You've seen those wine cellars with travertine counters, cleverly interlocking zebra-wood racks, and age-tracking software. All that money could go into wine! Don't they get it? It's a cellar! You know, as in cell? It's for roots and coal, spiders and snakes. This is where you lock bad children. Pity the naughty little wine snoblings, reduced to screaming, "Let me out, Mommy! There's white Zinfandel in here!!”
Europe does cellars right; ancient, dank caves where you don't need the aim of William Tell to spit. One Old World winemaker lifted a hatch in his cellar floor and showed me shrimp swimming around, inches below our feet. Talk about damp! Another cellar had a foot of mold covering the walls and ceilings. In it, glimmering randomly like mosaics at Ravenna, were coins from every era. I pulled a Euro out of my pocket and pushed it into the black sponge and there it stuck, right next to an ancient Roman denarius.
The caves of Champagne are a maze of chalk tunnels, like a colony for effervescent termites. I know a restaurant with an underwater cellar; you order wine and they send a diver down for it. But the most mysterious, fascinating cellars of all are in the Tokaj-Hegyalja region of Hungary, home of the mythical, sweet, Tokaji Aszú wine.
Long before the Rhine and Sauternes, since at least 1571, Hungary has been spinning mold into gold, letting the fuzzy fingers of botrytis cinerea shrivel grapes to where they yield but one glass per vine. But such a glass!
In a good year, the first few drops become Eszencia, a kind of scummy pond sludge too sweet to drown in, and so rare they sell it by the spoonful in Hungarian restaurants for the equivalent of $19 a sip. At less than 3% alcohol, it's not so much wine as highly revered bodily fluid. When it's not being worshipped it’s blended into Aszú.
Grapes are next milled into paste and dumped by the bucket, or puttonyo, into a base wine, which starts them fermenting. The current fashion is minimal aging in barrels kept brim-full to prevent oxidation. This "Sauternes style" wine is pale gold, flowery-soft and creamy. Delicious, certainly, but a far cry from the storied stuff that Louis XIV called "King of wine and wine of kings," and that Napoleon III's wife, Eugénie, credited for her girlish complexion at the age of ninety-four. Still, it's far better than sixteen years ago, when communists were apt to disguise plonk by instant-aging with oxidation as well as subjecting it to fortifying, pasteurization and other indignities too brutal to mention.
Now, traditionalists are reviving the real Tokaji Aszú, unique and unearthly. As wine writer Hugh Johnson put it, "There's something going on in those cellars.”
And it's in the walls. Traditional Tokaji ferments for a couple of years (compared to days for most table wines), as well as aging in cellars of volcanic rock—cold, damp tunnels, up to twenty miles long. Their walls are covered in microflora like no place else on earth: microbes, yeast, bacteria and over fifty species of fungus. This mold creeps down to blanket everything in sight, including bottles, barrels and the surface of fermenting wine. Though barrels are neither full nor tightly stoppered, no oxygen gets in.
During this process, called darabbantartás, strange things happen. Sugars caramelize, not because of heat, but because amino acids break down, turning the wine from gold to amber. The breakdown of glutamic acid infuses the wine with umami, the savory fifth flavor embodied in sautéed mushrooms and soy sauce. This adds an overall tang, plus distinct notes of dark rye bread.
Even more than red wine, old-school Tokaji is a pharmacy of health products. Polyamines and nitrogenous compounds promote cell metabolism and the synthesis of RNA, DNA and protein. It's also crammed with antioxidants including resveratrol, vitamin E and superoxide-dismustaste (SOD), which, variously prevent cancer and dementia, lower blood pressure, and foster good skin tone, like the empress said.
All this, and a taste like heaven. They have rye bread in heaven, don't they? So next time you get the urge to clean your basement – put down that mop! Sometimes grottiness is next to godliness.
