There are people who want wine to be a mystery, in the sense that by shrouding it, it retains a magic that familiarity never brings. I don't hold with that; after all what is wine but an alcoholic drink that when consumed in sufficient quantities makes you drunk. Anthony Barton of Chateau Leoville has a similarly prosaic view. 'Wine,' he said, 'is the brief interlude between grape juce and vinegar.' Put a bottle of well-made wine in front of me and I can down it as well as the next man. But there are wines that I sip.

It's all to do with the intensity of flavour. A sip of Chateau d'Yquem is such a taste explosion in the mouth that tiny sips can keep you amused for hours. Most of the great dessert wines of the world are like this: the process of drying the grapes to concentrate the sugar also concentrates the flavours. It's as though you have the 'essence' of the grape. That's a word that turns up often on dessert wine labels precisely for that reason.

Eastern European wines have never been much appreciated as a category, but there has always been, and there still is, a notable exception: Hungarian Tokay. The Tokay hills are ancient volcanoes, lava covered with sandy loam - perfect soil for vines. From the plains to the south come warm summer winds and from the Bodrog river moisture, while the hills themselves give shelter. The same grapes as grow in other parts of Hungary, the Furmint and Harslevelu, ripen perfectly here. Better still, they undergo the same 'noble rot' as the grapes of Sauternes, concentrating their sugar and flavours. They ferment slowly, but give strong and intensely flavoured wine.

The Tokay custom is to keep the most nobly rotten (or 'Aszu') grapes to one side and crush them into a pulp in tubs called puttonyok. A number of seven-gallon puttonyok of pulp is added to barrels of one-year-old wine. Tokay barrels, called gonci, only hold 35 gallons, so if five puttonyok are added the wine is entirely Aszu - like a German Beerenauslese. The most luxurious Tokay of all is made only from the juice which Aszu berries naturally exude as they are waiting to be crushed. This 'essencia' is as much as 60% sugar and will hardly ferment at all. Of all the essences of the grape it is the most velvety and penetrating, with a flavour that stays in the mouth for half an hour. What it was like at 200 years old (some of the great Polish cellars kept it that long) only the Tsars can tell.

Modern Tokay is stabilized by pasteurization, which may account partly for its faintly madeira-like or cooked flavour. But even today an Aszu of four or five puttonyok has a silky texture, a haunting fragrance and flavour of mingled fruit and caramel.

Wine of the Week

Tokaji Aszu, 5 Puttonyos, Oremus, 1995.

A top-end Tokay, the 5 puttonyos allowing the description 'aszu'. A wine enjoyed for centuries by the rulers of the Hungarian Empire.

Available Searsons, RRP. £24.99