Sue Tolson

Despite being British, I’m a European through and through. I’m a linguist, translator, editor, writer and teacher. I play with words. I read, I travel, I taste. My first love was languages, I studied French and Italian, but then languished in England for a few years before setting off on my European odyssey, making my home in four European countries over the next 18 years. I began in Hungary: for some masochistic reason, I wished to master the tongue-twisting Hungarian language, Poland was my next port of call, where I enjoyed the people and magic of Kraków, but never mastered the language, I’m afraid. I made a short stopover in Rome and then returned to the magic of Kraków before spending some years in the Bavarian beer capital, Munich. However, the strings that bound me to Budapest began to pull me back again, and so I returned. When did my love of wine begin, I’m not sure. My parents tell me that when my mum was expecting me, they were on holiday in Bulgaria where the wine was flowing. Or perhaps it was when I spent an academic year in Piemonte, home to the great Barolo, and the summer in Bordeaux, tasting wine every Friday afternoon. Hungarian wines also captured my fancy a little later. Who knows. A few years ago, I began to follow the WSET courses and my hobby, my amateur interest, developed into a passion and now my passion has become my profession. I now hold the WSET diploma, judge at the International Wine Challenge and am a member of the Circle of Wine Writers. I write a blog about Hungarian wines, aka Budapest Wine Snob, and find ever more to fuel my interest. Maybe all roads lead to WineSofa.