The Culture of Wine: Hungary
Hungary had a huge influence on European football. In 1953, Hungary became the first team to beat England in England, 6-3 in a match which had a lasting legacy on the development of English football (Hungary then beat England 5-1 in Budapest in the return fixture). The next year Hungary reached the World Cup Final; having beaten West Germany 8-3 in the group stages, they lost 3-2 in the final to the same team—like Austria in 1938, they were the best team in the world but couldn't quite prove it. Their most famous player was Ferenc Puskás—the best goal of the year anywhere in the world is named after him. He moved to Real Madrid in 1958 and even played four times for Spain, and didn't return to Hungary until 1981. That was because of the brutal repression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956. His team, Budapest Honvéd, had been playing a European tie in Bilbao at the time of the uprising, and the players didn't return.
The Hungarian Revolution was a seismic moment in European political thinking. It questioned intellectual and ethical attachment to communism, dividing opinion on whether this repression was a fault of communism or the Russian interpretation of communism. The revolution led to slightly more liberal governance in Hungary than other Soviet countries, but the country was still very much a Soviet satellite. It was the first to be liberated in 1989 as the Soviet empire collapsed, with famous, iconic images of streams of East Germans crossing the border to Austria after it was opened.
1989 was also the year that Royal Tojaki was launched, in a brave and successful attempt to revive the sweet wines of Tokaji. These had foundered under Soviet rule: wine, especially expensive sweet wine, was seen as bourgeois. The Soviet Union gave each country a particular agricultural or industrial speciality to support their economies; for instance, Bulgaria was given wine. Hungary's wine received no financial support, and Tokaji was in danger of dying out completely. Tokaji is one of Europe's great historical regions, the first to introduce regulations on to how to farm vines and make wine back in the 1500s. The wines were served in the courts of Europe, considered the finest on the continent and predating Sauternes by more than a couple of hundred years. Since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, Tokaji has been revived, with international investment in new wineries also helping local growers and producers advance the region and their own careers.
Another famous style of wine is "Bull's Blood" made in Eger, also in north-east Hungary. Like many of Hungary's wines, it’s maybe not as famous as it once was but its name remains memorable. The wines have been exported since the 13th century, demonstrating how widespread Hungarian wine and culture was. The name Bull's Blood comes from a Turkish siege in the 16th century: as we move into central and southern Europe the clash between Islamic Turkey and Christian Europe becomes an increasing trend.
Budapest is the capital city, two cities—Buda and Pest—on either side of the Danube river. Like Vienna, it's grand and very central European. It can also be quite seedy, and there's still a post-communist, post-Soviet feel. There are also a lot of tourists: it's a beautiful city, and walking across the Danube along the bridges gives a sense of its grandeur and history. Many of those tourists are from central and eastern Europe which Hungary sits right in the middle of. It's a pity the country is now run by a far-right quasi-dictatorship, though that's in keeping with Europe's difficult history.
Even though Hungary sits in the heart of central Europe with historic connections to its neighbours, its language is connected to the Baltic states of Finland and Estonia, which has created decades of speculation about its development. German, Slovenian, Slovakian, and Romanian are spoken on the borders, but 99% of the population speaks Hungarian. That’s Hungary: connected to disconnected to its neighbours, with its influence spreading across Europe even when the country has been isolated.
