a little bit like a Vengeon in the Jura. So it was picked at high sugar level, aged in the cellars without topping the wines and having some oxidation, some developing some floor on the top. This was a traditional style. Then from the 90s and the 2000s, there were more and more dry wines made in a more fruity way. First, the idea was to express the freshness and to make a very enjoyable fresh wine. Then there was more and more ambition to express terroirs, the soil character through the dry wines. As you know, in Tokaji, we only have white grapes, and the most important variety is called furmint. So I have a bottle of furmint here on the table. Let's pass that around, Greg. Let's taste that. When you taste it, the furmint is not a very aromatic variety. It's not like Riesling or Sauvignon Blanc, but it has a very good freshness. It has a nice fruity flavor. It tastes almost like peach, pear, and it has a very fresh acidity, and a very pleasant salty mineral finish. This is very typical for furmint. There is a sort of transparency in the wine. I think because of this very transparent quality, you can really feel the details of the soy, the details of the terroirs. Would you say that in the winemaking style in the region, you've gotten more clean and modern and expressive? Exactly. The first step was make modern and clean wines. Then later, there was really this target, this go to make, to show the vineyard characters, to show the soy characters. There's probably, based on what I read in the magazines these days, a bunch of guys in Turtlenecks who are starting to look for the wines like you used to make, the weird oxidative funky ones. They'll probably come back in style in like five years. Yeah. But at the same time, yes. So this type of wine, which is now called the Syros Samorodni, this is the oxidized style, there is a comeback for this as well. So there are some producers specializing on this wine. We also produce a little bit, but it's not a commercial volume, so we only sell it locally. But it's a very complex wine agent. Would those be more reminiscent of things we'd see out of Jura? They'd be dry? Yes. So this one, this is a very fresh dry formant. It's in fact formant on the label, but it's 90 percent formant and 10 percent hash de velu. So the formant, it's quite easy to pronounce. It's really the most important variety of Tokaji. Hash de velu, the second variety, represents about 30 percent in the wine region, and it's a more aromatic variety. The formant is more neutral. Hash de velu has a little bit floral, a little bit like alder flower character, and it gives a little bit of aromatic lift to the wine. This is an un-oaked formant. It was harvested late September. The grapes were very ripe, but the wines still have a very fresh acidity, but with a certain weight on the palate. It's light but with a weight on the palate at the same time. I got to tell you, it smells like it's going to be really ripe and full and fruity, but then on the palate, it's really expressive and linear and acidity driven, focused. It's very nice. I think it's a perfect food wine as well. This wine you can enjoy with a lot of things, with seafood, with white meats, with a lot of things. This is dry formate which comes from the Disznoko vineyard. Disznoko vineyard is quite big vineyard. It's 100 hectares in one plot. But at the same time, we also make smaller lots from specific smaller parcels that we vinify separately and then we can blend it or we can just bottle it as they are. In Tokaji, for the dry wines, there is this trend to make vineyard-specific dry formates, mostly, some hash-tavari as well. We also have a very old history of vineyard classification. It's a volcanic wine region with a lot of former valkans and geysers and there are more than 500 growths, vineyards in Tokaji. The idea is to show their characteristics through the dry wines. The 500 different vineyard designations. designations in the Tokaji region. Are they grouped in any way? By villages. Okay. The 500 are broken into the 27. Could you theoretically make a dry ferment that's from a single vineyard or a single village and put that on the label? Yes. Okay. And then from the entire region as well. You can declassify. Got it. Okay. What's the Hungarian equivalent to AOC? What's the term you use? It's quite complicated. It's OEM. It's Oltalom alatt álló eredetvédett megjelölés. But it's OEM. What? Yeah, that is kind of complicated. Yeah. I've read and written the OEM, but I've never actually heard anybody say it. I hate to ask, but can you say it one more time? Oltalom alatt álló eredetvédett megjelölés. Wow. How does that translate? It's protected designation of origin. There you go. It's the same. Yeah. It has to be, I think. You got a polysyllabic language there. Yeah. Hungarian is not a European language. It's a language originated from Asia. Yeah. They call it cases or something, right? No. It's Uralian. Yeah. The language group is called Finno-Ugrian. There are in Europe, there are three languages, the Finnish, the Estonian, but they are quite close to each other. They are almost the same. Hungarian, which is the Uralian part of this branch. You have some vineyards that are known to create wines with ageability. How long can these things go in the top examples? It's difficult to say, because we don't have enough experience with the formant and with these dry wines. Sometimes they age quite well, sometimes they don't age well. So for this particular dry formant, which is un-oaked, vinified in tanks, I would say that best to drink within three years. It's not a wine to be aged. Some other wines, it's barrel fermentation, barrel aging, et cetera, they have much more ageability. I would say that most of these dry Tokaji wines are better to drink within ten years. And then you can age the Tokaji Asu, the Tokaji sweet wines for decades. Yes, they can go down for a century or more. Can I ask, what's the oldest bottle of Tokaji that you've tasted? It was 1867. Wow, 1867. You know, when you drink wines that old and you go back and you think who was alive at that time, what was going on in history around the world, it's pretty crazy. Let's turn to the sweet wines, what Tokaji is famous for. And I'm looking at these bottles, and I'm very, very excited. However, I do kind of not, I don't want to dump out my dry ferment. I mean, I feel like I could smell this all day. It's lovely. So great job there. I just want to say, Roger is going to be bummed that he missed this one. Ha ha. Sorry, Roger. So sweet wines, basically, we have two types of sweet wines in Tokaji. We have the late harvest type. For these wines, the grapes are harvested by clusters, by bunches. Whole clusters? Whole clusters or just part of clusters. Okay. What we have here is a Tokaji Yasu. We have a five and a six puttanesha. I will explain the difference. Thank you. It is made of grapes, four mint hash developed grapes mostly, that are picked by berries. Here we have botrytis on the grapes. Right after the attack of the botrytis, the berries dry out, desiccates completely. They become almost like raisins. And these grapes are selected one by one by different passages. So the only way to extract their sugars, their flavors is to mix them together with wine or with the fermenting must. So we make a maceration, we make a skin contact, and through this maceration, we obtain the sugars and everything from these berries. For the Tokajasu, we need the asu berries, the botrytis-affected dried berries, and a base wine, which is almost a wine that we tasted. Depending on the proportion of the base wine to the potatized berries, we call them three, four, five, or six Puttanyas. The Puttanyas means baskets in English. Historically, traditionally, it was the number of baskets of botatized berries mixed with one barrel of base wine or base must. Which could let somebody know who is buying the wine in the range of how sweet it would be. The more Puttanyas, the sweeter the wine. Exactly. The five Puttanyas is, I would say, the most classic balance because it was made about the same amount, the same volume of base wine as asu berries. Okay. One barrel was five times bigger than one basket. And in terms of residue sugar, five Puttanyas is a wine between 120 and 150 grams of residue sugar around. Okay. This wine is incredible. I know. This wine is insane. And it's absurd the amount of work you guys go through to make this. I can't put, first of all, single grapes that are being hand picked, the little shriveled grapes. How long does harvest for us, Su? How long does it last? How many weeks? It can be three months. Some vintages like, for example, 2011, we started the first picking in the early varieties late August, and we finished the harvest late November. But usually, the majority of these botatized affected grapes are selected from end of September until the beginning of November. It's a 2008, five-putanyosh, and I think it's a 10-year-old wine. For me, it's a perfect age for a five-putanyosh, because it's still very fresh, still very youthful, but has already a complexity coming for its aging. We'll throw some tasting notes in here. It is honeyed, it's so rich and broad, but it also has this floral perfume, the actual woman's perfume floating across the top of it too. I get a lot of orange marmalade, a little bit of rye bread, rye toast. Buckwheat honey. Oh yeah? That's a reach. I know, but some kind of honey. Yeah, honey, honey, snuggle, not a stone fruit. Yeah, it's great. But I like it because it's not too sweet. It's not cloying, the acid is balanced, and it's not so, so weighty. It's still for 120 to 150 grams per liter of sugar. I think it's quite light on its feet. Still very refreshing. So it has around 140 grams of sugar and 12% of alcohol. What is it? 12. Wow, okay. Is that average, give or take, for five petunios to be around 12? Yes. For Disznoko, it's usually 12.5. In Disznoko, we try to make a little bit higher alcohol and less sugar to be a less sweet balance. This is the house style. What do you pair this with in Hungary? This particular vintage is a very good savory wine as well. So you can have it with foie gras, with pâtés, with also with spicy food, with thai, or even like a pork belly caramelized with minty flavoring, some cheese, of course, with fruits, desserts. I think it's a very versatile wine. Most people, when they think of sweet wine, they would think of desserts. A five-potaniash is a perfect savory wine. I totally want to go downstairs and get that Manchego that I didn't buy earlier. That would be so good. I was going to say blue cheese. Blue cheese with honey is classic. Right. Your vineyard workers, ever as a joke, do they trip each other? It's single, and then you drop the basket and you're like, damn it. It's really funny. They pick just 10 kilos of grapes per day, which is... Harvest sounds great over there. Your labor costs are way out of whack. In Napa, we got buckets on our backs, and we play classical music. It just sounds like something that's just a lot chiller but still hard work. Aged 18 months minimum in oak asu, right? This is the specification. And what do you guys do? This one was aged maybe a little bit more, two years. Hungarian oak? Usually Hungarian oak. It was majority Hungarian oak. We had some used French oak as well, but when we have new oak, it's always Hungarian oak. And the oak for Tokaji comes from the surrounding mountains. So, as of 2013, there were some label changes for your Tokaji. So the Asu, was it just five putunios and six putunios is done away with? And it's just called Asu now? Yes, this modification was made for the purpose to simplify the range and give a better understanding for Tokaji. I don't know if it happened, if it was the case or not. It's weird because I'm wondering, okay, so if those designations on the label are to be done away with, but how does one know if I have a five putunios or six putunios? So, I feel like you don't really like it, yeah. The use of putunios number became a normal mandatory anymore, so you can just label the wine Tokaji Asu without using the putunios number. And every Tokaji Asu has to have at least 120 grams of residue sugar per liter. So, this is important. And you can use the putunios number. If you use six putunios on the label, the wine should have at least 150 grams of residue sugar. So, this is the law. I think most of the producers use the putunios number because this putunios number explains a little bit the traditions, the history, and we explained it to sommeliers, to customers, and people like this story on the label, and it's a good indication on the concentration of the wine. So, we still use this. You can still use it. Yeah. I really like it because I want it to be the name of my band when I quit my job and start a band. It's going to be Kristen and the Five putunios. It's going to be awesome. We're going to play all fake instruments. It's going to be great. Cool. So that's kind of Asu. What's the other bottling that we have here, the 2000? 2006 putunios. 2006 putunios. Therefore, it's a richer wine. You see the color is deeper as well for two reasons, I think. The one reason is that it's an older wine, and also it's a very different vintage. 2008 is a vintage with a lot of botrytis. It's a normal vintage with quite a lot of humidity during the harvest period. 2000 was a hot and dry vintage with a lot of heat waves during summer, very early ripening, lower acidity, and much bigger concentration. More opulent wines. More opulent wines. Yeah. Here, the assoberis were less affected by the botrytis. We had botrytis, but a very fine botrytis, and it was more shriveled grapes. The quality of the grapes were perfect. They were very ripe. We made a longer maceration, a longer skin contact. And you feel that the wine has less acidity, but has a sort of tannin structure, which comes from the skin contact, I think. For the flavors, it's more dried fruit, like dried figs, dried dates, honey, and a little bit also like tea, like a tea leaf character. It's beautiful. Yeah, Greg likes it. I don't even know how to react to something like this. Yeah, I've never tasted anything like this. My experience with wine is more limited, and these are two of the craziest wines I've ever tasted. So can you talk to us a little bit about the Essentia style and how that differs from the Asu? Yes, so we have tasted five and six botanicals. Unfortunately, we don't have the Essentia on the table, but you can imagine it. So the Essentia is a nectar, it's even not a wine. So the Essentia is just the free-run juice of these asu berries before we mix them with the wines for the skin contact. So during the harvest, the asu berries are poured into containers, into vats, and we store the asu berries in these vats for several weeks until the end of the harvest. And after a few days or a few weeks, there is some free-run juice at the bottom of the container. And if we open a small tap, there is the Essentia running down from the tap. The Essentia is something that has between 600 to 900 grams of sugar per liter. Sometimes it's almost solid. It's almost like honey. And it's a very few percentage, very few volume compared to the weight of the asu berries. Usually from 100 kilograms of asu berries, we will have like two, three liters of Essentia. But the goal is not to have the Essentia. The goal is to be able to store the asu berries in a safe way. So this is why we take over the Essentia. And then the majority of the Essentias are added back into the asu wines during the fermentation. So the Essentia, because of its very high sugar content, cannot ferment. So there is no real fermentation in the Essentia. After three, four years spent in a demijohn, in a glass container, it will have like one, two, three percent of alcohol and with 600 grams of residue sugar. Oh my God. That just must hurt your teeth. So this is really, really very intense. But there is a certain balance. If you taste an Essentia, it has acidity and it's a little bit like the memory of the Vintage. When we taste the Essentia, we find the same flavor, the same characteristic in the Essentia that we could taste in the Aso berries. That's really cool. A little like vintage time capsule like that. Yes. I think if an Aso wine, you can match it with different things. You can have several glasses because they are very balanced. The Essentia, it's usually tastes very intense. A tablespoon, right? A dismal spoon? But the good thing is that if a bottle of Essentia is opened, it will be good for a year. It doesn't change. So much sugar. So much sugar. It has already a sort of evolution, oxidation in these damage zones. That's going to be changed in the bottle. That's good to know. And do you, how much of that do you produce in a given decade? We could produce Essentia from every vintage, because when we have Aso berries, we have Essentia, but we don't bottle it from every vintage. And when we bottle a vintage, usually it's less than 1,000 bottles. Still small, but it's a good amount. It's more than I thought. I think we've covered Tokaji as quickly as we have in a good... Do you have any questions for us about working at Binny's Beverage Depot? Do you know how to use a two-wheeler hand truck? No. Well, let me tell you. I was Chicago-bound for you so far. Pat, do you have any other questions today? When can I have more? This is incredible wine, right? No. Really, it's rare that we get to taste Tokaji or get to sit with the winemaker and talk about the region. The wines are showing exceptionally well. Very well done. They're awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. They're gorgeous. For my first post-cast in my life as well, so. You're natural. I'm happy that it's us. Yes. So ladies and gentlemen, that buttons up another episode of Barrel to Bottle, The Binny's Podcast. I am your host, Kristin. I'm Greg. I'm Laszlo. I'm Pat. Keep tasting.