Domaine Bükk

Norbi is also a rare hybrid. Hungarian born and raised, but he also went to UCSC and founded a bakery in Santa Cruz called Chimney Bread that he ran for over 9 years. His language and cultural fluency between the two countries has been much appreciated and a valuable door opener for us. We are able to communicate what we are really after to producers and he’s able to translate that beyond our capabilities. He’s also just a gregarious character that manifests community and togetherness wherever he goes. Beyond good farming and delicious wines, he is emblematic of what the wine trade is fundamentally about.

In 2020, he and his wife Judit founded Hunvino Inc. after having moved back to Hungary in 2017 after 16 years in CA to give their two sons a balanced Hungarian education and upbringing. Hunvino is not just about making wine, it’s also about helping other wineries with logistics, marketing, and export with a focus on regenerative/organic/biodynamic agriculture. Making connections and following through.

COVID was less than ideal for such services, so they ended up focusing their efforts on their home and winery in the hills of the Bükk region, just a few hours drive east from Budapest in the direction of Tokaj. Bükk is a lesser known appellation (in Hungary too) despite having some remarkable history. Before phylloxera it had about 17,000 hectares of first class vineyards. Today it has less than 900 ha. The nearby Ónodi Vásár Market, established in 1396(!) by King Zsigmond, is not only a massive market place for everything from livestock to handcrafts, it’s also a meeting point for people far and wide. From the top of their vineyards you can also clearly see Tokaj Hill and there’s even a village called Kistokaj (little Tokaj) just a 10 minutes drive away. In other words, this area has all the building blocks to be really special, they just need people to do something with it.

Most grapes are Zenit with a lesser amount of Pinot Blanc along with a little Kékfrankos and Medina coming to fruition this year as well. All vineyard work is done manually by the family and a few Romani families and minorities who are in need and well skilled.
There’s a nearby gravel mine and lake that adds humidity and a helpful microclimate to their deep heavy yellow and gray clay, marl, and pannonian sea sediment.

As of 2023, they stopped spraying elemental sulfur and copper. To help mediate this, Norbi made his own lacto ferment sprays from herbs growing right behind the winery. Using wild garlic, chili, chives, yarrow, nettle, tansy, milk thistle, horsetail, worm wood, and horseradish (all antibacterial) in concert with aerobic compost (vermicompost, algae, molasses), they have both healed and added immunity across the board. Other than that, cover crops are native, but they try to focus their efforts on flowering plants that support the bees and manually remove those that don’t. They turn over the soil in early Spring and sometimes in mid summer since it can often be quite hot and dry.