Nyakas is indisputably one of the most popular names on the wine palette of Hungary. Their wines are everywhere, from supermarkets through wine shops to the corner shop. Their labels are clear, the style of wines is too, so if you buy some wine of their wine, you have a good chance of getting a fresh, acidic white or rosé in your glass, no matter what the vintage. To manage this, a happy marriage of many things is needed. On the one hand, there is the 150 hectares of vineyard (30 hectares on the Nyakas Hill in the village of Tök and 120 hectares near Budajenő) and on the other, the professional winery, where the light reductive white wines are perfected. Their slogan is ‘fresh, crisp and aromatic’. This has been so well learnt by Hungarian consumers that they buy 820,000 of the annual 900,000 bottles within the country! Wine festival fans do not come across this winery so often, but there are of course logical reasons for this. From such a winery, they send out about 3000 bottles a day for sale, while just 20-30 bottles are usually sold at a wine festival within this same time. With such quantities, and in addition such a reputation, it is not worth travelling all over the place, building wooden stands and hiring the necessary staff. They plan  to plant a further 35 hectares of vines on the Nyakas Hill, but when we asked about the varieties, we got an interesting answer, “Fashion is changing quicker than we can plant; moreover it then takes five years for a vineyard to become productive, so we are probably flying a bit blind. We are confident about the future if blends come to the fore instead of varietals (in Hungary, there has been a renaissance of varietal wines over the last 25 years –ed.), so we could increase the volume of a specific wine and, on the other hand, we could react faster to the incidental changes on the market. If a blend doesn’t sell, we will immediately have the possibility to make varietal wines again.”  In their opinion, Hungarian rosé wine is at its peak, while the other smash hit, Irsai Olivér, will come to the end of its glory days within four or five years. “We also don’t need to be prophets to see this, as taking a look at where and how much Irsai was planted over the last few years is enough. As soon as those become productive, that will be the immediate end of the market.” If you like the even more serious, oaked wines, there is no reason for concern, as their oenological experts are experimenting with the Menádok series, producing Chardonnay ‘sur lie’ and using ‘battonage’. They produce a total of just 5-10,000 bottles of these wines and their price is also much higher. If you pre-register at the winery, you can do some wine-tasting and visit the vineyards.