2022 Tóth Ferenc Vinalia x Tóth Ferenc Leányka Felső Magyarországi Hungary 750 ml

In the 1980s, Albariño was barely known in the US. A decade earlier, the same could have been said about Sancerre, and it wasn’t until the 90s that the first big wave of Grüner Veltliner hit American shores.

Now those wines are household names. And we won’t be surprised if Hungarian wines enjoy the same status in a few decades.  

After all, Hungarian wine traditions are old. Eger, which Toth Ferenc calls home, has been making wine for nearly a millennium. French priests brought “modern” techniques to the area in the 13th century. Hell, Hungary beat the rest of the world to an enforceable governmental classification of Premier and Grand Cru vineyards, and for centuries their wines were some of the most expensive in Europe. If the country hadn’t been hidden behind the Iron Curtain for most of the 20th Century, Hungarian wines might be as well known today as bottles from Spain and Portugal.

Eger is basically on the same latitude as Chablis, but the presence of the Bükk mountains creates a climate that’s warm enough to ripen red wines—and makes growing modern, zesty white wine a snap. And even though there’s been immense commercial pressure to plant grapes like Chardonnay and Merlot, Ferenc has been a champion of heirloom indigenous varieties like the white grape Leányka.

Leányka’s name translates as “the maiden,” in reference to its delicate features and pretty, floral-accented wines (though it’s not actually related to Feteascǎ Albǎ, in Romania, which also shares a translated name). In the hands of Ferenc and his daughter, Katalin, it produces a beautiful white wine, which in today’s case was custom-labeled for their American importer.