Pálinka Tasting at the Source
Like our wine trips, we can design pálinka-tasting-excursions into the countryside. These trips can be either a day trips or multi-day trips and will include tours and tastings at top pálinka distilleries. If you’d like to do more than drink pálinka, we can add winery visits, spa visits, and cultural excursions.
Pálinka Tasting In Budapest
If you don’t have time to leave Budapest, Taste Hungary can arrange pálinka tastings in Budapest. The tasting will feature a variety of pálinka styles, flavors, and labels, along with explanations on the distilling process, the history, and the culture of pálinka in Hungary. If you have time, we can arrange for a traditional Hungarian meal to be accompanied by pálinka pairings. Find out more here.
About Pálinka
In the Hungarian countryside pálinka was traditionally downed with breakfast to prepare workers for a day in the fields or factories. It’s a necessity at village pig killings when the cold is biting and the days are long. On Easter Monday (locsolkodás or “sprinkling day”) men and boys visit female relatives, friends and neighbors to spray them with cheap perfume while reciting poetry. Their reward is a shot of pálinka–or chocolate if they’re too young. Pálinka can be both a potent aperitif and a helpful digestif. For an increasing number of people, it is also becoming a hobby similar to wine tasting.
The best-known types of pálinka are plum (especially from north-eastern Hungary), apricot from the Great Plain (Alföld) around Kecskemét, and pear. But these days pálinka is also being made in lesser-known flavors like elderberry, quince, rosehips, mulberry, blackcurrant, sloe, and greengage. High-end Hungarian distillers are getting ever more creative with their flavor palette and they all seem to have their own special experiments stashed away which, if successful, will be bottled and repeated.
The Hungarian version of grappa, törköly pálinka, has made a comeback in recent years. Distilled from pomace (the residue left from grapes after pressing them for wine, mostly stalks, skins and seeds), some of the best Hungarian winemakers are now producing their own high-end varietal törköly pálinka that is being sold in Budapest’s boutique wine shops. Like wine, some of it is labeled with the vintage year and the best is often aged in oak barrels.
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