2025. RetrospectIVE

Péter Várhelyi / HÍMESUDVAR

The life of a small winery in the Tokaj Wine Region

The workings of our winery are defined by the cyclic nature of both the grapes and the wine tourism. We’ve done our best to align our workflow, moments, energy and ourselves as well with these two major pillars of circumstance.
Thanks to all that, the years we leave behind don’t really stand out from each other so we try to define new goals and ideas as a new annual goal every time. Perhaps doing this can help our ordinary days to become a little more exciting.
So let’s see how 2025 went for us.

​We’ve opted not to write up an annual harvest summary this year but this is still the most important thing to start with here.
This year’s harvest had started much earlier than in the past. Last year, we made the decision that we want to process our grapes ourselves, something we used to hire the Hétszőlő winery to do before this year. In order to place this process into our own hands, we had to make significant sacrifices: we’ve removed the guest accomodation furniture from the larger wing of our cellar – we can’t host guest events down there anymore – and we’ve also renovated the wing a little bit. All that in order to make room for our brand new pressing machine along with a few other minor implements and other machines.
And so, we started our harvest season with a lot of excitement and some hesitation. After a few initial technical difficulties and learning curves everything proceeded as smoothly as it could.

​Thanks to the Cserés couple – Laci and Ildi – healthy and well ripened grapes welcomed us in the vineyard, enabling us to gather the first batch for our first dry wines of the vintage. 3 of these new wines (Furmint, Kövérszőlő, Zéta) currently rest in barrels. The semidry Sárgamuskotály wine is waiting its turn in steel containers to be rolled out as the first wine to be bottled from the year. The latter type also yielded 2 other versions, namely a semisweet and a late-harvest sweet wine.
The botrytis fungus had made its presence known quite early – as early as the middle of September – and thanks to the optimal weather conditions the process of aszúification began at an alarmingly quick rate. By the end of the month, there weren’t many unaffected grapes at all which was, of course, great news for us! Looking at this incredibly fast aszú process, we wasted no time and started picking the aszú grapes which will yield a very sizable quantity of Aszú wine. After we’ve successfully picked all the aszú grapes by hand from the vines, we’ve basically „whole-pressed” 80-90% of the aszú clusters. These wines will most likely have a sugar level of around 300-400 g/l and we are mostly likely set for a sweet Szamorodni wine too. We’ve decided to purchase a small batch of Kabar grape as well which is currently aging in barrels – hopefully it reaches a quality that enables it to be fully bottled as a Kabar wine.
We headed into this harvest thinking „well, it’d be nice to make a lot of different kinds of wine” because most of our previous wines had sold out almost completely and our storage has been increasingly growing in free capacity.
Fortunately this vintage has truly spoiled us in a great way. Expect some dry wines, some Szamorodni, Aszú and also a rarely seen wine type, the Fordítás wine to come with a 2025 vintage label. Here’s to a vintage never worse than this one!

​This year’s professional wine industry awards are essentially completely identical to last year’s. We decided to compete with two of our 2022 sweet wines, a 2024 dry and semisweet wine for the WineLovers WineAwards competition. The former two wines managed to win gold medals in the tasting competition while the latter two wines were granted bronze medals. The latter wines had got into the tasting jury’s glasses straight after being bottled. Today, they taste even better.
Our wines also performed really well on the thematic tasting tests from Vince Magazine. Almost all of them landed in the top quarter of the competition.

​The wine lover of our modern time can easily rate and review the service they received or the wine they purchased. The places for this are usually online platforms like our webshop, our Google company profile or other booking platforms. In tourism – and in wine tourism specifically – the most relevant of these platforms is most likely Tripadvisor. We’re proud to say that we’ve received the Travellers’ Choice award in 2025, just like we have every year before. We hope that this proves to be a valuable indicator to anyone who wants to visit Tokaj and the region and wishes to enjoy an atmospheric wine tasting program, or even a visit to the cellar and the vineyard.

​The largest renovation project of Tokaj’s downtown area is still ongoing since at least one and a half year. It comes with a lot of dust, noise and all sorts of temporary traffic changes in the city. We’re trying our best to alleviate the latter issue by updating Waze’s and Google Maps’ navigation data accordingly, although it’s not really our job to do that. Despite that, we think it’s a simple gesture not just towards people who happen to visit the town, but it’s also helpful for the local businesses and townsfolk.
By the end of the year, the downtown of Tokaj looks better and better. Many scaffoldings have come down, some covers removed, and the green islands on the street are becoming populated with trees and other greenery.
We’ve been on the receiving end of this renovation for around 2 years now and we can’t wait for spring to arrive, so we can finally enjoy the results of the project.

Tokaj Renewed

​We don’t want to miss out on all the new stuff either. So this year, we want to keep up with all the renovations around here, and are working hard to beautify our bathroom area near the winery. We’re also planning to redesign our two guest entrances a little bit. These are our year starting missions before the nice weather arrives and we’ll eventually be flooded with visitors.
We can’t wait to see you in a new Tokaj in 2026!

​Kata, Dalma, Andi, Gábor and Foltos

TASTING PROGRAMMES 2026.

Best of Foltos

translated by Mara Várhelyi