Time to go, Mr. Merlot

„It’s too early to indicate my favourite wines but two things have clearly emerged from yesterday’s tasting. Firstly, it never ceases to amaze me how many faulty and mediocre wines are entered. To expect an oxidised 5-year-old red wine with brett and no fruit to fare well in the ‘Best Hungarian Red’ category shows that some producers are completely alienated from reality. But Hungary is no exception here and it happens in all competitions in the world.

The second observation is that Chardonnay and Merlot are the poorest wines currently produced in Hungary. They offer no personality and are clearly not adapted to most of the local terroirs and climates. Chardonnay is flabby, with no structure or minerality and easily dominated by oak (even worse when there is heavy-handed malolactic fermentation as well). Merlot is picked too late (as are most Hungarian red grapes), overextracted and overoaked and makes a jammy, flabby wine with no sense of place and no sense of refreshment. Those grapes were planted in the early 1990s in the first wave of modernisation and it followed a post-colonial logic that those most popular international varieties would have been embraced by emerging vintners. Twenty years on, it’s time for a ceremonial burial of these consistent underperformers.”