The quality of the wine grapes harvested so far in the Villány wine region is excellent

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Gergely Nagy reported that the picking of white grape varieties, which account for barely twenty percent of the area, has already been completed almost everywhere, but the clusters of blue grapes for rosé and siller have also been removed from the vines. The harvest of blue oporto, which produces Portuguese red wine known as a specialty of the wine region, is still going on, but the merlot variety is also being harvested. Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc, which have the largest production area, will be harvested by the middle of October, at the latest, he said. The expert said: this summer there were several prolonged, rainy and humid periods in the wine region, so the farmers had to pay serious attention to plant protection. Although some plantations were damaged by downy mildew infection, the vast majority were able to avoid it. As he said, according to the analyzes carried out so far, the quantity of the crop is expected to be only average, but the quality promises to be excellent, provided that the weather in the following weeks will be similar to or drier than the long-term average.

In the wine region, around 6,000 hectares of land can be planted with grapes, and the actual cultivated size changes only slightly from year to year

Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc are grown on the largest part of the currently 2,350-hectare vineyard – 390 and 341 hectares respectively, while 308 hectares produce Merlot, 303 hectares Kékfrankos, and 294 hectares Kékóport. The specialist reported that a third of the harvest is now done with harvesters due to the increasingly difficult availability of human labor, and an increasing number of plantations are being made suitable for mechanization. He added: in addition to harvesting, certain green work – such as cutting back shoots and pre-harvest leaf thinning – is already carried out with machines in many vineyards. Gergely Nagy also touched on the fact that the wine sector is constantly affected by negative external influences worldwide, not only in Hungary, such as epidemics, energy crisis, changes in solvent demand, which improve the prospects of wineries that are efficient, creative, flexible and produce in larger areas. Although the Villány wines are high-quality, popular and sellable, at the same time the local wineries also have to make more and more serious efforts, more and more people spend more and more on marketing, appear on new sales channels and with new products, and try to follow the changes in consumer habits – the expert pointed out .

MTI