What BTW Is: Natural Wine, Made by People
If you’ve ever wondered what makes a bottle of natural wine from Hungary different from anything else on the shelf, the honest answer is: it’s not really about the bottle. It’s about who’s behind it. Here’s what BTW is — and why our second stop is always the person who made the wine, not the wine itself.
What BTW Is
A wine relationship that’s actually worth having.
Not a label to trust blindly, not a shelf to pick from at random. You finish with a bottle you can talk about, and a story you’re proud to pour for anyone.
Natural wine. Minimal intervention, no shortcuts, made by hand in small Hungarian cellars — wine that tastes like where it’s from, not like a spreadsheet.
Unfiltered people. Direct relationships with the winemakers themselves, so what you’re drinking has a name, a face, and a reason behind it.
The cult. A community that doesn’t take wine too seriously to enjoy it properly — tastings, meet-the-winemaker nights, and a place to belong to, not just shop at.
Meet the Winemaker: Koncz Réka
That second pillar — unfiltered people — is easiest to explain through one producer: Koncz Réka, one of the natural winemakers behind our current lineup.
A vineyard nobody else was looking at
Réka’s story doesn’t start in a famous vineyard. It starts with curiosity about the ones nobody was looking at — scattered, half-abandoned parcels in the remote hills of northeastern Hungary, holding onto rare local varieties and memories nobody had bothered to write down.
She went looking anyway. What she found became the foundation of everything she does: heritage vines on volcanic ground, worked by hand, farmed organically, guided by the land’s own rhythm instead of a formula.
A cellar built on restraint
In the cellar she steps back on purpose — spontaneous fermentations, long macerations, neutral vessels, nothing corrected, nothing polished away.
The result is wine that feels like a fingerprint. Rhyolite, dacite, tuff — the volcanic trio of Zemplén — show up as a signature clarity you can taste, vine by vine, bottle by bottle. Réka works a tiny 3-hectare estate like she’s writing personal notes from the vineyard, and every one of them is unrepeatable.
Try if you’re into
Mineral whites, gentle aromatics, thoughtful winemaking that never shouts.
