French business groups, Spanish wine dynasties, Hungarian bankers, airlines, pharmaceutical families and a new business elite began to buy up vineyards on the volcanic slopes around Mád, Tolcsva and Erdőbénye. Tokaj became important again. But somewhere along the way, a question arose that now almost imperceptibly divides the region: can authenticity be bought?
When I listed the wineries I had previously visited to Zoltán Demeter, and those were Holdvölgy, Disznókő and Sauska, he didn’t think for long:
They are investors, he said.
And he didn’t say it with contempt. More like a man who precisely separates two types of reality. Then he added:
To get to know Tokaj, you must first come to me. Then to István Szepsy. Or vice versa.
Project, or identity
That sentence actually discribes today’s Tokaj better than any official presentation of the region. Tokaj today lives between two logics: one that sees the vineyard as a project, capital and a global brand and the other that understands it as an obligation, an identity and something that cannot be accelerated with money.
Tokaj has always been more than a vineyard. For centuries, Tokaji Aszú was the wine of European courts, a luxury that financed politics and symbolized the power of a small country on the edge of great empires. The French kings called it the wine of kings and the king of wine, and its value was so great that Tokaj cellars functioned almost as the financial infrastructure of the aristocracy. Then came phylloxera, wars, Trianon and communism.
Transformations for the new elite
Collectivization destroyed not only private property but also the hierarchy of values. Aszú, one of the most expensive and demanding wines in the world, has been transformed into a mass-produced category. The region survived, but lost its own sense of proportion. After the fall of communism, a new transformation begins. France's AXA Millésimes acquires Disznókő. Vega Sicilia founds Oremus. Hugh Johnson launches Royal Tokaji. Bankers, industrialists, international wine groups and the new Hungarian business elite enter Tokaj.
József Váradi, the founder of Wizz Air, is building the Juliet Victor project in Mád. The winery is not named after a vineyard, a village or a family history, but after his initials translated into the NATO phonetic alphabet. A telling detail. He did not come to Tokaj to escape the business world, but to pursue it by other means.
The question hovers over Tokaj
That, of course, is not necessarily a bad story. Capital has renovated the cellars, modernized production and refocused the world's attention on Tokaj. Without investors, the region would have had a hard time recovering from decades of socialist devastation. But the question hovering over Tokaj today is no longer whether the region can be rebuilt. The question is who actually defines its identity. For Zoltán Demeter, the answer begins at the entrance to his cellar in the center of the small town of Tokaj.
Nothing in his winery seems accidental, but nothing seems designed to impress either. The walls, the old lamps, the shelves, the barrels, his father's press..., everything seems to have ended up there because it had to be there.
Not a single square millimeter in my winery is placed by accident, he said calmly, like a man who is not uttering philosophy but technical fact:
If I don't understand something, I don't put it here.
Not a single millimeter is accidental
I asked him who helps him in the vineyard, in the cellar, in organizing the work... He looked at me confused:
In what?
Well... in everything, I added.
He shook his head briefly:
I do everything!
In the vineyard. In the cellar. I do everything myself, he confirmed.
For him, perfectionism is not a pose. It seems more like a form of defense. An attempt to ensure that there is nothing superfluous between wine and man. At one point I told him that he acts like a complete control freak. He didn’t understand the expression, so we Googled the translation together. When we came across the word maniac, he laughed and said:
Good!
And that’s where the story ends. As if the definition is precise enough. Demeter doesn’t believe too much in wine fairs, festivals or masterclasses.
People come, sit, listen… and leave, he shrugged.
That’s not wine, he continued and pointed around:
This is wine!
Furmint is our language
That sentence actually sums up his entire philosophy. Wine is not a product separate from the space in which it is made. It is an extension of the place, time, rhythm and the man who makes it. For him, even Aszú acts as a personal statement, not a market category. He made his in just 56 magnums, with no standard bottles.
It’s a wine that has to last. You can’t put it in a small bottle, he said. When he talks about Furmint, he talks about it almost like a language.
It’s our language, not just a variety. If we don’t understand it, then we don’t understand where we are, he explained.
And it is here that Demeter almost imperceptibly meets István Szepsy. If Demeter is the inner measure of Tokaj, then Szepsy is its historical vertical. In Tokaj, the surname Szepsy is not just a surname. The family line of winegrowers stretches back sixteen generations, all the way back to the man who was the first to write down the process of producing Aszú in the 17th century. To bear that name means to inherit both glory and ruin.
Tons per hectare he cut down to kilograms
Szepsy was very young when he lost his father. After his studies, he tried to leave Hungary and ended up in Paris for a short time. On the third night, he dreamed only of Tokaj. He returned home. Later, he will redefine the entire region. While Tokaj still lived in the logic of quantity and compromise, Szepsy began to drastically reduce yields. Where others were producing nine tons per hectare, he was going towards three. With Aszú, even less. Sometimes just a few hundred kilograms per hectare.
In his early years, many considered him an extremist. But the wine spoke differently. Aszú is one of the most expensive and demanding winemaking processes in the world. Every berry affected by noble rot is picked by hand, often through multiple passes through the vineyard. The risk is enormous, and the result is never certain. Yet for decades, this very wine was undervalued and cheap. Szepsy refused to accept that greatness must be a compromise.
At the same time, he realized something else: Tokaj could not survive by relying solely on sweet wines. That is why he began to develop dry Furmints and through them to explore the terroir of the region. For him, Furmint ceased to be just a variety. It became an instrument for reading the soil.
The quest for quality as a way of life
Szent Tamás, Úrágya, Urbán... These are positions that suddenly begin to speak with their own voices. Tokaj is no longer just a historical symbol of sweet wine, but one of the most interesting terroir regions in Europe.
The quest for quality is an everyday way of life, István Szepsy once said.
For him, terroir is not a marketing word either. It is more of a moral category.
Everything is resonance, says Szepsy: If you dig to the heart of matter, you will only find waves of resonance.
He pauses, then continues: The most important resonance is the resonance of human love.
Such sentences might sound pretentious in another context. In Tokaj, among people who have been trying to rebuild the meaning of a region for decades, they sound almost logical.
The biggest problem for Tokaj today is not a lack of capital. It is not technology. It is not international visibility. It is how to maintain an identity as the region becomes globally desirable again. Furmint is planted from Austria to South Africa. Tokaj has modern cellars, luxury projects and a growing number of investors who see vineyards as the last sophisticated form of prestige. In a world where companies are sold and careers end, a vineyard seems like a rare form of permanence. But terroir is not the same as ownership.
Money can’t buy everything
This is perhaps best understood by people like Demeter and Szepsy. One obsessively controls every inch of his own space. The other has been trying for decades to reestablish a hierarchy of values in a region that has almost lost it. Both, each in their own way, are trying to protect the volume of Tokaj. And perhaps that is why these two seem more important today than many of the larger, richer and more spectacular projects in the region. Cellars can be renovated with money, but a sense of proportion does not come with the investment. It is a slower process. Almost a generational one.