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Oremus

The owners of Vega Sicilia are building for Oremus director/winemaker Andras Bacso the winemaking facility of his dreams. With luck, this amazing example of modernity in the service of tradition will be ready for the 1999 crush. The juice and wine will move entirely by gravity. Sophisticated rotating fermenters for the extraction of raisined fruit (added to must, not finished wine) and refrigerated storage for freshly picked Aszu are among the modern touches. Bacso believes strongly in the wines' two years' stay in Gonci barrels, one-third of them replaced each year by a local tonnelier working with oak from the Zemplin Hills. "With a really exceptional Aszu year, I'll experiment with longer aging," he explains. Even the simplest dry wine here rests in barrel for three to five months, naturally clarifying in the pure, fungus-filtered air of Oremus ancient cellars. Bacso, cellarmaster Lajos Kun and enologist Peter Molnar strive to achieve a fine balance of sweetness with acids and alcohol. A typical 5-puttonyos wine, for instance, won't have much over the minimum requirement of 120 grams per liter residual sugar. The rest will have been converted to alcohol, with a 12.5% level typical, of which 1% is lost through the barrels during elevage. Fruit from multiple parcels in different villages and microclimates is assembled to achieve the most complex wine and the best balance of fruit and botrytis in a given vintage. Most of Oremus' 130 acres are in Mandulas Kutpatka, Seredi-Vay and Szentver, four top growths of Tolcsva, but several smaller parcels promise to add enormously to the quality of future wines. Just outside Satoraljaujhely new vines are being planted in the parcel from which Oremus derives its name, and from which in 1630 Calvinist pastor and vintner Laczko Szepsi is recorded as having crushed the first Aszu wine. Three acres in the Mariassy, a sheltered heat and humidity trap just outside Tokaj, are also going in. The first vintage under the current regime was 1993 but, like all of the other foreign investors, the owners of Oremus were required to purchase large stocks of older wine vinified under the Communist-era regime. Bacso, who from 1990 to 1993 directed the then-monolithic state monopoly, seems to have viewed this requirement as a special challenge to taste with tenacity and select the best. Many older wines I tasted are still for sale, and demonstrated that great wines, though doubtless the rare exceptions, were bottled even in the "bad old days."

From Today Tokaji (Sep 1999) by David Schildknecht

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1997 Tokaji Furmint

Color: White

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Oremus

1997 Tokaji Furmint

1995 Tokaji Szaraz Szamorodni

1972 Tokaji Szaraz Szamorodni

1996 Tokaji Furmint Noble Late Harvest

1975 Tokaji Aszu 5 Puttonyos

1981 Tokaji Aszu 6 Puttonyos

1975 Tokaji Aszu Eszencia

1972 Tokaji Aszu 6 Puttonyos

1983 Tokaji Aszu Eszencia

1964 Tokaji Szaraz Szamorodni

1968 Tokaji Aszu 4 Puttonyos

1995 Tokaji Aszu 6 Puttonyos

1994 Tokaji Aszu 5 Puttonyos

1998 Tokaji Furmint

1959 Tokaji Aszu Eszencia

1993 Tokaji Aszu 5 Puttonyos

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