Last month I paused my Martinborough wine tours and exclusive Wairarapa wine experiences to explore Hungary, travelling first to Tokaj followed by Eger and then to Badacsony.

Last month I paused my Martinborough wine tours and exclusive Wairarapa wine experiences to explore Hungary, moving from Tokaj to Eger as my second stop. To understand Eger properly, you have to begin with its long historical arc. Eger’s wine culture is inseparable from its history. Viticulture here began to take shape in the 11th century, when King St. Stephen founded one of Hungary’s earliest bishoprics and endowed it with extensive vineyards. Monastic communities arriving from Western Europe brought their own grapes and cellar practices, embedding a European winemaking sensibility into the region long before Hungary’s other major wine districts emerged. After the devastation of the Tatar invasion in the 13th century, King Béla IV repopulated the area with Walloon settlers, whose influence was profound: they introduced barrel ageing and more structured cultivation methods, nudging Eger toward a red‑wine identity centuries before it became codified.

Last month I took a break from hosting my Martinborough wine tours and exclusive Wairarapa wine experiences to explore the wines of Hungary, beginning in Tokaj — a region no longer defined solely by Aszú. It has evolved into a multidimensional landscape where dry wines, terroir transparency, and individual vineyard identity now stand alongside its historic sweet wines.

This guide is especially for New Zealand travellers heading to Japan who would like to taste Japanese wine without building the whole trip around it. (Other travellers, especially from Australia will also find it useful.) It covers a tasting bar, urban wineries and wine villages you can reach in a day from Tokyo and from Osaka, how to get there by train, when to go, and a few things that will surprise you at a Japanese cellar door.

After spending a full week intensively exploring the wines of Hungary — driving long kilometres to visit more than a dozen producers across six regions, tasting extensive flights and taking careful notes — my wife and I were ready to slow down and simply enjoy the next stage of our trip. Yet by our second day in Serbia, my curiosity about the country’s wines had already been stirred. With just one day left in Novi Sad, we found a wine bar only ten minutes’ walk from our accommodation. My hope was modest: a basic introduction to a few key Serbian varieties rather than the usual international grapes. What followed far surpassed those expectations, ultimately leading to this article — only the third wine‑bar review I’ve written, after Bea Bar in Copenhagen and the iconic Noble Rot in Wellington, New Zealand.

The first part of this series traced the macro-political and corporate lines running through New Zealand viticulture. It showed how immigration policy rollbacks, superficial desktop audits, and a regional housing crisis have joined forces to choke family estate succession and greenwash baseline legal obligations into badges of sustainability. The result is a lopsided industry—one that boasts world-class environmental credentials on paper while anchoring its core workforce strategy in cost-optimized, compliance-driven legal minimums.