Balatonakali-Dörgicse | Wine

The first experience with Lake Balaton for most of us is linked to our childhood, a time of innocence that quickly fades away. The transition to adulthood is sometimes a painfully difficult stage of adolescence, when one’s daughter, in my case one’s son, becomes interested in other things of the world as well. These are short, but meaningful years. Here in Hungary, they include every glimpse of Lake Balaton in the summer. One of them, in connection with Lake Balaton, is wine. The first trips to Lake Balaton as a child enrich you only with the view: rows of vineyards, mainly in the north on the slopes of Badacsony, Füred and elsewhere. The past and the present at the same time, since, since as we know, already the Romans… But in time, the quiet gazing is replaced by practice. The first glass of wine at Lake Balaton at sunset. Then in Tihany on the terrace of Rege Confectionary with its unrivalled view of the lake. Or in Balatonfüred in early autumn on the promenade, when recalling the memories of summer. Or during the summer conference of the Association of Young Archivists in Badacsony, between discussing two important professional issues. Either way, Lake Balaton and wine are inseparable. Even for the historian: in 1991, shortly after having read Károly Eötvös’s immortal work, Journey Around Lake Balaton, I got the idea to follow in his footsteps and take a tour around the lake myself. In the second half of August this year I did it. This is how I got to Badacsony again, where I tried to transport myself back to the milieu of the times of almost two hundred years earlier by reading through the poems of Sándor Kisfaludy. At that time, I felt I had succeeded in doing so, but now I know that I was closer to the image living in me, since I could not have been closer to anything else. But that those few glasses of wine I had there helped me create the illusion, is undeniable. Just like the fact, that I would not reach for a sweet red merlot today, as I did so in the late 1980s. Tempora mutantur. But a glass of wine at Lake Balaton does not change.