History of Hungarian Wine

Hungary has been making wine for centuries, and in the Middle Ages Hungarian wine was wanted across Europe. So where are those wines now?

Wine has been made here for a very long time. The Romans planted vines in their province of Pannonia around 2,000 years ago, and when the Magyars rode into the Carpathian Basin around 895 they brought wine knowledge of their own. The Hungarian words for wine and grape, bor and szőlő, come from Turkic rather than from Latin.

By the Middle Ages Hungary was one of Europe’s major wine exporters. The sweet wines of Tokaj did particularly well at court. In the early 18th century Prince Ferenc Rákóczi II sent them to Louis XIV at Versailles, and that is where the line Tokaj growers still like to quote comes from: the king of wines, the wine of kings. In 1730 Tokaj became the second wine region in the world after Porto to be classified by quality, and seven years later a royal decree turned it into a closed wine district. Today hardly anyone knows Hungarian wine, including plenty of people who know wine.

How Hungarian wine almost disappeared

From 1541 the Ottomans held the middle of the country for a century and a half. Winemaking carried on regardless of Islamic prohibition, because wine was a useful source of tax revenue, and the north and west of the kingdom never came under Ottoman rule at all. Hungary’s best-known wine story comes from these years. At the siege of Eger in 1552 the defenders are supposed to have drunk so much red wine that the attackers took the stains in their beards for bull’s blood. The name Bikavér stuck. Serbian families moving north ahead of the Ottomans brought the Kadarka grape with them to Szekszárd and Eger.

The 19th century was the best run Hungarian wine ever had. Then phylloxera arrived in 1875, and within two decades most of the country’s vineyards were gone. What went back into the ground afterwards looked different, and some old varieties never came back at all.

In 1920 the Treaty of Trianon took two thirds of Hungary’s territory, and a large share of its vineyards went with it. Transylvania, what is now Slovakia, and Slavonia were suddenly abroad. The Hungarian wine map you see today is essentially what was left over.

Two world wars followed, and after the second one, forty years of communism. Small wineries were merged into state wine factories that were paid by volume and behaved accordingly. Egri Bikavér went out across the Eastern Bloc as a cheap litre bottle, and the reputation it earned there has followed the name ever since. A few growers held on to their best parcels through those decades and kept working them. Beyond that, quality wine as a category was gone.

The Eastern Bloc was also the main customer. Hungary shipped enormous volumes to the Soviet Union for decades, and when that market collapsed in the early 1990s the wine industry lost its biggest buyer overnight. For companies built around volume, the timing could hardly have been worse.

Starting again after 1989

With the change of system in 1989, which Hungarians simply call rendszerváltás, the vineyards went back into private hands. Tokaj moved first, largely on foreign money. The British wine writer Hugh Johnson was among the founders of the Royal Tokaji Wine Company in 1990, AXA Millésimes of France bought the Disznókő estate in 1992, and the Álvarez family of Vega Sicilia took over Oremus in 1993. Vineyards that had been famous for three hundred years had capital and cellar equipment again.

The first genuinely good dry reds came out of Villány in the mid-90s. Most of the twenty years after that went on rebuilding: repairing cellars, replanting vineyards, working out what modern winemaking could actually do.

The biggest steps have come in the last few years, since a new generation took over. Many of these winemakers have worked in France, Austria, New Zealand or South Africa and came home with an open mind. They care more about local grape varieties, old single vineyards and Hungarian wine styles than their parents did, and a good number of them work organically or with no additions at all. What is coming out of that is genuinely new.

Where Hungarian wine stands now

Hungary has 22 wine regions, from Sopron on the Austrian border to Tokaj in the north-east, and nearly all of them now have producers who can hold their own internationally. At the Decanter World Wine Awards 2026 the country posted its best result so far. Alongside that, a small and very lively natural wine scene has grown up, and abroad it often got noticed before the classic estates did.

What is missing is recognition. A Hungarian bottle still has to argue its way past the assumption that it will be cheap or sweet. That is changing, slowly.

Why Hungarian soil makes good wine in the first place

For this we have to go back a long way, because Hungary was once a sea itself. Ten million years ago the Pannonian Sea covered most of the country, and when it dried out it left minerals and nutrients behind in the soil.

Then there are the volcanoes. Hungary is geologically active and always has been. Volcanoes laid down layer after layer of lava over millions of years, and the hills that came out of it carry the volcanic soils that Somló and the Balaton vineyards sit on today. The same geothermal activity is why the country has so many thermal baths.

Hungary also sits in the right place. The grapes get plenty of sun without it getting too hot. Europe’s big mountain ranges are all around, from the Alps to the Tatras and the Carpathians, with the Balkans starting just to the south. As almost everywhere else in the world, the good regions here are on slopes near large rivers and lakes: the Danube, the Tisza and the Bodrog, Lake Balaton and Lake Fertő.

So why can you hardly find any of it?

You might have read all that and be thinking: if Hungarian wine is so good, why is it not in the shops? Or you bought a Hungarian bottle recently and it let you down. The main reason is size. The wineries making the good wine are very small. Between 10 and 50 hectares is normal, and some of the best growers farm 5 hectares or less. (A hectare is 10,000 square metres, roughly a football pitch.) With a handful of exceptions, the only producers with enough volume to export are the former state cooperatives, whose quality is often poor.

The good small wineries simply do not have the quantities, and with the wine scene at home booming, most of them sell everything in Hungary. We think more people should get to drink these wines. So we bring them to Berlin and introduce the growers behind them.

Which Hungarian wine region would you try first?