Tokay for you!
News Flash: European Wine Authorities take Historic Step of Making Wine Labels Less Confusing
To those of you who are completely uninterested in wine, this will seem like a small thing. But for the wine geeks of the world, it’s a great step towards making it easier to predict the qualities and quality of the wine inside the bottle based on the label outside the bottle. There’s still a long way to go, but this helps…
One of the most vexing aspects of european wine labelling practices is that similar (or identical) terminology is often used to describe very different wines. One example is the Tokay or Tokaji designation of certain hungarian wines — usually very sweet dessert wines that are peach / gold in color and rich with delicious honeysuckle and tropical fruit flavors. Problem is that certain Alsatian wines also use the same designation — Tokay d’Alsace — to describe dry (i.e. not sweet) wines made from the pinot gris grape (which, by the way, is called pinot grigio in Italy — argh).
It seems that Hungary has been lobbying for some time to prevent other wine-growing regions from using the Tokay designation and they have recently succeeded in convincing Italy and Alsace to give up using their own variants. The handover of the term was symbolized by the passing of a crystal bowl in the shape of a bunch of grapes. Such ceremony!
Anyway, I happen to know of several oenophiles (better known as cork dorks) who read this blog, so this post is for them 
