Going Hungary
Exploring volcanic terroirs in a hotbed of illiberalism. Plus: visits to Levente Major, Papa Aron Pince, and Bálint Losonci.
Natural wine is not Hungary’s most prominent export right now. That honor goes to the illiberal governmental reform template of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, which has provided ample inspiration to resurgent rightwing parties in the Republic of Georgia, Slovakia, Germany, Holland, Austria, and the USA. (This latter influence was immortalized in an episode of Succession, when the Roy family patriarch organizes a corporate / family retreat to the Hungarian countryside.)
No, Hungary is not the sexiest destination nowadays for anyone sentimental about liberal democracy. I only found my way there after befriending some Hungarian vignerons while making an appearance at a volcanic terroir-themed salon in nearby Slovakia in November 2023. Constitutionally unable to leave politics out of my wine conversations, I later queried them about their feelings about Hungary under Fidesz.
“It might be a good time to be a farmer in Hungary, but not for natural winemakers,” says Levente Major, a vigneron in the Mátra region northeast of Budapest. “If you make natural wines, it is not accepted [by the wine authorities], and very hard to do any business.” (Subscribers can check out a visit to Levente Major here.)
British-born, half-Hungarian vigneron Aron Molnár, who has produced wine as Papa Aron Pince in the lakeside vacation destination of Szent György-hegy since 2013, appreciates the government’s subsidies to small farmers, while disagreeing with the ideology behind its discourse. (Subscribers can check out a visit to Papa Aron Pince here.)
“We know how it is. They’re against gypsies, and gays, and they were trying to ban the Budapest Pride march,” he says. “But then 250’000 people went to the march. I think the government is on its last legs, if you ask me.”
Bálint Losonci, who has produced wine in Màtra since 2004, sees vineyards disappearing from his region, casualties of a slowing wine market and the agglomeration of agricultural land in the hands of large-scale owners. (Subscribers can check out an interview with Bálint Losonci here.)
“In agriculture there's bigger and bigger concentration of land ownership. And the biggest agricultural oligarchs are tied to the government,” he says. “They just go for EU subsidies, they don't even care about which crop [they grow].”
Losonci affirms that he shares certain conservative values of family farming that the Fidesz government takes pains to idealize.
“But I feel they use this image as some kind of mask, to pose as saviors of the countryside. Whereas, in the big decisions, they are totally capitalist, looking for the biggest short-term optimization of their wealth.”
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What haunts me about Losonci’s characterization of Fidesz rule in Hungary is how familiar it is.
From the USA to the UK to France and beyond, the highly symbolic figure of the small farmer is routinely invoked by politicians to summon nostalgia for the social mores of a time when there actually were more small farmers. Electoral mandates achieved in this way are then invariably put in service of enacting legislation that further eliminates small-scale farming in the name of economic growth.
Viewed through this lens, Hungary just offers us a particularly drastic example of a phenomenon going on across the world. Viktor Orbàn purports to protect Hungarian family farmers from unfair competition within the EU single-market, but in practice his government’s policies have been aimed at agglomerating agricultural land-ownership in the hands of cronies eager to reap millions in EU agricultural subsidies, a phenomenon that actively works against the interests of small-scale farming communities.
“The land grabbing process has accelerated and is serving more politicized aims and goals since 2015. This was when the Orbán government privatized a large quantity of state-owned land via a ‘thunderstorm’ process that benefitted a set of loyal oligarchs,” explains environmental social scientist Noémi Gonda in a 2020 interview in the Green European Journal.
A cursory look into this subject provokes initial astonishment that such large-scale graft could go on with the apparent complicity of the EU. One soon realizes, however, that Hungary is not the only culprit; former Czech prime minister Andrez Babis has also been implicated in similar efforts. It is hard not to suspect that such maneuvers are, on some level, the point of the EU agricultural subsidy system, which largely incentivizes land agglomeration, in that it exists to facilitate a continent-wide transition from the activity of farming for the needs of a family and its surrounding community to farming for profit on export markets.
Agricultural subsidies are not a small part of the EU budget, either. They represent almost 25%. (This illuminating Times report had them at 65 billion dollars per year in 2019.)
Looking into the situation, I’m reminded of separate conversations with Auvergne vigneron Pierre Beauger, and Anjou vigneron Olivier Cousin. Both emphasized the malign nature of agricultural subsidies, and the wish to make it known that their wines were produced without them.
“I wanted to put it on my label, once: wine without subsidies,” said Cousin. “Because [a lot of winemakers] are drunk on money, and the wine is drunk on sulfur.”
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Like many natural vignerons I know in France, I find myself conflicted about the nature of the European Union. We all like cultural cross-pollination and freedom of movement and liberal democracy. But we cannot fail to note that EU administration of agriculture continually provides subsidies in favor of productivist agriculture, and continually tacks away from taking a hard line against pesticides and herbicides, despite the ever-mounting evidence that these latter continue to wreak catastrophic harm on human health and the environment.
It is for this reason that the European unity often evoked by Western commentators feels ambiguous. Most would agree nowadays that European unity is important to defend against rising threats from Russia (and, apparently, the USA). But unity for the purposes of facilitating and accelerating the rationalization of the European farmscape for maximum economic gain is not something to be wished for lightly (for those of us into natural wine).
In France as in the USA, anyone calling for economic growth to be deprioritized in favor of environmental and social renewal is politically homeless nowadays. Even those politicians on the left who are sympathetic to such ideas seem unable to iterate them aloud, for fear of being taken for a communist. (On some level, we still live in the old McCarthy era, even in our new McCarthy era.) I suspect this to be a key reason behind the astonishing aphasia of the Democratic party in America in response to Trump’s flagrant profiteering in office.
Democratic politicians are afraid of where Trump is taking America in a spirit of lawless plunder run amok.
But they are more afraid of losing their relevance and their office, for the offense of questioning the very premise of America, the only item of consensus between the two political parties: the pursuit of wealth.
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Most wine lovers associate Hungary with its most famous wine, tokaji. Unsurprisingly, Tokaj is not a hotbed of natural vinification, and it is not where I wound up. Instead I visited two notable, and notably different, volcanic terroir regions: Lake Balaton, a series of lakeside mini Mount Etnas of Mitteleuropa that comprise a popular vacation spot, and Màtra, a swath of downtrodden basaltic mountain foothills northeast of Budapest, which does not.
Subscribers can delve into three new reports from these regions:
An INTERVIEW with MATRA natural wine pioneer BALINT LOSONCI, who makes immense, exploratory unsulfited wines from untreated vineyards of GRUNER VELTLINER, KEKFRANKOS and more. Read here. (No paywall.)
A VISIT to MATRA natural wine maestro LEVENTE MAJOR, whose unsulfited, long-aged whites from incredibly LOW-YIELDING vineyards are already WORLD-CLASS MASTERPIECES of natural winemaking. Read here.
A VISIT to PAPA ARON PINCE on SZENT GYORGY MOUNTAIN, where ARON MOLNAR and KARINA VISSONOVA craft some of the most ORIGINAL natural wines of LAKE BALATON. Read here.
That’s all for now. On Friday I head south to begin my 2025 harvest of abandoned vineyards in the Languedoc. Expect a full report on the 2024 vintage soon! (It’s finally all in bottle.) Also forthcoming: another deluge of reports from Alsace, plus some news from the Jura. In the meantime, raise a glass to what remains of small-scale organic farming - in Hungary and beyond 🍷