Tokaji

Tokay (English) or Tokaji (Hungarian) is an adjective meaning 'of Tokaj' — deriving from Tokaj, a small town in northeastern Hungary at the confluence of the Tisza and Bodrog rivers, in a region of volcanic tuff and loess soil that creates conditions uniquely favorable for the production of the world's most famous sweet wine. The Hungarian suffix -i is the standard adjectival ending for 'of a place,' so Tokaji bor means 'wine of Tokaj,' and Tokaji aszú means 'wine of Tokaj made from shriveled grapes.' The geographic name Tokaj is of uncertain origin; proposed etymologies include a Magyar root meaning 'ford' or a Slavic place-name predating the Magyar settlement of the region. The wine region encompasses the volcanic foothills of the Zemplén Mountains, where the warm autumns and morning mists from the rivers create the ideal conditions for Botrytis cinerea — the 'noble rot' fungus that shrivels and concentrates the sugars, acids, and flavors in Furmint and Hárslevelű grapes.

The history of Tokaji aszú — the intensely sweet, botrytis-affected wine that made the region famous — is traced to a specific moment of creation that may be legendary but has been repeated with conviction for three centuries. In 1630 (or 1631, or 1650, depending on the account), the keeper of the Oremus vineyard, a nobleman named Máté Laczkó Máté, delayed the harvest because of a Turkish invasion scare. By the time the harvest could proceed, the grapes had been affected by botrytis and had shriveled to raisins. Rather than discarding them, the workers gathered the shriveled aszú grapes (aszú means 'dried, shriveled' in Hungarian) and pressed them separately, adding the concentrated juice to a base wine already in barrel. The resulting wine was extraordinary in sweetness, complexity, and longevity — and a method, the puttonyos system, was developed to standardize the ratio of aszú paste to base wine, creating a classification still used today.

Tokaji's European reputation was established with unusual speed for a wine region. By the mid-seventeenth century, bottles of Tokaji aszú were among the most expensive wines in Europe, traded at the courts of Louis XIV of France, Peter the Great of Russia, and the Polish kings. The formula attributed to Louis XIV — 'Vinum regum, rex vinorum' ('Wine of kings, king of wines') — whether or not the king actually said it, captures the wine's position in eighteenth-century European luxury culture accurately. The tsars of Russia were such devoted consumers that they established a permanent trading post in the Tokaj region and maintained Russian soldiers to guard the wine shipments on their journey north. Frederick the Great of Prussia and Voltaire were also noted admirers; Tokaji appears in Goethe's Faust. The wine had, by 1700, penetrated every stratum of European intellectual and aristocratic life.

The word Tokay entered English wine vocabulary by the eighteenth century and was used both for the genuine Hungarian wine and, increasingly, for imitations made elsewhere — a pattern that reflects both the wine's prestige and the difficulty of controlling geographic names before modern wine law. California produced a 'Tokay' (from the Flame Tokay grape, a table grape unrelated to the Hungarian Furmint) well into the twentieth century. Australian sherry-style wines were sometimes labeled Tokay. The genuine Tokaji was protected by EU geographical indication law from 1993, requiring that wine labeled Tokaji or Tokay must come from the designated Tokaj region of Hungary (and a small adjacent area in Slovakia). The legal protection arrived too late to prevent decades of global imitation, but it restored the word's connection to the volcanic Hungarian soil where it was born.