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Weekly Wine & Spirits Columnist - Michael Vaughan

  Liquidity, Sweet Liquidity

(Publishing Date: Saturday April 22, 2000  - Toronto Section)

No this isn’t an investor’s incantation on this week’s turmoil in the stock market. It’s Easter and I fondly remember playing hide-and-seek for all those wonderfully decorated candied eggs that my Viennese grandmother used to make. It seems that the sweet-of-tooth have emerged en masse from their collective winter closets to devour the legion of chocolate bunnies that are ready to make the ultimate sacrifice. Given this seasonal preoccupation sweetness, today’s revelations are geared to shed a little light into realm of one of the LCBO’s best liquid assets.

This month’s Vintages release holds one sadly ignored gem. It’s a sweetie that would have brought smiles from fussy Austrian-Hungarian royalty – the Royal Tokaji 1995 Tokaji Aszú 4 Puttonyos ‘Red Label’ $24.95 for 500ml. This ambering orange coloured jewel has a pungent, nutty, sweet baked apple nose with a hint of balsamic. The mouthfilling, sweet but vibrant, apricot, baked pear and caramel flavours dance on the palate.

Discover of this Hungarian ‘wine of kings and king of wines’ predates the German find of “noble rot” at Schloss Johannisberg by more than 100 years. Credit goes to one Maté Szepsi an abbot who was in charge of wine making at large northeastern Carpathian mountain estate and in 1650 ordered the harvest delayed because of a possible invasion by the Turks. As a result, only the grapes were attacked, not by the Turks but by the benevolent botrytis cinerea fungus, which concentrates the sweetness and transforms the wine’s basic flavours. Finally in a rush to get the harvest in, the estate’s priest used these now-shriveled, raisiny, fungus-covered grapes to make the wine. It was during the Easter festivities in the following year, that the virtues of this sweet elixir were discovered.

Discovering how Tokaji is produced isn’t easy. It is made predominantly from furmint grapes usually blended with some indigenous hárslevelú and perhaps some muscat blanc à petit grains. It has nothing to do with the Italian tocai or the French tokay d’Alsace which is actually pinot gris or pinot grigio. Simply put, what happens is that a base wine is made in 136 litre wooden casks to which a special paste of the very sweet, individually-picked, botrytis-affected Aszú berries are added. This paste is measured in puttonyos weighing between 20-25 kilos. The more puttonyos added per cask, the sweeter, richer and more expensive the wine. They start at 3 and go up to 7 puttonyos, the latter containing 18-23% residual sugar! All these wines require three years of cask aging.

It seems that the numerous political disruptions combined with lack of controls during the last century resulted in a dramatic variability of quality. Moreover, questionable practices such as pasteurization and fortification, which were eventually outlawed in 1997, damaged the international regard for these wines.  It was, in part, this adulteration which spurred world famous wine writer Hugh Johnson to spearhead a group of private investors to establish the Royal Tokaji Company in 1989 to reintroduce quality Tokaji.

Being high is sugar and acidity means that these amazingly rich wines are in some instances capable of evolving for many years even decades. One of greatest wines I have ever tasted was a 1900 Esszencia at a Heublein auction in Chicago more than two decades ago. Made exclusively from the free run juice of aszú berries, Esszenia contains from 50 to 80% residual sugar meaning that its fermentation may take years before it is complete and the wine can be bottled. If you interested in tasting it, check out the LCBO’s Classics Catalogue where a 1993 Chateau Pajzos Esszencia (the sole Hungarian carryover from the last Fall’s Classics Catalogue) can be had for a mere $575 for 500 ml. As of mid-week, there were four bottles at both the Queens Quay and Bayview Village stores. I suggest you call first to make sure they are still available.

While both 6 puttonyos Tokaji from the Classics are sold out, a few bottles of last November’s 1995 Tokaji Aszú 5 Puttonyos ‘Blue Label’ ($16.55 for 250 ml) still remain at scattered locations (check the LCBO infoline). It’s good, although I personally prefer the surprisingly richer, currently released 4 puttonyos (above) which is still widely available. Those frustrated by the shortage might try calling the Royal Tokaji Wine Company’s Ontario agent Harry Drung at HHD Imports at (519) 746-8368 to find out what might be ordered privately. 

While there isn’t quite anything quite like Tokaji Aszú, you may want to scoop up the remaining bottles of a terrific Austrian sweetie which would have made my grandmother jump for joy. Move over icewine! Sweet, honeyed and loaded with creamy, apricot-peach-marmalade flavours, the A. Fisher 1995 Bouvier Trockenbeerenauslese from the Neusiedlersee region represents unbeatable value at a mere $17.75 for 250 ml. First released last November, it’s a crime that any still remains at the LCBO. As only a grandmother can say, “try it, you’ll like it.”