Everything about Essencia seems otherworldly. So concentrated and rare, it’s like an unguent not meant to be drunk but administered in pagan rites. You might imagine Cleopatra’s mermaid attendants smoothing it on her eyelids as she drifted down the Nile.
It’s certainly one of the most expensive wines in the world (in Harrods, a 37.5cl bottle – the only size made – is £995 for the 2016, while the 2003 is more than £1,600). It’s also vanishingly rare: there are, for example, almost no bottles of the 1993 left (only 400 half-litres were made) and later vintages are made in tiny quantities of about 2,500 litres.
The first records of vineyards in Tokaj date to the 13th century; the sweet wines of the region were famous for centuries, lauded as an elixir by everyone from Russian emperors to Jane Austen and Dickens.
Royal Tokaji Company in its modern form was started when Hugh Johnson and a group of swashbuckling friends persuaded the vignerons of Mád in the centre of Tokaj to go into business with them in the early 1990s, after the fall of the Soviet empire. The first vintage of Essencia was 1993.
Making Essencia is a drawn-out process. Botrytised aszú grapes (aszú means ‘dried’ or ‘shrivelled’ in Hungarian) are put into 400-litre tanks and left to settle, pressed under nothing but their own weight. The juice that drips from already dry, puckered fruit is thick, concentrated, loaded with sugar and acidity. Just as rainwater filtering through the Cambrian hills picks up mineral traces from the rock, so the aszú juice takes on skin character as it filters down through the tank of berries, a process that can take two months, ‘so it’s a kind of skin contact. You get phenolics,’ winery director Zoltán Kovács notes.
It is collected into glass demijohns and left in the cellar to ferment – so viscous is the liquid that the yeasts struggle to get the sugars up to even 2% alcohol. Over a long period of selection, in only the best years, the finest juice is selected for Essencia. Between 2,000 and 3,000 half bottles will be made on average.
As the wines age, they develop a fine-grained, tannic dryness on the mid-palate, always freshened by acidity. That, and sugar, is the secret of this extraordinary wine. Essencia wines clock in at well over 12gsl (grams per litre) acidity (2017 is unusually low at 10.4gsl), and residual sugar levels are almost always over 500gsl. For comparison, the average in Sauternes would be around 130gsl sugar and under 5gsl acidity.
Few other wines show vintage as transparently as Essencia. Cooler years for example – 2009 or 2007 – produced a lovely tight, tannic dryness at the finish; but even in a heatwave year like 2003, the acidity courses through, livening the palate as if with sparks of electrifying energy.
And it’s this acidity that gives Essencia its rarest property of all: ageability. The wines seem subject to different rules of physics, their ageing slowed to a crawl. All will stay fresh for decades. Some, like the gorgeously dark 1999, with what Johnson called ‘off-the-scale acidity’, I imagine lasting into the next century and beyond.
