Grape Guide
Furmint and the New Eastern Europe: Hungary, Slovenia and the Wines That Surprised Us
Tokaj made Furmint famous as a sweet wine. Dry Furmint is making it famous all over again, and it's brought a whole continent's worth of undiscovered bottles along for the ride.
Tokaji Aszú was the first geographically classified wine in history, Louis XIV's 'wine of kings', and Furmint was the grape that made it possible. What the Tokaj region discovered in the 1990s, as Hungarian winemaking modernised after the Soviet era, was that the same qualities that make Furmint great for sweet wine, electric acidity, mineral character, structural backbone, also make it exceptional for dry wine.
Furmint spent 400 years making the world's greatest sweet wine. Someone recently pointed out it also makes exceptional dry wine, and the grape has been making up for lost time ever since.
The grape that built an empire
Furmint's high acidity and thin skin make it exceptionally susceptible to noble rot, the mould that shrivels grapes and concentrates sugars into Tokaji Aszú. For centuries, that was Furmint's defining purpose. The discovery that it makes extraordinary dry wine too changed everything about how we should think about the grape.
Dry Furmint 2022
Apple, Mandarin peel, Hazelnut
Furmint 2023
Apple, Hay, Pepper
What dry Furmint actually tastes like
The closest comparison is dry Riesling: same electric acidity, same mineral precision, same ability to taste irreducibly of the specific place it came from. But Furmint has its own voice, a slightly smoky, volcanic quality from the tuff and clay soils of Tokaj, and a body that feels a little fuller. At its best, one of the most compelling white wines in Europe.
Slovenia: the other side of the story
The Zavec Brothers farm in the Jeruzalem-Ormoz region with a natural wine philosophy: low intervention, indigenous yeasts. Their Furmint is slightly more textured and expressive than the Hetszoelo, shaped by a warmer microclimate. The two together are a good argument for what the same grape does when it grows in adjacent but distinct places.
Why Eastern Europe makes sense for a Dutch wine shelf right now
The Dutch market has historically been very good at discovering wine regions before they become expensive. Eastern European white wine is at a similar inflection point to Austrian Riesling in the late 2000s. The quality has arrived, awareness is growing, and the prices still reflect what the wine actually costs to make rather than what recognition would command. The moment to discover them is now.
