We’ve managed to somehow slow down a bit during the holiday period, allowing us to think over all the things that happened in the past year. What kind of vintage was it? How well did we achieve our goals and objectives? What else do we have left to do in 2025? Our usual retrospective writeup and short report follows. The vintage The most important bit is always the grape. The vineyard. These are the foundational pillars of our winery and we can safely say this is the most stressful part of the whole thing. During this plant’s entire lifetime we’re constantly exposed to the whims of the elements, forcing us to adapt to them, but never quite being able to eliminate all the casualties the weather could cause. Laci and Ildi – as a married couple – have been tending to the vineyard with extreme precision for several years now. Thanks to their diligence and hard work, along with constant protection of all grapevines, we were able to harvest beautiful, healthy grapes at the end of August for our dry and semidry wines. A month later most of the weather elements turned out to be favourable, so by the end of October we had collected a large amount of aszú berries finishing the harvest with a Szamorodni and an Aszú wine in turn. We’re quite happy with how one of the earliest harvests turned out this year and the new wines are clean, fine and promising.
Accolades At the start of last year, a great achievement was bestowed upon our family. Gyula Várhelyi (82), founder of Hímesudvar was granted the title Decorated Citizen of Tokaj. He deserves this award for his decades worth of cultural work along with the historical research he has carried out in his retirement years. His active lifestyle in the town still allows for a bit of time around the cellar and so most of the cleanliness around the estate can be credited to „Grandpa Gyula”. The winning of an outstanding achievement for the whole team remains to be the Tripadvisor Travelers’ Choice Awards, granted on one of the world’s most popular tourism websites. The main team of Kata, Andi, Dalma and new arrival Gábor was assisted on the most frequented days by the helpful „little” Andi (a legal doctor today), Anna (in marketing) and Janka (painter). The Worker of the Year award, however, yet again goes to Foltos – in the midst of extreme competition at the top level, of course. We’ll be writing up a little something about Foltos on the 1st of next year. Every single member of the team utilises their hospitality, kindness, their best smile or their loudest purr to make sure all the domestic and far travelled guests enjoy their time to the fullest at our winery.
Wine competitions We rarely ever participate in these competitions since we believe the best judge of them all is the buyer. We sell all our wines on the spot so everyone gets a chance to taste the goods before purchasing and we don’t feel the need to constantly prove our quality with badges. On the other hand, we usually don’t have very large batches of new wines, so by the time the results of a competition get published, our wines will have usually been sold out. Sometimes, we get invited to a certain category which we don’t even have a fresh wine for, so there’s that. But with all that said, we still took our chances at a few of them: we’ve received invitations from Vince Magazine, Debreceni Borozó and WLWA, so we sent them a few samples to compete. The results are reassuring and inspiring, since the competing opposition consists of very strong, capable, fine wines and our wines managed to reach high spots on these samplings. The main takeaway for us regarding these competitions, is that even a qualified team of wine jurors quite like our wines, giving us a perhaps more objective view on where we stand in the country’s wine scene at large.
Other things and events Despite having multiple floodings over the course of spring, we still tried to build ourselves up and extend our horizons. We’re always thinking on what other novelties we can bring into our repertoire to keep giving our visitors a fresh experience. The ever-expanding bicycle network around the Tokaj region brought in more and more two-wheeled visitors to our winery. We’ve installed a cute little bicycle parking spot in the front of our entrance, giving room for up to 5 bikes. We’ve long supported local businesses and their artisan products, after all, we’re doing the same thing. Alongside the honey, syrups and gin we’ve picked up the beautifully made goose liver products of Royal Paté. Mainly because a lot of connoisseurs love to talk about how goose liver and Tokaji aszú compliment one another perfectly and we’ve always been in trouble when someone asks where they could try such a pate around this town. So now, Hímesudvar has it too. Along with all the gourmet stuff we also like to have some extra goodies and accessories for all the wine lovers out there. We’ve refreshed our supply of Pulltap’s corkscrews with 8 + 2 brand new colours. We even have electric versions of these in stock, if you’re into that type of innovation. If you’d like to surprise someone else – or yourself – with a decorated version, there are also exclusive Swarovski crystal decorated editions of these corkscrews, in 4 different variations. You can find all of these in the webshop here.
As usual we tried our best to partake in the various local events and programmes with some of our own small little happenings. In spring it’s usually the Tokaj Wine Days or the Harvest Festival that brings a lot of people about but we also took part in Tokaji Pezsgés, the Tokaj Street Music Festival and we’ve even hosted a combined vineyard tour with a lot of other wineries in town. Then there was also a small tasting event in the Fesztiválkatlan venue, we even visited Debrecen for an evening and we illuminated the Bem street for the participants of the Fényes Futás night-time running event. These are all the popular events that work all year round and these are the ones to choose if one wishes to make their wine experience a more social one as well. Plans in 2025 Our 2025 blueprints are insecurely connected to the renovations going on in Tokaj as we write this. The „Tokaj Old Town Project” is a never-before-seen renovation project and all the troubles of it (dust, noise, road closures) will be sure to be with us for the time to come. The preview plans and the already finished sections look to be promising and neat. The hardware gets refurbished, but we’re mostly interested in what „software” these renovations may bring to the town of Tokaj. Will the new businesses and locales be able to bring in more tourism for the town and generate more attraction for the wine giant? We’ll wait and see, but what’s sure is that the town needs a fresh and modern look along with a lively crowd to visit as well.
We say thanks and express great gratitude to many other colleagues and family members, without whom this small business could not function as it does on a daily basis. So big thanks to Beáta Borbély, my partner who endures my workaholic behaviour, Mara Várhelyi for all the translated content (translator’s note: that’s me!) Gergely Makai at Hétszőlő Winery, the harvest team and the specialists, the couriers, the suppliers. We’ll continue this constant self-expansion in 2025 as well; we’re working on planting some new grapevines after a long time of not having done so, and we’ve got some cellar expansion ideas to finish downstairs too. We’re always thinking on how to stay neat and do better. Our winery has welcomed around 13.000 visitors in the year of 2024. This is not only a clear indicator of success for us, but also reminds us of the responsibility we hold. We can take inspiration from both sentiments, reminding us that it’s worth doing all this and doing it well, despite all the hardships. translated by Mara Várhelyi  WITH LOVE FROM TOKAJ
0 Comments
Your comment will be posted after it is approved.
Leave a Reply. |
Categories
All
Archives
December 2024
|
RSS Feed
|
|
|
WELCOME |
|
Nyitva minden nap 10-18
-
Open every day 10-18
-
Open every day 10-18