The murmuring of female voices hung over the vineyard like a soft blanket. I did not understand a single word but the language of women catching up is universal. It was my first time harvesting with an all-female team. And it was the first time the team was entirely local. 

Harvesting in Tokaj had always been a community affair. Women from the 27 villages that make up Tokaj gather at dawn where the grapes are ripe. They walk the vineyard vine by vine, harvesting not whole bunches, but individual grapes, picking only those perfectly mature and beautifully botrityzed (more on the magic of botrytis, or noble rot, in a next chapter!). Doing this meticulous work entirely by hand, they pass news from one village to another. 

Winemaking is a form of storytelling and nowhere is that more palpable than in Tokaj. The skill to recognize a ripe grape in the blink of an eye is passed from mother to daughter. Each matriarch is an expert in a slope, a vineyard, a grape variety. Their expertise is called upon once a year, when the summer subsides and the misty mornings signal the start of autumn. 

They are retired nurses, bankers, shopkeepers or teachers, but above all, they are Tokaji - from Tokaj. They continue a winemaking tradition that started over a thousand years ago and propelled this region in north east Hungary to fame in the 18th century, when their sweet wines were served in palaces in Vienna, St Petersburg and Brussels. 

"Can you taste the female touch,” Erika asked me when I first tasted her wines in her winery. And although wines may be gender-blind, each of her wines has a precision and finesse that can only be achieved through careful handling of the grapes at every step, a meticulous focus in the winery, a ruthless obsession with cleanliness, and the inherited knowledge of her land. 

A wine of queens, made by a queen of wine. That is NR6.