Furmint Spotlight Series 1: Introducing FurmintUSA

A view of Barta’s Öreg Király Vineyard

During the second round of my Furmint Adventures travels, I had the pleasure of dining at Barta Pince, which some of you might recall have been involved in salvaging the historic Öreg Király Vineyard in Tokaj.

During dinner, our traveling group had a bit of an impromptu video recording session with one of the leaders of the FurmintUSA project, Laszlo Balint. Not only is Laszlo a winemaker, wine writer, and wine critic, he’s also a passionate consumer/collector of Hungarian wine. He’s the emotional heartbeat of the FurmintUSA program, and he’s also a family man, and a good friend.

You get a chance to meet Laszlo (albeit virtually) in the latest video release from FurmintUSA (see embed below), taken from the conversation that was filmed between him and me during our stop at Barta (you also get a chance to see how many “uhms” I utter on video when jet-lagged). If more indigenous grape varieties had guys like Laszlo pushing them into wine marketing modernity, we’d be overrun with more interesting and geeky wine choices in the States…