The Hungarian Wine Valtteri Bottas Can’t Stop Buying

It is Formula 1 weekend in Budapest, which means the fastest machines on earth are screaming around the Hungaroring just outside the city. So it feels like the right moment for Smike to tell the story he cannot stop thinking about. Not a lap time or an overtake, but a bottle. The afternoon one of the coolest drivers in the sport walked into his little wine bar and left with his arms full of Hungarian red.

Smike runs Bortodoor, the wine bar in Budapest’s District VI that he opened with friends. It is the kind of place where the pours are honest and nobody is trying to impress you. James, one of the guys who works there, happens to know Tiffany Cromwell, the Australian professional cyclist who partners a certain Finnish racing driver, and the two of them go back to their school days. One afternoon James floated the idea of bringing the couple in for a glass, and Smike said yes without really believing it would happen.

Then it did. Smike arrived to find Valtteri Bottas at the bar, mullet and all, friendly and unhurried, asking for one simple thing: a bold red. It is a deceptively hard request. What do you pour for a man who could open almost anything in the world? Smike’s answer was not French and not Italian. He reached for a wine made by monks.

90 minutes west of Budapest, the Pannonhalma Archabbey has stood on its hill since the year 996. Benedictine monks have grown vines there for more than 1,000 years, through empires and occupations and a communist era that nearly finished Hungarian fine wine altogether. The monastic winery was rebuilt in 2003, set into the hillside below the ancient basilica, and it has spent the two decades since making some of the most quietly serious wine in the country.

Its flagship red is called Infusio, a Bordeaux-style blend built mostly on Merlot and Cabernet Franc. That second grape is the thread running through Smike’s whole story. His first film for Magyar Minute made the case that Villany, down in Hungary’s warm south, might be the true home of Cabernet Franc. Now here it was again, grown on a monastery hill in the northwest, in the glass he handed to a Formula 1 driver. Hungarian red keeps making the same argument from opposite ends of the country.

Bottas tasted it, and he did not just nod politely. He bought bottles to take with him, around 4 by Smike’s count. A man who spends his working life chasing hundredths of a second, slowing down for a wine grown by an order that measures time in centuries.

That is the part Smike wants you to keep. You do not need a paddock pass or a podium to drink the way a world-class driver drinks in Budapest. The bottle that won over Valtteri Bottas came from a hill you can visit on a lazy afternoon. This weekend the noise is all cars. The better souvenir is a Hungarian red.