Karádi - Berger Borászat ― Erdőbénye ― Tokaji borok

Tokaj: The Delight of Diversity

Tokaj wine is about much more than just the Aszú style that made it famous.

Tokaj is on a par with the world’s finest wines regardless of style, whether dry, late harvest, Szamorodni, or Aszú. For this reason, it can be confidently mated with the best flavors of the world’s various cuisines. It would certainly be a shame to get stuck with the commonplace match of Aszú to dessert.

The wine region boasts an abundance of truly unique wine styles owing to the volcanic composition of the soils that often varies from vineyard to vineyard, the diversity of microclimates as shaped by the Zemplén Hills and the rivers Bodrog and Tisza, as well as the distinctive range of local grape varieties.

It was the beauty of the Zemplén countryside and our discovery of the inimitable character of the local wines that spurred us to found the Karádi-Berger estate in 1999. Today we cultivate four hectares in the Palandor and Narancsi vineyards, and have embarked upon renovating a vintner’s mansion in the village of Erdőbénye.

We believe that the potential of a superbly sited vineyard cannot be realized unless we enable each vine to concentrate the sun’s energy and the minerals of the soil in just a few bunches of grapes. Therefore, we leave less than 1 kilo of fruit on each vine. The plantations we cultivate consist of old vines whose roots reach down several meters underground to collect their diet of minerals and trace elements. As a result, they provide us with fruit that has greater depth and complexity of flavor.

We harvest the grapes selectively depending on the wine style in mind. For our dry wines, we select the finest yellow-ripe bunches, while the sweet, late harvest wines are pressed from bunches partially affected by botrytis. And, of course, we cherry-pick botrytised berries to make our Aszú wines.

Hand-crafted using the bare minimum of technology, our wines are traditionally fermented and matured in casks of the Gönc and Szerednye type, both made to order from local Zemplén oak.

Szilvia Karádi and Zsolt Berger, proprietors
boraszat@karadiesberger.hu