Wines & Vines

36 WINES&VINES February 2018 OAK BARRELS glacial moraines were formed, and the pH of the moraines was great for the regrowth of oak. Robur would grow along large river courses, and the petraea would kind of hop from mountain to mountain. So Tronçais and Tokaj were the only two forests that were isolated from these large river courses, and that was why they ended up with more petraea than they did robur." The Zemplén forest covers the foothills of the Carpathian Mountains, where the best cooperage oak grows between about 1,200 and 2,100 feet elevation. "This region had recent volcanic activity," Kalydy said. It was between 6 million and 8 million years ago, so some of the youngest volcanic flows in Europe are in the Carpathians, which reach 11,000 feet in some places. He said the winters in the Zemplén forest are much longer than in southwest Hungary, where Kádár and other coopers also harvest oak, including a much larger percentage of robur. In the southwest, the Mediterranean influence moderates the climate, and the ter- rain is less mountainous and more fertile. More trees here are hybrids of the two oak types. In contrast the Zemplen, where Kádár gets about 40% of its trees, has about twice the number of snow-covered days as well as thin, rocky soil with little organic matter. Because of the difficult growing condi- tions, petraea trees in the region grow very slowly, and the wood grain is very tight, a trait almost universally considered desirable for aging high-quality wine. The tall, slender petraea trees in the Zemplén are harvested at 80 to 120 years old. They have 15 rings per inch of diameter and measure just 14 inches average diameter, which is much smaller than the average size of French trees of the same age, Molnar said. Tight grain = aromatics "We do know that the triumvirate of the cold climate, high altitude and young volcanic soil creates a profile we like in the oak, and aromatic impact is the No. 1 driver," Molnar said. Not that the aromatic impact comes from something in the soil. He maintained that the species and tighter grain of the wood are the keys. The grain is determined by the thickness of the growth rings. Each growth ring con- sists of a portion of early season growth and later season growth. Molnar maintained that petraea trees in the Zemplén forest are stressed for nutrition and water and grow mainly in the early season. "Tight grain is always more aromatic, because all the aro- matics are basically in the spring wood," he said. The summer wood is "structural" and doesn't add many aromatics; it is extra wood - alexis@adour.fr - Ph: +33.671.139.506 REVIVING KÁDÁR AFTER THE BERLIN WALL FALLS A group of individual coopers founded Kádár Hungary as a cooperative in Budapest in 1951, and the barrels are still toasted and produced there. At first it was named Budapesti Kádár. The cooperage built its largest stave mill 120 miles away in the village of Erdobenye, which translates as "Coopers Valley," to be near the Zemplén oak forest and the many wineries that operate around Tokaj. Peter Molnar's parents had moved from Hungary to California in 1956, the year of the Hungarian Revolution. Molnar was born and raised in the United States but had international aspirations after college. He went to Hungary in 1990 after the Berlin Wall fell to help privatize the wine industry, in conjunction with the World Bank and

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