Eger: Valley of the Beautiful Women
Sunday, October 16th, 2005After a week in Budapest, partying at the Backpack Guesthouse, we needed to get back to some normalcy – a bit of quiet, a private room, and cheap, cheap wine. Where else to go but Eger, two and a half hours northeast of Budapest, and home of the famous Bull’s Blood red wine, so it was there that Bec and I journeyed on October 11th.
About a twenty minute walk from the centre of Eger, a town of about 60,000 or so, is the wonderfully named Valley of the Beautiful Women. Here, amongst all the lookers, are at least 100 wine cellars standing side by side, each making their own wine on site and selling it dirt cheap to anyone walking past. We had been told that you could take empty plastic bottles to the cellars, and the owners would gladly fill them up for you. Almost disbelieving, Bec and I emptied a couple of water bottles, and walked through the late afternoon sunshine towards the valley, a bit of a spring in our steps. The guidebook we had mentioned something like the following when talking about the valley, “The number of cellars can be overwhelming. Cellars 6, 8, 16, 17, 25, and 45 are always popular, but numbers 5, 13, 18, 23, 31, 32, 42, and 44 have better wines.” This sounded like our sort of valley.
Dave