Patricius Winery was founded “as an oath to the future” by Dezsõ Kékessy and his daughter Katinka Kékessy. The production is split between the famous sweet Tokaji Aszú and the modern dry single varietal bottling. The fruit is sourced only from premier vineyards that they have slowly been acquiring, row by row, since 1997. The winery is located under a rebuilt winepress house in the Várhegy vineyard. The aesthetic of this old building, mentioned in the mid 19th century in a book about the region, has been preserved and carefully integrated into a modern subterranean gravity-flow winery. Native grape varieties including Furmint, Hárslevelű, Zéta , and Kövérszőlő are hand-harvested into small bins to prevent premature fermentation and then quickly transported to the computer-controlled state of the art gravity-flow winery. After a second fruit selection on a sorting table, the grapes drop through a de-stemmer into fermentation tanks. Movement of the wines is done without pumps. Each vineyard’s fruit is vinified separately at specific temperatures and then later blended to the Patricius house style. For the Aszú wines, this is base wine to which the individually hand picked, noble rot affected berries, mashed into a super sweet thick black paste, are then added. The more puttonyos (literally, ‘baskets’) of Aszú fruit, the sweeter and more complex the wine. This produces an intensely flavored, golden, and ageless wine.

This is not a ‘fortified’ sweet wine, simply an exceptionally concentrated one: at just 11.5% alcohol, it combines richness and refreshment like few other wines in the world. A little goes a long way here, and once, in a bygone era, this wine might well have been consumed as an apéritif or with an early course in a multi-course feast. We think it would be amazing to break this wine out before, rather than after, a special meal. The wine is characterized by a fine nose of tropical fruits, peach, and apricot, balanced by a lively acidity and kind sweetness on the palate. A long, smooth taste is giving an elegant finish. This kind of balance between high sugar, high acid, and low alcohol are what makes Tokaji wines magical. Enjoy it with dessert, goose liver dishes, and blue cheeses.