Kendi is a real Bor

Normally I would say puns are a form of humor beneath this blog. This one was too easy though. Bor is Hungarian for wine and we are in Hungarian wine country at Eger.

They have all of these cellars built into the sides of hills.

Some of them, like this one, only sell wine to take out in big plastic jugs.

But in others they have decorated the cave and you can come in and have a taste.

It’s between 50 cents and a dollar usually for one deciliter. They dispense with the formality of bottles for this young wine and often pour your glass straight from the tap or from plastic bottles like these.

The main varietals are similar to those in Moravia, since we are just south of Slovakia. We are still about 100 km from the far northeastern corner of the country where Tokaj is made. The most famous wine from Tokaj, Aszu, is sweet and made from grapes infected with the noble rot, which were first used for making wine in Hungary. They are, however, starting to produce dry whites in Tokaj like Kendra’s favorite Furmint. When the Hungarian prime minister during the 1848 revolution, Szemere Bertalan, was living in exile after the failure of the revolution, he tried to gain patronage from Friedrich Engels by sending him two dozen bottles of wine from Eger, Tokaj, and Lake Balaton. Engels didn’t like it because it was too sweet. Szemere is responsible for the law that emancipated Jews in Hungary.

You can have a goulash cookout here, too (notice the hook for a bucket) to go with the large volumes of wine you buy. The whole experience is a lot of fun.

Finally, I’ve been thinking that I should start tucking in my shirts.