Barta Pince

Furmint held to line

Furmint sets the cadence for Vivien Ujvári, winemaker at Barta Pince in Mád, where cellar work and estate oversight sit in the same hands. Since 2016, she has worked here as winemaker, Chief Winemaker and general manager, a progression that matters because the role now reaches from the cellar to the broader running of the estate. In Tokaj, that means judging ripeness, style and release with the same discipline used to run the property itself.

Ujvári’s name is tied most closely to Furmint, handled with precision, tension and balance rather than weight. The estate’s signature bottlings keep that anchor visible: Egy Kis Dry Furmint Barta 2018, Oreg Kiraly Dulo Dry Furmint Barta 2015, Oreg Kiraly Dulo Sweet Szamorodni Furmint Barta 2013 50cl, and 2016 Furmint Öreg Király Dűlő. Read together, they place dryness and sweetness inside the same estate grammar. The through line is not volume. It is line.

Organic work on Öreg Király

The production scale stays small, with 15,000-20,000 bottles annually from 13.5 hectares of vineyards. Barta Pince works organically, and its focus sits within Tokaj PDO, with Furmint, Hárslevelű, Sárgamuskotály and Kövérszőlő in the cellar’s vocabulary. The house makes still white, dessert and sparkling wines, but the center of gravity remains Furmint, the variety most closely attached to Ujvári’s work here.

The estate’s standout ground is Öreg Király, a terraced vineyard dating to 1285. Its south-facing exposure on volcanic slopes gives the place its working frame, and the terraces keep the vineyard visible from the chateau rather than abstracted into a label name. Barta Pince does not treat the site as scenery alone; the vineyard name appears in the wines, keeping the bottle tied to the slope that formed it.

A cellar under a Renaissance house

The cellar is carved into the hillside beneath the restored Rákóczi-Aspremont chateau, a 16th-century estate brought back with its Renaissance house intact. The setting gives the work a particular quiet: stone, slope, and the measured light of a place built for patience. Above ground, the tasting rooms are bright and well lit, with white tablecloths and natural daylight that lets color register without theatre.

From the terraces, the view opens across the Tokaj region, but the room itself keeps a restrained tone. This is not a loud hospitality frame around the wines. It is a composed house around a cellar, a vineyard and a maker who carries production and management together.

The estate held in one cadence

What matters here is the join between place and responsibility. Ujvári’s station is not only at the bench-side of the wine program; it includes the terms under which the estate operates, harvest after harvest. That continuity is the substance behind the glass. The 2016 Furmint Öreg Király Dűlő runs back to Vivien Ujvári, the cellar, and Öreg Király itself.