Getting down to the vineyard - part 2

In the first part of this series, we looked at the question of what a single vineyard is and what the different definitions mean. In the second part, we visit ten interesting, or even amusingly named, Hungarian vineyards.

Read the first part of our series on vineyards!

1. Kopár

Kopár is the Villány Wine District’s most iconic area, on the southern side of Szársomlyó Hill between Villány and Nagyharsány. It owes its name to its landscape, the barren limestone, karstified, “devils’s plough” hill with only sparse growth of scrub. It is an extremely warm vineyard, the birthplace of big red wines, although just 50 years ago, it was considered to yield the best Olaszrizling in the world.

Source: Gere Attila Winery

2. Tehéntánc

You can find such names in Eger, the Mátra and Tokaj. The explanation is that in the past, the indigenous plant communities of these places also included medicinal herbs, which made the cows begin to gyrate as they were grazing, hence the name ‘Dance of the Cows’. Could the dance of the cows be a memorial to ruminant hoofed animals addicted to soft drugs?

3. Landord

The origin of the name is now lost in the mists of time. The best-known area of the Balatonboglár Wine District, including Szőlősgyörök, is part of the Sinai Hill, under the Sinai-hegy vineyard. It has nothing to do with the English word “landlord”. Unless it is that the Landord Major was established on the site of the medieval settlement of Landord after its demise, and the Count, as landlord, often visited it.

4. Siralomvágó

In 1863, János Ranolder, Bishop of Veszprém, had a stone cross erected in the present-day Siralomvágó vineyard in Csopak. The area had long been known by this name when the current owner, István Jásdi (Jásdi Vineyard), decided that it was worth officially setting the vineyard apart, because he had observed that the Olaszrizlings with the greatest ageability come from here.

5. Áfrika

A perhaps lesser known, but very amusingly, maybe even communicatively named, vineyard in the Eger Wine District. Many of the large wineries bottle late harvested, often sweet, typically white wines from here. Perhaps the name refers to the fact that the high incident sunlight and the amount of heat often make the vineyard very warm.

6. Savanyú-kút (Sauerbrunn)

German vineyard names are in the majority in Sopron; just look at the neighbouring vineyards to ‘Sour Spring’. Frettner, Rothepeter, Harmler or even Steiner, which in the past was divided into even more sub-divisions, namely Oberer Steiner, Spernsteiner, Spitzsteiner, Unterer Steiner and Steinige Satz. The name of the Savanyú-kút vineyard in Fertőrákos is derived from the vineyard springs, from which the Balfi mineral water also comes.

7. Görögszó

Szekszárd and Decs share this iconic vineyard, which has produced iconic red wines representing both the wine district and Hungarian wine in general in recent decades. It probably takes its name from the fact that the nearby Orthodox monastery of Grábóc used to have its estates here, cultivated over the centuries by Serbian, Macedonian and other Orthodox priests who often communicated with each other in Greek, the language of the Church. The vernacular name, Görögszó, or Greek Word, refers to the fact that Greek words could be heard from the vineyards.

8. Nagy-Eged

The iconic hill and vineyard of Eger, with the highest vineyards in the country. In fact, we are talking about at least two vineyards on the southern side of the hill called Nagy-Eged. The lower, larger area is the Nagy-Eged vineyard, and the upper one is the Nagy-Eged-Hegy vineyard. There is a statue of the Virgin Mary in the middle of the vineyard, erected by the St Andrea winery. It also differs from the other vineyards of Eger in that the bedrock is limestone instead of the predominant volcanic areas, resulting in wines with a completely different character.

9. Úrráteszi

A lot of water has flowed down the Inner-Mérges stream since Bálint Losonci bottled his last Kékfrankos under this name. Since then, as far as I know, the vineyard has ceased to exist, or rather it has been merged with two other neighbouring vineyards, making it difficult to use the name on the label. And what a good name it was! It was a reference to the fact those in the settlement who could acquire vineyards here increased their fortunes enormously!

10. Makovica (Szent Tamás)

The Szent Tamás vineyard in Mád, Tokaj, is probably one of the most famous in the country. Few people know that the vineyard was originally made up of many smaller units, and it was only modern product descriptions that brought these sub-vineyards together. Among them was Makovica, perhaps the most valuable area of Szent Tamás, and it is no coincidence that some wineries also include the name on the label if the wine comes from here. It takes its name from the castle above the village of Zboró on the Slovak-Polish border, the Makovica manor, which was owned by the Rákóczi family as well as this vineyard.