Tokaji Aszú

Tokaji Aszú, a full-bodied sweet dessert wine made from late-ripened grapes affected by Botrytis cinerea, a mold that concentrates grape sugars and flavours into honeylike sweetness. The grapes are from the Hungarian Furmint or Hárslevelű vines, which are grown in the Tokaj wine region in northeastern Hungary.

To make the wine, the shriveled and botrytis-infected aszú grapes are made into either a base wine or an unfermented grape must. These grapes are kneaded into a paste and then soaked in the base wine or must. The taste and quality of Tokaji Aszú is greatly affected by the proportion of sugar-rich aszú paste added to the must or the new wine. Finally, the wine is transferred to barrels and matured. Tokaji Aszú wine can take up to seven years to mature, after which it retains its flavour for a long time. The former Fugger family wine cellars held aszú wines that were 100 years old.

In Hungary the aszú grape was first mentioned by Fabricius Balázs in his Latin-Hungarian dictionary, published c. 1590. The first preparation of Tokaj Aszú wine is associated with Lady Zsuzsánna Lórántffy and her Oremus vineyard c. 1650, when the grape harvest was pushed back until late autumn, allowing the grapes to become infected by B. cinerea.