Professional Education Focuses on Lake Balaton Wines - Interview with Tamás Hermann, President of the VinoPelso Foundation
With the support of the Veszprém-Balaton 2023 European Capital of Culture (VEB2023 ECoC) programme, the VinoPelso Foundation launched a professional wine education course in March this year. It is based on the international WSET (Wine and Spirit Education Trust) curriculum and focuses on the Balaton wine region. We spoke to Tamás Hermann, President of the Foundation, about the details of the training programme and the Foundation's ambitions.
My passion for wine goes back to my university years, more than 20 years ago. I then organised a university wine club with my classmates, including Gergő Istvándy, who is now a winemaker in Badacsony. It was a very formative experience for all of us. After graduation, I went abroad. When I came back, I saw that although there is viticulture-winemaker training at the university, students don't have the chance to gain experience on wine tasting. They don't have the opportunities to learn all about the wines, to get to know different styles and the objective basics of tasting."
- says Tamás. He established the VinoPelso Foundation partly because of his experiences as a young man. Returning from abroad, he founded the Bogyózó [Pickers] Wine Club in the Balaton Museum in Keszthely. It was a place where people interested could taste wines, meet winemakers, and learn about viticulture and winemaking.
He later launched the WSET course in Keszthely, with basic, intermediate, and advanced level training. Last year, with VEB2023 ECoC programme support, his courses were supplemented with topics related to the Balaton wine region, creating a vinicultural training course focused on the area.
We developed a new curriculum, which differs in many aspects from the general WSET course. It goes into much more detail about the wine production of the region, the landscape and the wines produced here. Tasting basics, wine and food pairing and other topics in WSET are also covered here. If you complete this course, you will not be an official WSET graduate, but will gain a basic general knowledge of wines, complemented by a broad knowledge of the Balaton region.
The point, of course, is not necessarily spreading WSET-type knowledge but rather to acquaint local gastronomy professionals - bar staff, waiters, etc. – with the wines of the region.
We thought that, in the spirit of cooperation and education with ECoC, we would offer local gastronomy professionals the opportunity to participate in the course at a discounted price.
Along with offering theoretical knowledge, the course places a strong emphasis on field exercises.
We don't just taste and learn; we also visit winemakers and talk with them about their experience, grapes and wines. This year we have already visited the Laposa Family sparkling wine production facilities. We also learned about the biodynamic Kristinus natural wines at Kéthely."
- says Tamás.
The VinoPelso Foundation focuses not only on education: it has begun the terroir mapping of the Balaton Wine Region with a new soil survey and production site classification. Also, the Foundation will organise so-called 'tasting' points in several locations in the region. There, guests can taste a pre-selected line of wines at a restaurant, bar, or other "accredited" place certified by the Foundation.
We want to put together a wine list that is most representative of the Balaton Wine Region. We will bring these to the tasting points. One of the conditions for tasting is for the place to have the right infrastructure, the right lighting, the proper wine glasses, decanters, etc... Another condition is that the person at the bar must have attended our training and must know the wines. After all, the aim is to give our visitors a taste of Balaton wines and provide them with information about the wines and the region that they might not have access to elsewhere.
