Lost Generation

Lost generation is one of the terms you surely come across while studying about Hemingway. In that particular context, lost generation was specific to one certain mass of people. Having deeply elaborated on that (my lecturer might still have some bad memories), I was wondering if there were further waves coming. I might have sensed one, while having an extremely strange conversation with a woman at a private wine tasting event earlier this year.

She was telling us about her life – actually, a collection of aggravatingly obscene stories – featuring some episodes of her son’s adventures, mainly concentrated on the multitude of places they had the pleasure to visit. All the awkward details her performance abounded with, got me uninterested and made me disconnect from the conversation right until I had the question “So what is your favorite city?” posed to me.

“Mine is Budapest.” – I replied, and that answer resulted in two badly disappointed faces just in front of me. “That is why I live here”, I explained further. I meant it, and there are two major reasons for that: One is that not any of the others I’ve checked out so far could ever beat the versatility of things you have access to around here. And the other is all the good people I know here, with whom we seem to have a reason to celebrate something from time to time.

Lost Generation 2.0

With an academically elevated and densely scientific Saturday almost behind me, we chose the current “chapter” of a pretty decent wine tasting series. This time, in September, it was a river cruiser that hosted the show. The wine region in focus was Mátra, and the name of the village represented with the highest weight was  Gyöngyöstarján, to be exact.

Wines included white, rose and red types, some having been really-really good and a few rather … “experimental”. The worst specimen of the latter was a sparkling white. We gave it a go and agreed that the right word to that was: industrial. But the higher-ranked league was actually quite something.

While taking the heavy responsibility of tasting all that variety, sunset came and we cruised around some of the major landmarks of the city, making the whole event a lot more special.

Tasting is one side of the story, the other is the value-added conversations we carry on with the winemakers. The majority of them are highly knowledgeable, and some of them are amazingly successful at passing all that expertise further to their kids, just like the youngsters we met being super-engaged to the profession.

Coming back to the conversations part, there’s a whole special mechanics to some of those – e.g. politely trying to diminish the knowledge gap between maker and “user”. But all that could potentially serve as a topic for another post.

So, after all the “networking”, we were taken back to the quay and hit the city with some more ideas in the pipeline. Except for a private party we accidentally entered, we managed to find interest in the rest of the night, finally settling down at a – most probably the best – wine bar of the city with professional wine stewards turning the celebration into even more “on-demand” and concluding it with Special Cuvée by Bollinger.