Ep 521: The Greats -- Tokaji Aszú

Wine for Normal People

Alcohol, Lifestyle, Arts, Education, Food, Wine, Dining, Grapes

4.6 • 1.5K Ratings

🗓️ 21 May 2024

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

As part of the series on the The Greats (the great wines of the world), I cover the complex world of Hungarian Tokaji. As with all dives into “The Greats,” I spend the first half of the show delving into the history of Tokaj and then discuss winemaking, the grapes, and the complex way in which this wine is made.

Some notes that may be hard to understand (since I obviously know no Hungarian!):

The main grapes in the wine are:

Furmint (Foor-mint) 60-70% of Tokaj plantings
Hárslevelű (Harsh-level-loo) -- 19% of plantings
Sárgamuskotály (Sharga-moose-kah-tie) - 9% of plantings (Muscat Lunel, Muscat Blanc à Petits Grains)

Secondary grapes are: Zéta (Oremus), Kabar and Kövérszőlő (Koo-ver-sue-loo)

And just a few words on the wines:

Tokaji Szamorodni (sam-or-od-nee) can be dry or sweet. It is made from bunches of grapes with a high proportion of botrytized grapes. These are bunches, not individual berries.

Tokaji Aszú is the world-famous sweet wine. Aszu contains exclusively all botrytized grapes, individually hand picked, trampled, and then turned into a paste/dough. The wine is then macerated in must, wine, or partly fermented must, still fermenting must or wine from the same vintage. Aszú ranges from 3 to 6 puttonyos, which indicates sweetness levels

Tokaji Eszencia: Is one of the most exclusive wines there is. Eszencia means nectar. It is the free run juice of botrytized aszú berries. It is so sweet that the alcohol doesn’t usually exceed 5-6%.

I hope you enjoy this overview of the Great that has one of the longest recorded histories of winemaking!

Full show notes and all back episodes are on Patreon. Become a member today!

_______________________________________________________________

Wine Access has an amazing selection — once you get hooked on their wines, they will be your go-to! Make sure you join the Wine Access-Wine For Normal People wine club in time for the next shipment. As a limited time offer, get $25 off your first TWO shipments of our club!

To register for an AWESOME, LIVE WFNP class with Elizabeth or get a class gift certificate for the wine lover in your life go to: http://www.winefornormalpeople.com/classes

Get the back catalog on Patreon!

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Welcome to Wine for Normal People, the Podcasts for People who like Wine for Normal People,
0:10.0	the podcast for people who like wine, but not the snobbery that goes with it.
0:13.2	I'm your host Elizabeth Schneider author of the Wine for Normal People Book and
0:19.3	certified wine dork. This podcast is sponsored by Wine Access go to Wine wine Club, get four shipments of six bottles a year.
0:33.3	If you join right now and have never joined before,
0:35.8	you get $25 off your first two orders.
0:38.3	We are just giving you $50 to give it a try.
0:41.8	And spoiler alert, if you love Serge Dorei, who has been on the
0:45.4	podcast many, many times talking about French wines, that is the shipment that
0:49.7	will be this fall. Join today, Wine Access.com
0:52.5	slash normal. Listen in the middle of the show for more details.
0:55.0	On the backs of two amazing shows, I know so many of you loved
1:00.0	the Year in the Vineyard with Brian Callahan
1:02.0	from Crux in Sonoma and then I'm getting some great feedback from the show with Alex Zahel of Zahel in Vienna.
1:12.1	Such cool guests.
1:13.8	I really feel so lucky.
1:15.2	We've got a bunch more coming up.
1:17.2	This time, we are going to talk about Austria's partner place, of course, the Habsburg's, Hungary, and we are going to
1:27.0	address one of the great wines of the world.
1:30.1	Now this is partly in anticipation of the book that I plan to write. I have
1:36.7	started some of the research and doing podcast that tie in with that research is
1:41.6	really awesome.
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Wine for Normal People, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Wine for Normal People and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.