Food for dry Furmint (Austrian)

Hi Dale, Peter Schandl, a vintner in Rust, gave me these recommendations for dry Furmint pairing: Catfish filet with spinach, celery-cheese quiche, Wiener schnitzel (which tends to get recommended for most Austrian wines!), roasted pork with quince chutney, stewed quince, and pumpkin cake. The flavor of that final one, the pumpkin, is a favorite pairing of mine- might not be the season for full-on pumpkin, but if you have a bottle of Kürbiskernöl (that's the pumpkin seed oil) I would incorporate it into a salad dressing of some sort, or with your soup. If you don't have a bottle of Kürbiskernöl, get one! It's magic stuff. Cheers, emily

In Austria Furmint is not drunk with food (or at least not recommended with food). Generally you have a choice of either having it as an aperitiv at 8 celcius or as an after-food treat at 10 celcius.

Furmint typically shows quite some acid, is heavy (14% is quite common) and sports forward aromas (hence the aperitif preference). It will generally be at its best from year 3-5 but can cellar well up to

RE choice of stem:- Austrians recommend a chardonnay glass.

Zum Wohl.

Stephan

Robin Garr from the winelovers' page must have dropped by here. This is what he had to say...

//Stephan

Offbeat grapes and wine: Furmint

Let's wrap up the work week with a quick trip down another of wine's less-traveled byways: Furmint ("Foor-mint"), the white grape best-known as a major player in Hungary's great dessert wine Tokaji ("Toe-kay"), turns up occasionally as a dry white wine in Hungary and neighboring parts of Austria.

Unlike its partner in the Tokaji blend, the thoroughly Hungarian Hárslevelü (which, as far as I know, is never produced as a single-varietal wine), Furmint traces its linguistic heritage not to Budapest but Rome: Early vine growers supposedly took its name from the Latin word "frumentum," meaning "wheat," because of the grape's golden-tan color. (While we're on the subject of Tokaji, by the way, let's take a moment to note that the Tocai Friulano of Northeastern Italy and the Tokay d'Alsace of France are unrelated to Tokaji except by name, a source of linguistic confusion that the European Union's regulators intend to clear up by banning the names of the sound-alike grapes.)

Furmint is an obvious candidate for dessert wine because its thin skin makes it a receptive host for Botrytis cinerea, the beneficial mold called "noble rot" that randomly infests some late-harvested grapes, causing them to shrink and dry so the natural sugars become highly concentrated, producing intensely sweet wine.

As a dry wine, Furmint is typically full-bodied and acidic (think of a Chardonnay with muscles), with bold flavors that the British wine journalist Jancis Robinson describes as "fiery." Robinson, who among other things is a leading wine-grape expert, also advises that Furmint be drunk up while it's young and fresh. But I recently ran across a dusty stash of bottles from the 1999 vintage in a local store - two or three years behind the current release - and to my pleased surprise found that it had gained real richness and complexity with a bit of age, despite presumably having been kept in less than pristine cellar conditions.

This fairly widely distribruted version from Oremus, a leading Tokaji producer, is worth seeking out as a wine of very good value; and if you can't find an older vintage, there'd be no harm in putting a more recent bottle or two away to sleep for a while. (I had tasted the 1998 vintage of this wine in the autumn of 2000, just two years after the harvest, and it was pleasant but much more simple and one-dimensional. Age has served this one well.)

TALK ABOUT WINE ONLINE Have you tasted this or other dry Furmints? Are you a fancier of Tokaji? You'll find a round-table online discussion about today's article in our interactive Wine Lovers' Discussion Group, where you're always welcome to join in the conversations about wine.