Winemaker Notes
Serve it chilled with light fish dishes, grilled and steamed vegetables, charcuterie, young cheeses, pasta with white wine sauce, chicken and turkey.
Native to Hungary, Furmint is the white grape variety principally responsible for the highly desired, historically important and lusciously sweet, elixir called Tokaji. The wine called Tokaji is named after the Hungarian region from which it comes: Tokaj. More recently the motivations of proud, young Hungarian winemakers have brought Furmint into a new light as a delicately crisp and dry white. Somm Secret—The sweetest version, Tokaji Eszencia, contains so much sugar that it has an aging capacity of 200 years!
A picturesque, eastern European wine growing nation, Slovenia can claim one of the most ancient winemaking cultures in all of Europe. Its history dates back to the Celts and Illyrians tribes, well before the Romans had any influence on France, Spain or Germany. But it wasn’t until the 1970s that Slovenia developed a more refined, private-sector wine industry.
Today it is a powerful source of some of the industry’s most important orange wines (whites made with extended skin contact); furthermore, fully three quarters of the country’s wine production is white.
Slovenian weather is continental with hot summers and cold, wet winters. It is divided into three wine regions: Podravje in Slovenia’s northeast; Primorska in its west, close to Italy; and Posavje in its southeast. These are further divided to nine wine districts.