Europe 2017: Day #27 To Tokaj

Tuesday, 29 August 2017

When Robyn and I first started planning our trip we had thought of ending it at Warsaw. Robyn has come to the conclusion that four nights in a city is a good length of time: day one to cover the travel getting there; day two to get oriented in the city with bus trips and walking tours; day three to include a trip outside the city to an area of interest; and day four to pick up on all the sites we might have missed. A quick calculation on the cities on the itinerary indicated that we would probably utilise a full four weeks at that rate.

Then she started to talk to some Polish friends who told her that we couldn't travel to Poland without visiting Krakow.  So we added that in as, yes, it did look interesting.  But that presented us with a problem: flights out of Krakow were either infrequent or difficult to get into the schedule.  Which brought us to the question of Budapest.  We'd visited the city about 25 years ago on a brief one day tour out of Vienna and had always said that we would like to return if we had the chance.

Rather than go back to Warsaw to catch a flight home we decided to keep heading south, so Budapest was added, and now the holiday was starting to stretch out of control if we stayed with the four days per city approach. Dropping the time spent in each of Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius and Warsaw by a day each helped, and then provided us with the opportunity to take a few days getting from Warsaw to Budapest through Slovakia.

It was beginning to come together and culminated when Robyn found a two-day guided tour starting in Krakow and ending in Budapest running through the Tokaj wine area of Slovakia and Hungary. We were sold.

I'd long known about the Tokaj wine, though don't remember ever trying any, due to the requirement for winemakers in Rutherglen, Victoria, to change the name of the fortified wine they make from Muscadelle grapes, formerly known as Tokay, now as Topaque.  So I was interested in visiting the area.

An added bonus of the tour was a door-to-door pickup and drop off, meaning we didn't have to lug our bags all over Krakow, plus it was a private tour, meaning just us and the driver/guide.

Andre duly arrived at the appointed time and we had no trouble packing our increasing luggage into the van and getting underway.  Our first stop was at Spis Castle over the border in Slovakia. This is everything you think an old castle should be; well, at least one in ruins anyway.  It has a commanding position on top of a hill overlooking a long river valley on one side and the wide plains of Slovakia on the other.  Destroyed by fire in the 18th century you had to have a bit of imagination to picture it in its heyday, which I'm sure was magnificent. I'm also glad that Robyn and I climbed the hill to this castle near the end of our trip after we'd got our legs used to all the steps and walking.

Our guide indicated that he'd never seen the castle so crowded.  We had thought it was a standard work day but were informed it was a Slovakian public holiday.  Given the Slovakian kids would be returning to school on the following Monday or Tuesday, a lot of them and their families seemed to be out and about in the good weather.  Can't say as I blamed them.

We had a rest in the car after the castle and headed to Kosice, the second largest city in Slovakia after the capital Bratislava.  This is a great town, with a wonderful cathedral, and thriving pedestrian zone in the centre. Though the public holiday meant that not everything was open and that there weren't a lot of people in the streets.

Start of pedestrian area with cathedral in background

Cathedral facade

Lunch and another drive got us to the Tokaj winery area in southeastern Slovakia.  The wine area is only 20% in Slovakia - with the rest in Hungary - and we figured we would be staying in Slovakia given the tour company was based in that country.  Didn't bother me, the main thing was we were staying overnight on the Ostrozovic winery grounds, having dinner there, then being taken through the wine cellars and finishing with a tasting.

Winery front entrance

The cellars were something else.  Dug out of the rock under the winery by mining experts, the tunnels were wet and cool with the barrels lining the walls covered in mold sometimes 2-3 cm thick.

The tasting itself was rather amusing, or at least we gained that impression.  Some 13 wines were offered and the 10 or 12 other people had a great time following our Slovakian host.  As the spiel was given in a language of which we understood not a word, I suspected we might have been rather bored.  Not a hope. We had a great time, and the wines were wonderful examples of the many ways that a basic stock wine can be impacted by the botrytis mold.

A tremendous end to a great day.