“This smells like smoke and tastes like licking lime juice off a piece of solid lava”, I said. The wine in my glass made me feel as if I was standing on top of a volcano peering down its crater, watching the boiling lava. Erika nodded: “this is what Tokaj tastes like.”

Minerality in wine - aromas or flavors that evoke rocks, flint or sea shells - is a hotly debated topic. There is no evidence that the soil in which a vine grows adds minerals, or anything that could taste like it, directly to a wine. But any wine lover will tell you that wines grown on volcanic soils, whether it is Carricante from Mount Etna, an Assyrtiko from Santorini or a Furmint from Tokaj, have a sameness that can only be described as… minerality. For some, it presents as a saline tinge on the tongue, for others, it is an aroma that smells like struck match or wet stone, and for me it is a combination of an acidity so linear it feels like it could cut glass, and a taste of what I imagine a wet volcanic rock tastes like. 

Fifteen million years ago, Tokaj was a seabed at the bottom of the Pannonian sea. It was a patchwork of active volcanoes spitting lava. Today, the soils of Tokaj are silent witnesses to that active volcanic era.

When you scratch the soil, you find volcanic ash and clay (the famous nyirok), pumice and basalt. These soils are great for growing vines: they are porous and soak water up like a sponge, which is very useful to nourish vines through the hot Hungarian summers. They are also dark and ensure heat is released continuously and slowly at the end of summer, when grapes ripen. And while rich in minerals, they are very low in organic nutrients, especially nitrogen. 

Vines are fine with poor soils - they do not need much to sustain themselves. But natural yeasts do need nutrients to happily ferment. And this is where “minerality” comes from: when yeasts are a little hungry, the aromas they produce veer away from the fruity into the savory, herbal and mineral - the exact aromas and flavors that leave impressions of flint, struck match or salinity.

At least, that is one theory. It seems that no researcher has been able to conclusively deduce where exactly minerality is coming from. But anyone tasting a wine from Tokaj, including NR6, will tell you: this wine has more than fruit and floral aromas and flavors - it has a sense of place, a sense of terroir, a sense of volcano. 

Perhaps the point is not to understand minerality. Perhaps the point is to savor it and to let it transport you to the bottom of the Pannonian sea, with its volcanoes, lava and its smoldering, liquid history.