Hungarian wines in Decanter World Wine Award 2023 – Furmint and Tokaj shine

Arguably the world’s biggest wine competition, the Decanter World Wine Awards has again set a record with the highest number of entries ever, judging 18,250 wines from 57 countries in this year.

The 2023 competition brought together an influential team of 236 wine experts from 30 nations, including 53 Masters of Wine and 16 Master Sommeliers. With more than 100 overseas judges and talented regional experts focused on what’s in the glass, DWWA’s results provide consumers and the trade with a trusted guide to the dynamic world of wine.

The winner is Australia, which topped the list with a record 10 Best in Show medals, a fifth of the wines that have won this highest accolade internationally.

Hungarian Furmint was also impressive, winning all three platinum medals in style based on one sweet and two dry varieties. The famous sweet Tokaji aszú and Szamorodni are not new to the competition’s medal list. Wine lovers know them from the 16th century to the present day. Furmint as a dry wine is growing steadily worldwide and the results show that quality is on the rise, with Oremus Mandolás Tokaji Furmint 2020, Tokaj-Hétszőlő’s Selection 2011 both scoring 97 points and Dobogó Winery’s Úrágya Furmint 2019 got 95 points (gold medal).

Hungarian wineries got plentiful awards this year too. There were 146 awards: 3 platinum, 11 gold, 54 silver, and 78 bronze, overall the highest number of awards for Hungary on the Decanter World Wine Award.

If we look at the regional allocation of awards Tokaj is the absolute winner with 45 medals, all the 3 platinum came from this wine region, and 9 out of 11 gold also. So the dominance of Tokaj is prevalent if we count Mad Wine’s Pop Dry wine the dominance is even more overwhelming.

Balaton also gave a steady performance, however Balaton as a wine regions consist of many wine districts so it is a bit hard to compare Balaton wine regions with districts like Eger, Szekszárd or Villány.

The red wine regions did nicely on this competition, both Villány and Eger got 19-19 medals while Szekszárd won 15 medals. The generally good performance of Eger wine district is due to St. Andrea, Thummerer, Bukolyi and Almagyar Érseki Szőlőbirtok mostly. From Villány Koch Csaba, Sauska, Jammertal, A. Gere and Maul Zsolt wineries did pretty well.

The traditional Bikavér (Bull’s Blood) producer regions Szekszárd and Eger showed the potential of Bikavér wines. Szekszárd has four Bikavér while Eger got five however all of them came from St. Andrea wines. (Agapé 2021, Agapé 2018, Agapé 2017, Áldás 2021, Merengő 2019).

If you look at If we look at the distribution by variety it worth to note that overall ten Cabernet Franc wines got medals six from Villány this fact shows that this variety really found its place in Villány. Seven Olaszrizling wines was also awarded by medal mostly from Balaton region. The traditional Hungarian red wines Kadarka took the lead with 4 medals and Kékfrankos also got three.

Wines from Vinotek.hu awarded on DWWA 2023