The owner took a bottle from his cooler and poured a glass of Hungarian juhfark, a grape variety that probably not one in a thousand of his customers had heard of, let alone could pronounce properly. Also, juhfark, which means “sheep’s tail” in Hungarian, is not a riesling.
“He didn’t give me what I asked for. He was like, ‘Oh, you want an interesting white wine? I’ll give you a juhfark,’” Aronsohn, who had been working with wine for a couple of grape harvests, recalls. The wine was from the Fekete cellar in Somló, Hungary.
“I was blown away. I was like, ‘There’s no fruit in here, I mean, there’s some, but not a lot. It’s saline and basalt and acid.’ I was like, ‘Wow! What’s going on in Hungary?’” she recalls.
Determined to find out, Aronsohn, a native of Boston, Massachusetts, has spent her last 12 years working in Hungary. Beginning in the famous Tokaj wine region, in 2023 she finally landed in, or on, Somló, the far less famous, extinct volcano that constitutes the country’s smallest wine region, of just 511 hectares, two hours’ drive southwest of Budapest.
“That’s the super-short story,” she declares, sitting on the terrace of the Somló guest-house-cum-wineshop, located part-way up “the hill,” as the locals term this basalt-based mountainous mass.
Aronsohn’s been running this business for the past three years, in part to earn a living, in part to live out her “obsession” with Somló wines. It all seems to be going very well. Underneath the terrace, her shelves hold 125 different wines from two dozen local vintners, priced from HUF 2,500 (“a great wine for fröccs”) to HUF 8,500 (“from one of the rare, natural winemakers, with limited quantities”). This July, she says there are only four nights when her eight-person guest house is not booked.
Further down the slopes, Károly Kolonics, who claims to be the first Somló winemaker to insist the future lay in “both high-quality wines and accommodation,” is currently the largest overnight provider in the parish, with beds for almost 50 persons in air-conditioned rooms. Like Aronsohn, along with domestic guests, his facility is especially popular with Czechs and Poles.
Further into the village of Somlóvásárhely, the award-winning Kreinbacher Winery, famed for its high-quality sparkling wines, is in the process of tripling its top-end accommodation to 43 rooms and is due to open in early 2027.
But appearances can be deceptive. Aside from the peaceful nature and viniculture, there are few other tourist attractions of note. Somlóvásárhely’s one restaurant closes at 8 p.m. Business-wise, “The hill is unpredictable,” says Aronsohn.
“In the first two summers, it’s like [30°C plus] outside and I’d have to politely kick people off the terrace at night. I mean, I gotta go home,” she says. In contrast, last summer, despite bearable temperatures, she found herself “sitting on the terrace by myself. Around the world, wine sales are down. I know the guys here have been selling less.”
Moreover, just because people stay in the guesthouse, there is no guarantee of wine sales. Sometimes visitors don’t even drink the welcome bottle that comes with the booking, or leave it half empty.
Another time, a Belgian couple, en route home, made a late booking. “They didn’t know it was a wine shop, [although] I don’t know how you could not know that! But they then bought all the wine! Ok, I’m exaggerating; they bought a whole lot of wine, but that wasn’t their plan. It’s so unpredictable,” she reiterates.
For sure, Aronsohn makes huge efforts to please, whether single-handedly hosting dinners for 20 or pouring tastings for merely two. Not everyone is so flexible.
Oliver Weingartner runs the vintner side of 5 ház birtok, a winery-cum-guesthouse operation that works with Airbnb on the hostelry side.
His Somló vines produce between 12,000–15,000 bottles of biodynamic wine annually, with exports to Belgium, Germany, Poland, and the United States. But living 45 km away, he has little incentive to respond to calls for a tasting from a couple of guests when not working on Somló.
Pre-booking, of course, is a different matter. Still, even then, he needs five to seven people to justify the effort and cost of opening the high-quality wines, which he argues are the only rational product that makes economic sense for Somló producers.
“We’ll do tastings for EUR 40 [per person] with warm food. On Somló, we – and not only me – like people who appreciate the wine experience. I don’t want groups who just want to spend the time because they come up the hill and find it boring,” he says.
Back at her shop, Aronsohn is preparing for a big group dinner and tasting at the weekend. It’s a demanding task, and she hints that the workload can be wearying.
“I’m an evangelist for Somló,” she says, “but if I knew back then what I know now, maybe I wouldn’t have done it.”
The Fekete Winery, the Somló producer that exported that juhfark to the United States in 2014, is still going strong; Aronsohn usually has five or six bottles on her shelves, though Gábor Riesz, who runs it, was unavailable at the time of the Budapest Business Journal’s visit.
Also going strong, according to the website, is the “hipster” outlet in LA that sold that wine, the Lou Wine Shop in the Los Feliz district of the city.
“Next time I’m there, I’m gonna have to go and tell that guy that he changed my life,” says Aronsohn.
Full disclosure note: Kester Eddy was a guest at the Somló Wineshop & Guesthouse for this story.
The extinct volcano of Somló, 431 meters (about 1,400 feet) above sea level, dominates the landscape for miles around.
The hill is 160 km (100 miles) southwest of Budapest. Trains leave Budapest Déli station every hour, taking 2 hours 20 minutes to Devecser, a 10-minute drive from Somló. A reserved seat in the air-conditioned carriage is much recommended. Don’t count on seeing a taxi in Devecser; it’s better to arrange a pick-up by your host beforehand.
Juhfark is a niche grape even in its homeland; internationally, it is barely known.
“Juhfark is another almost extinct variety, which is only grown really well on the volcanic slopes of Somló. It is a truly distinctive Hungarian variety that produces a remarkable straw yellow wine with well-defined and powerful acids,” is how David Kopp, the English wine writer, describes the varietal in his book “Hungary, Its Fine Wines and Winemakers.”
He continues: “When I first tasted it, I did not like its nose and could make little of its taste because of the aggressive acidity. When I learned how to taste traditionally made wines in Somló, which require four or five years’ cellaring to reduce the searing acidity, I found it rather more approachable. Such wines really do need air and patience to develop in the glass. Today, most juhfark wines are made reductively and are much easier on the palate.”
Somló vineyards grow other varieties, notably olaszrizling, furmint and hárslevelű.
This article was first published in the Budapest Business Journal print issue of July 3, 2026.
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