Today I will be talking about a late harvest wine, a sweet wine from Tokaj.

I bought this bottle in Spar last weekend, cause my wife pointed out this used to be her favorite winery before she met me. As I never heard of this winery before and it was a sweet wine I was immediately sold to buy and try this one out !

Now people asked me a lot of times what exactly is a late harvest wine ? Well the answer is very simple and you will have a better understanding of the term after this.
Late harvest is a term we give to wines that are made from grapes that stay on the vine longer than usual, they stay on it till they have ”noble rot”. Noble rot is a mold that causes the grape to lose almost all of his water and almost becomes like a raisin in some sense. If you create noble rot your wine will always be sweet, this is the base for any sweet wine like Aszú.

It is a bit similar to the ice wine from Germany and the Sauternes from France, but both of these wines are made in a different way but at the end become a sweet wine as well, although in my personal opinion the late harvest from Hungary and the Aszú have a lot more flavors and smells.

This wine is from 2009 and is made from yellow Muscat  grapes it is in his prime year, meaning it is perfect to be drank, it has a very very nice golden color and it has a nice oak smell with hints of apricot at the end. When you drink this wine you will taste a very noble apricot taste again with light hints of the oak and the light acids in the after taste.

This wine costed 2.200 HUF, that is 7 euros which in my opinion was very cheap for such noble and classy wine.

Note that all late harvest wines come in 0.5l or 0.35l bottles, the reason for this is unknown to me but I have a good guess it is cause it’s a dessert wine and it’s very sweet, you should pour less of this anyway.