Wojciech Bońkowski
Master of Wine

2012 Pannon Wine Challenge day 0

Day 0 of the 2012 Pannon Wine Challenge, Michelin-star warm-up dinner in Budapest (if 7 courses can be termed a warm-up).

Blau & Blau

A reader recently commented on my blog note from two years ago. It actually had me thinking whether I’d not been too harsh towards Austrian red wines. Easy to check…

Luka Kékfrankos 2008

 
This post marks my new cooperation with leading Hungarian wine website A Művelt Alkoholista, which will be publishing my weekly column on good and bad bottles of wine from Hungary. Some (but not all) will be cross-posted here on this blog, but do visit the Alkoholista to enjoy the lively and thorough discussions that ensue there.
***** 



Luka Soproni Kékfrankos 2008
This is one heck of a wine. I didn’t expect it to be so good (see below for rationale), but it ‘knocked my socks off’ as they say in the US. If you believe in the first-bottle-emptied drinkability factor, two people finished this 750ml in exactly 54 minutes. The drinkability is certainly helped by the 12.5% alcohol only.

In fact this is a fairly light take on Kékfrankos. It’s surprisingly light in colour, and light-medium-bodied with a fair bit of acidity; a profile that was rarely encountered in Hungary before (although it’s becoming more widespread now). Those unfamiliar to Kékfrankos will surely say it tastes like Pinot Noir, and I’d recommend to drink it at 15C. Yet’s it’s a fairly multi-layered wine with reasonable complexity of herby, meaty, earthy notes on the nose and some succulent sweet strawberry fruit on the palate. No oak in sight, very digestible and more elegant than almost any other Hungarian interpretation of the grape. (I’m told Luka wines were formerly much on the oaky and extracted side, but this 2008 is very balanced).

Until recently, Sopron in Western Hungary has been quite a puzzling wine region to me. The potential for serious red wine is obvious, but for too long the region has relied on a single vintner: Franz Weninger Jr. (although it took me some time to accept the amount of oak in his wines). The rest – Jandl, Taschner, Pfneiszl – have been decent but little more. It sorrowed me even more knowing that a few kilometers across the Austrian border, in a patch of land that is historically Hungarian and has almost exactly the same terroir, some terrific wines are being made, red and white, courtesy of such producers as Josef Umathum and Heinz Velich.

Sopron seems to be on the upswing, however, and apart from the increasingly impressive wines of Weninger, it has two great new players: the idiosyncratic Ráspi and the dynamic Luka. The wines of Luka are ambitiously priced – this Kékfrankos at 13€ from the Bortársaság wine shop chain is their cheapest wine – but judging from this bottle, well worth it. Now I’m really curious to taste the other bottlings. 
Source of wine: own purchase.