Slovakia

Slovakia sits between three of the great wine cultures of central Europe and borrows from all of them. The grapes are Austria's: Grüner Veltliner, Welschriesling, Blaufränkisch and St. Laurent, under Slovak names. The sweet wine tradition is Hungary's. The scale is nobody's, because almost the whole crop is drunk at home and very little leaves the country.

There are six regions. Malokarpatská, the Small Carpathian belt running north east from Bratislava, is the largest and the most visited, because the wine road starts inside the capital's suburbs. Južnoslovenská, Nitrianska, Stredoslovenská and Východoslovenská fill in the south. The sixth is Tokajská.

The Tokaj vineyard does not stop at the border. About 900 hectares of it lie on the Slovak side, on the same volcanic and loess soils, planted to the same Furmint, Lípovina and Muškát žltý. Slovakia won the right to sell the wine as Tokaj after a long argument with Hungary, and the bottles say Tokajský výber with a number of putne on them, which is the same measure as puttonyos.

The signature Slovak crossing is Devín, a Tramíner cross bred at Bratislava in the 1950s that gives a broad, scented, faintly bitter white. Look for it, and for Dunaj, alongside the imported names.