Volcanic Hungary
I love volcanoes as much as I love wine.
This piece was originally written for my monthly Taste of Terroir column, an excuse for me to talk about geology and geography, for Glug magazine in 2023. To sign up for their excellent wine club, visit their website.
Fifteen million years ago—give or take—Hungary was a world of roiling lava lakes and plumes of ash-heavy clouds, a land where the thin firmament between the living earth and the unworldy molten chaos below was fissured. The separation between the searing hot makings of a planet and the thriving ecosystems of the Miocene era was almost non-existent. At any point, ash would rain down, lava could flow. From this uncertain period, Hungary’s rich volcanic soils were created. Even now, hot thermal springs and mineral water sources all over the country show off the seismic activity happening underneath the peaks of the now bucolically-extinct volcanoes.
The wine region of Somló, in the northern part of Lake Balaton, is actually one single volcano, protruding out of the flat countryside as a blackened, forested hill, craggy and imposing. At over 400m elevation, the hill provides steep slopes for vines to grow on, but more importantly is the black soil made from basalt—rock formed from those lava flows that would have once coloured Somló all the colours of fire. Now, millions of years after its extinction, Somlós lava gives the wines made all over its 800ish hectare region a stunning and unique minerality—colours of a different kind.
In Badacsony, the iconic hills that strike odd shapes against the sky are also the remains of lava-filled craters, covered up by ash and soil over millennia, which then eroded leaving the hardy basalt behind. There was once a vast lake here called the Pannonian Sea, and it was this shallow, marshy body of water that cooled the lava quickly, forming basalt soils all around the region.
Grapes were once grown here for the Hapsburg empire, and were deemed classier and more potent than Tokai. Now, after decades of decline in interest, winemakers are returning to the slopes to make wines with indigenous Hungarian grapes in traditional styles, rekindling a love for wine that reaches deep into the heart of the Hungarian landscape.
