Young, talented, and full of curiosity, after considering various paths—ranging from pursuing UFO research to becoming an ornithologist or biologist— Annamaria Reka Koncz decided to pursue viticulture, even though her family had no tradition of viticulture or winemaking.
However, the region where she was born and raised (in northeastern Hungary, on the border with Ukraine) had a long—though now lost—history of viticulture. While studying at the University of Copenhagen, she first learned about natural wines, made without chemical or technological interventions.
Through her student job at a Copenhagen wine bar, she began visiting wine-producing regions in Slovenia, France, and Italy on a journey that seemed to have no turning back. Having nurtured the idea of producing wine, she returned to the region where she grew up in Hungary, found old, nearly derelict, mixed vineyards planted with different varieties, and began to realize her dream by producing wines without the use of technology.
She cultivates her 35 stremmata of vineyards using organic methods and strives to revive the old vines she found nearly abandoned, devoting all her energy to this endeavor. The winery feels like a journey back in time, where the only equipment present is a wooden press, a destemmer, and plastic tanks and amphorae in which she ferments and ages her wines.
