I sat next to the Tisza River in Tokaj on a sunny morning with cotton wool streaks of clouds and huge storks in the sky. Tokaj is tiny, and for some reason far busier on a Sunday morning than a Friday evening, full of teenagers and tourists all squinting into the sun.

There is a direct train from Budapest Keleti to Tokaj, taking just under three hours; or you can change in Miskolc. It’s 220 kilometres, so costs around 4000 HUF return. On arrival, turn your back on the station building, cross the tracks, and turn right to find yourself on a road called Szerelmi Pincesor. Ken translates this to mean I Love Wine Street, but I prefer Sweet Cellar Row. At the end of this road, turn left onto Bajcsy-Zsilinsky Ut and walk towards the centre of town.

Accommodation: You will pass loads of houses offering private rooms on this route, and after about ten minutes, you will come to the new Millennium Hotel (tel 352 247), which has double rooms at 9100 HUF; keep walking, there are now a handful of panzios in the town, and if you cross the river, there are two campsites on the right: Spori Sport Camping and Tisza Camping; Pelsöczy Camping, on the left, is very relaxed and reasonably clean, charging 450 HUF per tent and 450 HUF per person. You can camp right on the bank of the river and listen to the frog chorus all night. The mosquitos aren’t too much of a problem, susceptible as they apparently are to good insect repellent. Arzenál Camping provides bungalow/motel type accommodation rather than tent space.

Eating in Tokaj can prove difficult. Makk Marci pizzeria closes at 8, yes, that’s 8, even in July; we managed to get there by 7 on Saturday, to find that they had no pizza. The Tokaj Hotel restaurant subsequently had neither the wine nor the chicken dish that we ordered, although they did manage to find us an alternative for each. To complete the trio, on Sunday morning the Bacchus (which really is no more than a cafe) had no coffee. We recommend instead the restaurant of the Lux Panzio and the Co-op on Kossuth tér. There is a large road between the Tokaj Hotel and the Bodrog river, so you can get neither a room with a particularly nice view, nor a waterside table on the terrace.

If you’re not interested in wine, don’t visit Tokaj, but if the vine is your thing, then you can easily spend a couple of days visiting the cellars. Our favourite was the Hímesudvar Pincészet on Bem utca, where the cellar tour costs 200 HUF per person, or is included if you choose the tasting, at 1600 HUF per person. This consists of 0.5dl each of Muskotály, Szamorodni, Hárslevelü, Furmint, Fordítás and a 6 puttonyos Aszú. You can also get small plates of cheese and paté, which might be wise…The town is full of cellars, where you can buy a decilitre of wine (100 ml) from as little as 50 HUF. Wander back to Szerelmi Pincesor, or behind Kossuth tér to Ovar utca, where a couple of pleasant cellars are open. One has a garden stretching up into the hill behind it, where you can sit with a jug of furmint and watch the sun set behind the storks, nesting on a pole a few metres away; the other one is less pleasing aesthetically, but stays open later.

If you somehow get bored of wine tasting, you could have a look inside the attractive church on Kossuth tér, or visit the Tokaj Museum for 200 HUF per head. The synagogue is now completely closed and looks like it is mostly collapsed, but there is an impressive storks’ nest above the pavement outside.

Back to the Hímesudvar Pincészet: we took the cellar tour in hungarian, as part of our intention this weekend was to practice in an out-of-the-way place where not too much english would be spoken; we work as a team: Ken speaks and I listen. Between us, we can manage conversations fairly well, slowly figuring out what was said and how to answer appropriately. After the tour, and as it was barely lunchtime, we chose to share one tasting between us, accompanied by some excellent non-hungarian blue cheese, some ordinary hungarian white cheese, and a booklet of tasting notes translated into very novel english.

Muskotály is the grape variety, and the first glass to try is this reasonably dry, gooseberryish white, which tastes much as you would expect, although better than your average hungarian white.

You then move on to the Szamorodni, which is a later harvest than the Muskotály, made from grapes which are not selected; that is, they include all the gammy wrinkled and mouldy ones. You can taste them, too, in its musty, apple flavours, if the description hasn’t put you off.

Next, a Hárslevelü, or Linden Leaf, with the sweetness turned up a notch to taste of elderflower honey and cloves. In contrast, or perhaps because our palates were becoming accustomed to sweetness, the Furmint seemed less syrupy, with a pleasant flavour of almonds and a pale golden colour. I am not a drinker of sweet white wine, associating it mainly with Liebfraumilch at student parties, so by the time we reached the Fordítás, I was quite nervous about the whole thing. Fordítás is made from a second pressing of the Aszú grapes, and it is hard to imagine why anyone would want to make something sweeter. It’s a liquid brandysnap, with the sweetness growing in your mouth. If we had consumed this at student parties, I would be the size of a house by now.

All this was building up to the Aszú, which, if you have heard of Tokaj wine, is the Tokaj wine you have heard of. This comes in varying degrees of sweetness, according to the number of punnets of sweet grapes added to the wine after pressing (2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 punnets = 2/3/4/5/6 puttonyos). The six-puttonyos wine we tried was a deep amber hue, and tasted of crystallised brown sugar. I wonder what would happen if you added it to your coffee. Having said that, it was not unpleasant, and if it wasn’t so expensive I’m sure I could have drunk it for the rest of the afternoon. I have quite changed my mind about Tokaj wine; I don’t think it’s horrible sweet goo anymore, I can appreciate its subtleties now that I have a little knowledge about it. I would recommend a visit to the town, if wine is a subject close to your heart and you happen to be anywhere near Hungary. Maybe not necessary to come here just for that, though; there are lots of nice things to see in Budapest too. Next stop, Villany, home of the Big Red…