Helyszín címkék:
The wine spritzer
Szabó Sára
Upward rise within the cup, Pearly beads, Naught can stop it, as each globe Upward speeds; Skyward let all things ascend Pure and white, Leaving on the earth beneath Dross and blight.
- Mihaly Vörösmarty, the song from Fót
According to the anecdote, the wine spritzer first saw the light of day in András Fáy’s wine house of Fót in 1842. At the small gathering of friends which was the starter of an innocent harvest party, Ányos Jedlik caused the greatest surprise who accidentally grabbed a bottle of soda to add some “pleasant hotness” to the wine waiting in the guests’ glasses. By this Jedlik, who was the expert of the electricity, the inventor of the dynamo and the electric motor by the way, introduced his latest invention “the sour-water preparation” to the table. One thing led to another, the enchanted linguist, Gergely Czuczor and the poet, Mihály Vörösmarty immediately named the noble mixture. That night each of them excelled in their own field of interest. How the rest of the night ended we don’t know but telling the story may not stand up to being printed. Anyway, Vörösmarty was as much convinced by the drink that not long after he jotted the song from Fót down.
God forbid, to destroy the legend considered as the origin story of the wine spritzer but based on written records we can know that years before the ominous party Jedlik was already offering soda enriched by wine to his fellow scholars. As you know, after finishing the secondary grammar school the inventor was accepted to the Benedictine order in Pannonhalma, to such a company where making quality wine had centuries-old tradition. It was also clear that Benedictines already drank wine spritzer in the 1820s, just they did not have a Vörösmarty to give a name for the drink.
Since then plenty of water has flown on the Danube and maybe even more than that on the Hungarian throats. The wine spritzer has pursued a brilliant career in Hungary, it has become popular among peasants living modest life and noble families as well. As the essence of the drink does not lie behind the quality of the wine! Its fame is primarily due to two things. One of them is that soda without minerals does not disturb the joy of wine with side tastes, the other one is that its pleasant proportions stupefy its consumer in the perfect extent. We can drink it made of white, rose or red wine. It is a wise and careful aurea mediocritas between the courageous imagination and gentle tipsiness. No wonder it has stolen so many hearts.
Complete conundrum is the proportion
We can order Small, Big, Long stride or Horse kick from wine spritzer. The Concierge is regular and sometimes the Vice, somewhere even the Mayor appears. If we are brave, we can order the Blockhead but at the end of the month the Cheapskate is p cool. By changing the quantity and the proportion of the wine and the freshly spritzed soda, Hungarian gastronomy marks almost fifty types of drinks. It enchanted Attila József who drank the Small Spritzer for “a whistle” and Gyula Krúdy who “frightened” 900 ml of wine with 100 ml of soda. There is unexpected matching too: one of the most famous gourmand at the beginning of the century, Ede Újházy changed the soda for sourdough cucumber juice. But don’t forget the Golden Team either, as Puskás and his mates were great fans of white Small Spritzer, twice.
There are nations where the matching of soda and wine is well-known but as a great cult of spritzer as the Hungarian exists nowhere in the world. It is an organic part of Hungarian gastronomy, there is no barkeeper who does not know the most popular proportions by heart. The experience is guaranteed by 22 fantastic Hungarian wine regions and more than 1000 soda maker masters, so the wine spritzer can be rightly described as hungarikum and a national value.
