Kabar

I snuck in a little teaser at the end of yesterday's post telling you that I owned what is, while not a collectible, a rare, yet inexpensive, bottle of wine. But, I didn't tell you what it was. Today, we will have the unveiling and we are going to taste it, albeit vicariously as we taste everything here. But, first we have to get to the winery.

We're in the Tokaji region of Hungary in the northwest corner of the country, not far from Kosice in Slovakia to the north nor Lviv in Ukraine to the east. Just to the west of the Tisa River, The weather here is somewhat continental, whatever I mean by that with overnight lows in the winter usually dipping below freezing (0C/32F) and daytime highs in the summer typically getting up around 80F/27C. Evm in the summer here, however, it's usually cloudy most of the day. IN a typical year, it rains here on nearly 40% of days, but on most of those days, it's just a sprinkle.

There are 6 grapes allowed in wines labeled as Tokaji (note that the region is Tokaji which is the possessive of Tokaj), all of them white. Furmint is by far the most important. Far less predominant and less known is Hárslevelű with the least grown being Kabar (I don't know the names of all 6 and could neither spell them nor pronounce them even if I did).

Kabar is a new grape. It was bred in a lab in Hungary in, at least I think, the 1970s. It is a cross between Harslevelu and Bouvier (not names for the family of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, but rather for the grape grower who found it growing on its property. Bouvier is not, at least not very often, a grape used in wines. Instead, it's one of the workhorses of central European breeding due to its naturally thick skin that makes it resistant to disease and bad weather.

The wine we are tasting today is made from 80% Kabar and 20% Furmint. And, unlike the more famous wines made in the region, this is a dry wine. Rather than waiting for botrytis (noble rot) to set in, these grapes were picked in early to mid-September from the famous Betsek Vineyard, one of the homes of some of the finest Tokaj in the world. Just a single barrel was made producing 280 bottles of this wine. That's it. In the world. 280 bottles.

This wine is probably not yet ready to drink today. So, in order to serve it to our readers, extremely unusually for white wine, we are going to decant this bottle for about 6 hours doing our best to control the temperature of this wine. We'd like to serve it at around 45F/7C to balance the extremely full body with the vibrant acidity of Kabar.

This wine was aged in a once-used Hungarian oak barrel (from a flavor standpoint, Hungarian oak picks up some of the characteristics of French oak and some of American oak while retaining some not seen elsewhere). It was a 226 liter (about 60 gallons for the metric challeneged) barrel, just a bit smaller than "standard," but somewhat larger than the barriques often used in France.

Kabar is not just a very acidic grape, but when harvested particularly ripe, it develops high natural sugar content so that after fermentation, it is a powerful, quite high in alcohol wine. This wine is full-bodied, almost creamy, and brimming with apricot and slightly warmed honey. It has the power to carry heavier foods, but the finesse to not overwhelm. 

While we take our first sips without food, today we are pairing with a loaded baked potato -- bacon, sour cream, chives, and replacing the typical cheese with a combination of creamy cheeses from central Europe.

I want a few more bottles.