Pressing must aboard a sailboat, inventing a new Balaton dish, building boats and making radio shows. The cellar-break of the wine-makers of the Badacsony Circle.
The aged but still elegant sailboat, Phoenix maneuvers out of the port of Badacsony with its diesel engine rattling. It is the beginning of October, the sun is burning but its cold. The boat that was built in 1956 was once used to transport happy trade union members on Lake Balaton, now six wine-makers stand on its stem, pressing must with a wine press.
The board of sailboats were not designed for winemaking in the first place, but many of the wine-makers aboard Phoenix are avid sailers who 'imagine everything to take place aboard a sailboat first'--and the unusual pairing has a more serious reason as well.
Bence Laposa, Gergely Istvándy, Péter Váli, László Szeremley and Gábor Kardos (the latter two representing the Szeremley Winery) are well-known outside the winemaking circles as well. You can meet most of them on the shelves of supermarkets as well--but not among the poor, lower-shelf kind of wines. They came up with the idea of popularizing the Balaton lifestyle, beside quality wines of course. This includes both harvest and sailing, so there's for the wine-press on the stem.
The cooperation of wine-makers brought about the foundation of the Badacsony Circle, which started out of a joint harvest last year. Since then, there has been a 'Balaton wine to Balaton restaurants' program, in the frame of which they clinked gigantic wine glasses, held wine shows in Budapest, and invited the chefs of the most popular Balaton resturants to Badacsony and invented a new Balaton dish, fish pierogi together with them. Apart from the new member of the Circle, Tamás Borbély, the passengers of the must boat also included the Hungarian king of cheese, T. Nagy Tamás, which signals that the Badacsony Circle looks further than the bottom of the glass.
Looking at the bottom of the glass, however, still remains an important part of the activities of the Circle--also in the sense that they prefer to employ the method of informal drinking instead of bare professional discussions as means of promotion. So the program is based on drinking (as well), in the frame of which they chat about the new dish of Balaton and the mistake the camembert-dry red wine pairing is.
