The Hungarian World Heritage Sites never seemed very appealing to me (with the exception of Budapest), and it never crossed my mind to plan a trip to Eastern Hungary as the main destination. But we took the opportunity to visit Tokaj and the Hortobágy National Park on the way home from Slovakia to Austria in August 2014. Tokaj is only about 100 kilometres from Aggtelek (where we visited the karst caves), and it's just a further 1.5 hours drive to the Hortobágy National Park, so we gave in to the temptation and made a detour to tick off these two WHS.

The Tokaj Wine Region is best-known for the sweet wines, the most famous is the Tokaj Aszú. It is made from raisin-like dry grapes that were affected in the vine by the Botrytis fungus. This 'noble rot' gives the wine its special flavour, but it depends on the weather and does not occur every year. The tradition of wine making in the Tokaj region is centuries old, the first vineyards were established as early as in the 12th century. And Tokaj was among the first WHS, that are dedicated exclusively to viticulture.

However, the outstanding value of such a WHS should be visible in the specific features of the agricultural landscape or by a typical rural architecture. But in this respect Tokaj is very similar to other wine regions in Europe, there is nothing really exceptional, and e.g. the Upper Middle Rhine Valley, Wachau or Lake Neusiedl are much more scenic landscapes. But maybe I'm biased because I always lived in or near wine regions, so I'm used to see vineyards, and even though I like this kind of cultural landscape, vineyards mean nothing special to me.

The town of Tokaj is the tourist centre of the wine region and its most lively place, it is located at the southeastern edge of the core zone. Near Tokaj are also the steepest vineyards, the upper photo shows the terraces of the Lencsés slope.

We spent a half day driving along the main road of the wine region from Tokaj to Tállya (about 25 kilometres) and we stopped here and there for a short walk through the vineyards. One of the most picturesque places was a small white chapel in the midst of the vineyards near the town of Torcal. But all in all, we were rather disappointed. We also went to two of the exclaves of the WHS, the Köporosi and Gomboshegyi wine cellar rows in the village Hercegkút (lower photo), 35 kilometres northeast of Tokaj. Each of the two places has about 70 to 80 of these wine cellars deeply dug into the hillside. But it was not possible to visit one of the cellars, everything was closed, seemingly tourists only rarely go to Hercegkút (probably only WHS enthusiasts), we were the only people around.

In the evening we went to a wine tasting at the Rákóczi cellar in Tokaj. In general, I prefer dry wines, but some Tokaj sweet wines tasted very good, so we bought some bottles of our favourite. And finally, after our return to Austria, on a mild summer evening on our balcony, a bottle of Tokaj wine and a selection of fine cheeses attenuated our negative assessment of the Tokaj WHS.