The Natural Balance: Bálint Losonci
An interview with Bálint Losonci, who coaxes ripe, exotic, Beauger-esque elixirs from gentle volcanic slopes surrounding Gyöngyöspata in the Mátra foothills.
Mátra vigneron Bálint Lononci’s centurion physique and his wide-eyed curiosity for the nuances of viticulture can make him seem younger than his forty-five years, belying his own long experience producing wine on the varied volcanic terroirs near the Mátra village of Gyöngyöspata. In his youth, Losonci worked five years for the seminal Hungarian wine magazine Borbarát, before beginning to produce his own wine on 0.3ha of olaszriesling (welschriesling) in 2004. In the intervening years he has embraced, in succession, organic farming, natural vinification, and no-till farming. Today he generally forgoes all vineyards treatments - even organic ones - on his vineyards.
Taking on the task of resurrecting quality wine production - let alone quality radical natural wine production - in historically poor and Soviet cooperative-dominated Mátra has not been easy. Losonci’s vineyard holdings have fluctuated over the years, as he has experimented with diverse grape varieties and adjusted his workload to accommodate the needs of his family. Between 2016-2018 he farmed 8ha, but he has since reduced his vineyard surface to 3ha, vinifying the harvest in a dilapidated cellar building in Gyöngyöspata. Wines are pressed with a manual vertical press, and fermented and aged in steel or plastic tank, along with the occasional old barrel. Losonci ceased all filtration as of the 2014 vintage, and ceased all sulfite addition on all cuvées as of 2021.
I first met Losonci as the ERUPTED tasting organized by Jan Culik and Marvla Tindo in the Slovakian town of Levice in November 2023. Losonci’s production stood out for its purity, its bold ripeness, and its rich expressivity. His macerated grüner veltliners, in particular, bear a kinship with the volcanic-terroir pinot gris of Pierre Beauger, or, in riper vintages, the immense rkatsiteli-mtsvane of Georgian vigneron Niki Antadze. I visited Lononci’s cellar and vineyards in February 2024; later that year he joined as my guest at my friend Jon Purcell’s Haut Les Mains salon in Burgundy. This year he returned to the salon to present his wines, which I’ve begun importing to France in small quantities. I’ve come to learn that some of Losonci’s more atypical wine production practices are borne of necessity: to support his family, he often works seasons for biodynamic estates in neighboring Austria, tending his own vineyards and tanks only when he returns home. The difficult circumstances of their production somehow makes the potential of Losonci’s wines all the more striking: one imagines what he is capable of, were he to attain greater financial security and consequently more time to focus on his own wine production.
BALINT LOSONCI: AN INTERVIEW
The following interview was conducted in early July 2025. It has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Where are you now? How are things in the vineyards?
At the moment I’m working at Nikolaihof [in Austria]. In Hungary, it is the biggest drought ever recorded right now. So there is no pressure at all with [vineyard] diseases.
Your vineyard surface has fluctuated a lot over the years. How many hectares do you farm now?
Nowadays it’s 3ha. At its peak, it was 8ha. Then when our third child was born, I decided to be more chill and be more with the family. It was also to have a deeper connection with the parcels, to not have to rush that much. So I gave back most of the rented vineyards.
Also, I have to say that here we are waging a war with the overpopulation of deers. It's out of balance. People say that they're such nice animals, but the natural predators are gone, they were hunted to extinction centuries before, so now when one species is overwhelming the system, it's bad. And not just for humans! Even the young forest can't regrow, the deer eat everything. That's also why I gave up some of those parcels - because the deers kept eating everything.
Some colleagues tried to keep them away with electric fences, but the equipment gets stolen. The good thing is that nature will probably solve this. Already, in the next village, there's is a growing population of wolves. They just reappeared in our region a few years ago. Now the number is getting bigger and bigger, and maybe in a few years they could reestablish the natural balance.
You work with a wide variety of grapes for such a small vineyard area. Which are the most important for you?
The biggest is pinot noir, which is altogether 1.2ha. But what is important to me is the kekfrankos [blaufrankisch]. I don't count on pinot so much as a varietal wine, because the climate is changing so much. I think in the future it will be very hard to produce pinot where we are. So kekfrankos will have more importance. Even at the end of the season, it doesn’t accumulate sugar too quickly, like syrah or pinot noir, so in hot vintages, it can work. And it doesn’t matter if September is super hot, it preserves acidity. So I think it’s really versatile and stable.
The other variety for which I have high hopes is the purcsin.
It’s a variety that dates back to the Roman times. My colleagues did an investigation, and figured out, that even in Roman times, in the province would become Hungary, it there was purcsin at the time. The other crazy story is that until phyloxera, purcsin was also an important variety in Tokaj. They made a traditional noble sweet wine from purcsin, but after phylloxera, it disappeared. In the whole country. Now I am the second to begin cultivating it again, there was just one guy before me.
Then there is grüner veltliner, which is the base of [my skin-macerated white wine] “Roger.” Then there is királyleányka, and riesling.
And you’re able to farm it all without vineyard treatments?
Well, last year was an exception, so it's not black and white. But if you take it over a decade, there were seven vintages where I didn't use copper or sulfur or anything else, just fermented herbs and essential oils. Whenever I can, I do not kill anything, I prefer just to help the good culture to propagate.
Is it easy to acquire vineyards here?
Yes. I don’t know if there’s anything cheaper in the whole world, a hectare, costs 3’000-4’000€. In other Hungarian regions, especially around Balaton or Tokaj, it will be five or ten times that. Tokaj used to have a very big hype and a big jump in prices, and all the big billionaires and other corporate guys and politicians, they bought land. But now it’s like a balloon, it’s burst, it’s over.
Here the tendency is the same, but [new landowners] illegally import really cheap Romanian and Italian wines, and they label it as Hungarian. They cheat with the papers. There are old plantations that don’t produce anything, but on paper they put the highest possible yields, and with that paper they legalize the imported wines.
Before you established your estate, did you begin by working for other winemakers?
No, I just had some experiments, one or two days with some artisanal winemakers, to help them with bottling and harvest, in 2003. But I was a wine journalist before that a little bit, so I was twenty-two when I got close to [the subject of] wine. I was writing altogether five years for a magazine called Borbarát.
It was very small, just three of us worked there, with the editor. It was my real school. The editor brought me to the best wineries in Hungary at the time, and also once or twice to Spain and France. I went with an open eye and tried to learn things in the vineyards. But mostly in the cellar it was too technical to me. I was already interested in alternative methods at the time. After finishing business school, which was my original diploma, I did a very basic winemaking degree. But it was like time travel back to the darkest age of Hungarian wine in the 1980s, with every industrial recipe and overexposure to technology and wine manipulation. It was how not to make wine.
In which vintage did you cease sulfite addition?
I began the process in 2017, there was already some wines with zero sulfite addition, but the last time that I had an experiment where some of the batch had a little bit of sulfite addition was the 2020 syrah. From 2021 all wines have been zero-zero.
How has Hungary changed, in your estimation, since Viktor Orban’s return to power in 2010?
It's not totally black and white. They had some good general directions, for the social welfare system. I think what has gone in a bad way is they just gave money for free for everyone without any expectations - if you have children, you get lots and lots of money. That was something good originally… The Fidesz government always wanted to act like saviors of the countryside. To some extent, they had some good policies in this regard, but on the most important issues, like the environment, they made the wrong decisions.
For example, they got lots of investors, mainly from China, to set up battery factories, and this is one of the most dangerous, polluting, water-demanding industries, very high risk. And now our country is getting to be a Sahara, it is drying out. Establishing industries that require a hell of lot of water, with a high risk of contamination, where the profits just go out of the country… It's not about the little farms, it's the opposite.
In agriculture, there's bigger and bigger concentration of land ownership, and the biggest agricultural oligarchs are tied to the government.
Have you perceived that wealthy people connected to government are buying up land in your region? Or is that mostly in other regions?
It's happening also in Mátra. Part of it is because the wine industry is generally going down, and it's basically lawyers and big land owners that are buying the land, without any vision [for how to farm it]. They just go for EU subsidies, they don't even care about which crop.
Whereas if we want to prevent most of our land turning to desert in ten years, we would have to take drastic steps in reforming agriculture, and move away from this very silly industrial way. But most of the big investors are still pushing corn and sunflower and wheat, when it is already a desert. So since the past four or five years they’ve harvested nothing, and now the government they want to finance big investments in irrigation. And it's nonsense, since even now the rivers are getting dry. There will be no water for irrigation.
They still see isolated systems, they don't want to deal with the real solution. Old school farming, normal peasant farming, centuries ago, by today's standards, we would call it polyculture. But it's just how nature works. It's ten times more resilient to climate change, and it's better for everything.
FIN
Balint Losonci
Vári ut 32
3035 GYONGYOSPATA
Hungary
Tel: +36 30 8286 804
FURTHER READING
A wonderful June 2014 report on Balint Losonci at Wine Terroirs.
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