Bring On the Major Leagues: Levente Major
Primary school headmaster, heavy metal afficionado, beer geek - Abasar's Levente Major wears many hats. He also produces some of Hungary's greatest white wines.
Levente Major is a vigneron in the Màtra village of Abasàr, where he also serves as headmaster at the local primary school. He began producing wine in 2005, and later expanded his estate with the aid of his longtime friend and investor Kornèl Kalapács. Today, from fifteen hectares of widely terraced, south-facing vineyards of olaszrizling (welschriesling), riesling, kekfrankos (blaufrankisch), and muscat, along with a smattering of old local varieties, Major produces just five or six thousand bottles per year. This is to say that yields on his volcanic soils are in the realm of 3HL/ha1, a testament to the practical impossibility of defending against the overpopulation of deer in his region.
Major laments the difficulty of producing sufficient volume, even as his own exacting vinification and aging regimens are, as if by intuition, perfectly suited to the concentration and intensity of the scarce grapes that remain at harvest. He employs a manual vertical press, barreling wines down early for very long fermentation and aging periods: generally three years in barrel and / or demi-muid for wines with white labels, and a mere two and a half years in tank for wines with black labels. On olaszrizling and riesling, in particular, the results are magistral: whites of a poise, a finesse, a salinity that recalls the great natural wines of the Jura.2 (After obtaining organic certification in 2016, Major began eliminating filtration and sulfite addition from his practice in 2016 and 2017, respectively; today no wines are filtered or sulfited.)
I first met Major at a tasting of wines from the Màtra region in Budapest, where I’d joined his neighbor Bàlint Losonci, who was also showing wines. Losonci kindly arranged a visit the following day to Major’s cellar, which contains droves of surprises. Beyond the kingly white wines, there are hopped pet-nats, undisgorged pet-nats, beers from brewer friends produced with Major’s wine lees... A year later, I finally got my act together to begin importing small quantities of both Losonci’s and Major’s wines to France. More recently, they both joined me in Burgundy to present wines at Vin Noé’s Haut Les Mains in late July. While stylistically highly distinct, Major and Losonci together represent a tiny radical natural wine vanguard of Màtra, proving the astonishing potential of its neglected terroirs.
BRING ON THE MAJOR LEAGUES
I was once gifted - in the spirit of PR - a device created to facilitate, if that is the right word, the opening of non-disgorged pet-nats. At the risk of appearing ungrateful, I wrote what I thought of the device: that it was an imperfect solution to a problem that shouldn’t exist, since winemakers could instead simply put in the effort to carefully disgorge pet-nats. Pet-nats worth savoring - the rare terroir-driven ones - are rarely aided by the presence of fermentary lees in suspension. (Lees do not express much nuance of aroma. There are good sweet lees and bad reductive lees, but in my experience they don’t differentiate hugely after that. They mostly taste like lees.)
Well, imagine my surprise to learn, on Levente Major’s cellar doorstep back in February 2024, that my host liked lees. Major opened a series of his Ex Nihil series of undisgorged pet-nats with a markedly simpler device, a nail and a rock. Major’s English and French is as limited as my Hungarian, so it fell to our friend Bàlint Losonci to translate, as best he could, my argument against non-disgorgement of pet-nats.
It’s all the more frustrating tasting your un-disgorged pet-nats full of lees, I tried to explain, because the juice itself is ambrosia!
The previous evening I’d learned just how infinitesimal Major’s yields were, on the terraced volcanic slopes of Sár-Hegy. The local over-population of deer leaves him with roughly 3HL/ha to work with most years. People invariably suggest installing electric fences, but this is impractical in Màtra, where the fences are soon stolen3, and where the police refuse to investigate such matters. (Losonci was once told that police cars are not equipped to navigate the roads leading to his vineyards.)
Major’s reply to my quibbling, as best I could tell, was something to the effect of, “Oh well.”