Hungarian wines are associated with two brand names, one - Tokaji - ancient and honourable, the other - Bull's Blood - modern and cheap. Tokaji is a subject in itself, Bull's Blood no subject at all. But what about the rest? I acquired the taste for Hungarian wine in a dingy cellar in Pest, where Chardonnay from Lake Balaton was served from a barrel. After a day delivering contraband to shaggy dissidents, I was in dire need of what the communists called "normalisation", and this Chardonnay's peasant-like shrewdness made the whole fraught day seem like a festival. For a brief period I even had the illusion of understanding that absurd language and the strange people who speak it. Lake Balaton Chardonnay is now exported under the Chapel Hill brand, and has acquired an American accent - it even has lipped bottles, the equivalent of baseball caps and Bermuda shorts. This may be why it no longer has the same effect on my linguistic abilities as on that memorable but unremembered evening.
Hungarian viticulture has improved so much in recent years that only post-communist inertia can explain our ignorance of it. Now, thanks to Alex Liddell's The Wines of Hungary, the 22 wine-growing regions have been meticulously mapped. And thanks to Wines of Westhorpe (e-mail: wines@westhorpe.co.uk) you can save yourself and the planet the thousand or so air miles, and visit these regions in the glass.
Within minutes of the Buda suburbs you are in vine-wreathed hillsides, scattered with summer houses and the remains of old farms. Here, delicate and fruity white wines are grown, and an example of the Budai Pinot Gris, with its elderflower aroma, was a wonderful reminder of those summer days in 1988, when the zeitgeist seemed to be hovering with a deceptive made-in-America smile above the city, like the Fata Morgana known in Hungarian as a delibab, a word successively applied to nationalism, communism, socialism, capitalism, Habsburg nostalgia, folk culture - in short, to anything in which the Hungarians happen momentarily to believe.
By contrast with Budai, the wines of Villanyi and Szekszard are ripe, rich and complex. The 1998 Pinot Noir from Villanyi is a creditable rival to the lesser Burgundies, while a Szekszardi Cabernet Franc 2000 (a good vintage for Hungarian reds) won the praise even of our Romanian guests, never quick to praise anything Hungarian. This wine is vinified by Vencel Garamvari in his labyrinthine cellars under Budapest; its deep blackcurrant colour and fine claret nose show the Cabernet Franc - the red grape of the Loire Valley - at its most alluring. It is made to last, and, at the ridiculous price of £24.80 per case of six, should be bought in quantities now, before its qualities are known.
