Region & History

An emperor is said to have started it all. According to legend, Probus — Roman emperor from 276 to 282, himself a native of the Danube province of Pannonia — lifted a centuries-old ban that had forbidden his subjects there from planting vines. He then had his soldiers lay out vineyards on Badacsony. The story isn't documented, only long passed down. What is certain, though, is that monks farmed royal and monastic vineyards around the lake in the eleventh century, and winegrowing kept expanding over the centuries that followed.

By the eighteenth century, Badacsony wine was considered the finest in the entire Kingdom of Hungary. Szürkebarát, the 'grey monk,' owes its name to the Pálos monks who founded a monastery on Badacsony in 1263. Their habits were grey at first, before the order switched to white in 1341. Even so, the colour stuck to the grape's name.

Phylloxera reached the region toward the end of the nineteenth century and nearly wiped out the old vineyards. During replanting, Hungary's 1893 wine law dictated which varieties could be planted anew, and it recommended almost exclusively white ones. Red wine has remained the exception on these slopes ever since.

One single variety tells this story more vividly than any other. Kéknyelű, the 'blue-stemmed' grape, bears only female flowers and produces almost no fruit without a pollinator like Budai zöld planted in the neighboring row. After a devastating frost in the 1980s, it was nearly abandoned, and in 1993 it was even uprooted from the last experimental plot. Cuttings from just 0.3 hectares near Nemesgulács were what winegrowers like Szeremley Huba used to start over after the fall of Communism. Today the planted area is growing again, to around fifty hectares.

Six separate wine regions now lie around the lake, Badacsony among them, and over all of them stands the name Balaton as a protected geographical indication. Badacsony only received its current product specification in 2012, though the rules trace back to the 1893 wine law. The lake lends its name to every one of these regions.