Furmint

Identity

Furmint is the grape of Tokaj. It carries the aszú wines that eighteenth-century Europe placed above all others.

And it appears in the specification of Palette, a tiny Provençal appellation, as a rare permitted variety.

It is the kind of fact you check twice before writing it down. It holds: Palette names twenty-four grapes, and Furmint is one of them.

A pedigree that leads back to Gouais

The VIVC gives its crossing: Gouais Blanc × Alba Imputotato.

Gouais Blanc again. This corpus has already met it behind Chardonnay, Gamay, Melon de Bourgogne and Auxerrois — all from Heunisch Weiss, which is its other name. Gouais was a despised variety, banned in places for its mediocrity, and it turns out to be the parent of a good share of the best Europe drinks.

It is one of ampelography's best-established ironies: the variety people pulled up is the parent of the ones they revere.

In the vineyard

Bud burst mid-season, ripeness late, high vigour, upright habit, short pruning.

Late ripening is the condition of its Hungarian use: the fruit must hang into autumn for botrytis to settle and make the aszú berries.

In the glass

Its decisive trait is high acidity — 4 to 5, the top of the scale, level with Riesling and Chenin in this corpus.

That is what makes great sweet wine. Sugar without acid gives syrup; it is acidity that holds a wine at 150 grams of sugar and stops it sagging. Furmint belongs to the same functional family as Chenin, Riesling and Petit Manseng: whites able to carry a great deal of sugar without losing their nerve.

Medium to full body, high alcohol, no tannin. The two descriptors on this entry are readings of that register, not quotations.

Where it is named

At Palette, and nowhere else in this corpus.

Its Hungarian career — Tokaj, the aszú wines, the dry Furmints that have grown there over recent decades — is outside this corpus: no Hungarian source was opened for this entry, and it will therefore say no more than the French sources establish.

That is an acknowledged gap and a large one. A reader looking up Furmint is looking for Tokaj.

What it gets confused with

Nothing, in France, because you do not meet it. Its interest for a taster lies elsewhere: in the family of very high-acid whites capable of sweet wine, where it sits beside Chenin, Riesling and Petit Manseng. Each reaches the same end by a different road — noble rot for some, raisining on the vine for another.