ROYAL TOKAJI ESSENCIA 2008  

Essencia is the world’s most concentrated essence of its ripest grapes. Royal Tokaji has been able to offer a few bottles of Essencia only six times in its twenty-six-year history. Essencia is the liquid gold that very slowly oozes from a pile of aszú grapes raisined by botrytis.

It is the essence of the grape, so rich, unctuous and sweet that yeasts have a near hopeless task to carry out their duty. From this rare liquid, our winemaker will select a tiny quantity produced only from A grade berries of truly great years.

It carries sweetness to such lengths that it feels stiff with sugar. It has so little alcohol that the legal definition of wine does not apply. You look at its chemical analysis and think there has been a mistake. We are putting this preposterous fluid into bottles? Not for mere drinking - Essencia is something you taste with friends, a sip at a time, and talk about to your grandchildren.

It calls for perfect conditions for botrytis, the noble rot, to shrivel Tokaj grapes into brown raisins, and deprive them of 90% of their juice.

Heaped up together in collecting bins, they slowly leak their honeyed quintessence, drop by drop, to form an amber pool. There is not enough to fill a barrel (and a barrel filled with juice this rich in sugar would leak as the staves leached out its meagre water content). Instead it goes down to the cellars, dark, damp and cool, in a fat glass demijohn.

Seven years later no violent transformation has taken place: fermentation is almost impossible for such concentration of sugar and it has achieved barely four degrees of alcohol. In cellar conditions, though, sugars and acids and the flavour compounds of the grapes gradually transmute into something unique; an unctuous syrup which at the same time is so perfumed and penetrating you can only hold a sip in your mouth at a time while it opens like a fan in all the organs of your head.

Vintage Notes & Vinification:

A very mild winter was followed by rain from spring until early summer, but in August the weather changed dramatically with warm and dry conditions prevailing. September was cool and wet again, delaying ripening. A lovely and very long Indian summer from the beginning of October turned a good vintage into a great one - the miraculous weather providing perfect conditions for developing aszú berries and the harvest was of unmatched quality.

Truly a great year, one of the finest in living memory and one of the top three vintages in the history of Royal Tokaji.

Between mid-October and mid-November - the ‘aszuzás’ took place, the process whereby the pickers handpick the selected Furmint, Hárslevelű and Yellow Muscat aszú berries one by one. Then the free run juice was collected and the alcoholic fermentation took place spontaneously and extremely slowly, seemingly stopping and re-starting over a period of four years. The wine (due to the low alcohol content it can only be called “wine” by special EU permission) was then aged for a further four years before bottling in 2016.

Tasting notes:

Deep gold colour with a hint of amber. Fresh ripe peach on the nose, spicy with hints of ginger-apricot chutney; so complex it takes a while to identify the full spectrum of aromas: nutmeg, tangerine, apricot jam, honey, all with an astonishing freshness and the background presence of botrytis. Full but graceful to taste, intensely concentrated, rich and sweet, a tapestry of exotic flavours balanced with taut acidity. Serve in a crystal spoon.