Váci utca: Tokaji, Unicum and the Wine of Kings
Why is it significant?
Walk slowly down Váci utca and let the shop windows do their work: embroidered blouses, porcelain, strings of dried paprika, and shelf after shelf of bottles, some golden as honey and some round, black and marked with a red and gold cross. Those two bottles carry two of Hungary's best stories.
Key Facts
| Place | Váci utca: Tokaji, Unicum and the Wine of Kings |
|---|---|
| Address | Váci utca, 1052 Budapest, Hungary |
| Geo Coordinates | 47.49520, 19.05270 |
| Part of Walk | Coffee, Cake & Paprika: A Budapest Food Walk from Gerbeaud to the Great Market Hall |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk slowly down Váci utca and let the shop windows do their work: embroidered blouses, porcelain, strings of dried paprika, and shelf after shelf of bottles, some golden as honey and some round, black and marked with a red and gold cross. Those two bottles carry two of Hungary's best stories.
First the street itself. Its name means the road to Vác, a town up the Danube, because it once led north to the Vác Gate in the walls of medieval Pest, which stood roughly where Vörösmarty tér begins. Pest was a small walled market town then, and this was one of its main ways in and out.
Now the golden bottles. Tokaji aszú is a sweet wine made in the Tokaj hills of north-eastern Hungary from grapes shrivelled on the vine by noble rot. Legend says that King Louis the Fourteenth of France called it the wine of kings and the king of wines, and the line has been quoted ever since. What is not a legend is that in 1737 a royal decree defined which vineyards belonged to the Tokaj region, one of the earliest protected wine regions in the world.
And the round black bottle is Unicum, a dark, bitter herbal liqueur. The family story of the Zwacks says it was first mixed in 1790 by a court physician for the Habsburg emperor Joseph the Second, who tasted it and exclaimed: das ist ein Unikum, that is something unique. Whether he really said it nobody can prove, but the name stuck and the recipe, of more than forty herbs, is still a family secret.
Under communism the Zwacks fled to the West and the state produced its own version, while the family kept making the original in exile. They returned after 1989 and bought the business back. Now turn left towards Petőfi Sándor utca and find the narrow passage called Pilvax köz, just a short block away.