Champagne, with footnotes
Some people make a room more interesting simply by walking into it. Máté Hajdu usually adds a story about a vineyard, an exact opinion on the glassware and a bottle worth slowing the evening down for.
He is a champagne specialist, writer and Chevalier de l'Ordre des Coteaux de Champagne. He wears the green ribbon lightly. What matters is the knowledge behind it, and his rare ability to make connoisseurship feel generous rather than performative.
Máté has taught me that high life, done properly, is not display. It is attention: to place, craft, company and the moment when an ordinary evening decides not to be ordinary.
In 2021, we brought our two worlds onto the same page in Világgazdaság. He brought Champagne, its history and producers; I brought the law of origin, identity and protected names. Seeing our names together in print meant more to me than I expected. It still does.
The WSET Level 2 came later. The house scale did not change: champagne receives the benefit of the doubt, and my tasting notes still get peer reviewed by a knight.
