Winemaker Notes
Professional Ratings
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Wine Spectator
The essence of orange blossom, dried apricot, tobacco and butterscotch aromas and flavors. This is thick and viscous, with a vivid structure and a saturated finish. Intensely sweet. A drop goes a long way.
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Vinous
The 2000 Tokaji Essencia has a much darker colour than the 2003 and younger vintages, as it is dark brown in hue. This contains 580 g/l residual sugar with 15.5 g/l acidity and represents a total production of 2,050 bottles. The 2000 is completely different on the nose, revealing a mix of sloes, cola, fig jam and raisin. It does not quite have the delineation of subsequent vintages. The palate is very pure with driving acidity that counterbalances the intense honeyed fruit. This millennial Essencia has a sense of maturity as notes of dried fig, Medjool dates and marmalade coat the mouth and linger for more than a minute afterwards.
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Wine Enthusiast
This famed Hungarian dessert wine never disappoints. An elegant nose of honey, apricot, butterscotch and spice is followed by a luxuriant, mouth-coating wave of satiny honey and apricot flavors, balanced by citrusy acidity. Complex, perfectly poised, it’s a wine with both pedigree and charm—delicious when sipped alone or paired with a mild Roquefort or fruit.
Royal Tokaji was founded in 1990 by well-known author Hugh Johnson and a small group of investors who were inspired to restore and preserve Hungary’s precious wine legacy after the fall of Communism. Tokaji is the world’s original sweet white wine – the “cult wine” of the 18th and 19th centuries – and the Tokaj wine region was the first to have classified vineyards. At the end of the 17th century, Prince Rakoczi classified the finest vineyards into: great first growths, first growths, second growths and third growths. Royal Tokaji owns five of those first and second growth vineyards, including one of Hungary’s two great first growths: Mézes Mály.
The winery produces a range of exceptional wines from dry to sweet, including several single- vineyard aszú (botrytis-affected) wines and Essencia, the free-run juice of botrytised “raisins.” The wines’ distinct character results from the varied volcanic soils of the classified vineyards, indigenous grapes and yeast, traditional winemaking methods and barrel-aging in the winery’s 13th-century underground cellars. Richness with vibrant acidity is the hallmark of all the Royal Tokaji wines.
Apart from the classics, we find many regional gems of different styles.
Late harvest wines are probably the easiest to understand. Grapes are picked so late that the sugars build up and residual sugar remains after the fermentation process. Ice wine, a style founded in Germany and there referred to as eiswein, is an extreme late harvest wine, produced from grapes frozen on the vine, and pressed while still frozen, resulting in a higher concentration of sugar. It is becoming a specialty of Canada as well, where it takes on the English name of ice wine.
Vin Santo, literally “holy wine,” is a Tuscan sweet wine made from drying the local white grapes Trebbiano Toscano and Malvasia in the winery and not pressing until somewhere between November and March.
Rutherglen is an historic wine region in northeast Victoria, Australia, famous for its fortified Topaque and Muscat with complex tawny characteristics.
Best known for lusciously sweet dessert wines but also home to distinctive dry whites and reds, Hungary is an exciting country at the crossroads of tradition and innovation. Mostly flat with a continental climate, Hungary is almost perfectly bisected by the Danube River (known here as the Duna), and contains central Europe’s largest lake, Balaton. Soil types vary throughout the country but some of the best vines, particularly in Tokaj, are planted on mineral-rich, volcanic soil.
Tokaj, Hungary’s most famous wine region, is home to the venerated botrytized sweet wine, Tokaji, produced from a blend of Furmint and Hárslevelű. Dry and semi-dry wines are also made in Tokaj, using the same varieties. Other native white varieties include the relatively aromatic and floral, Irsai Olivér, Cserszegi Fűszeres and Királyleányka, as well as the distinctively smoky and savory, Juhfark. Common red varieties include velvety, Pinot Noir-like Kadarka and juicy, easy-drinking Kékfrankos (known elsewhere as Blaufränkisch).