Up early and we jumped into the "crew bus" and zoomed the two hours to Pecs.
Pecs was founded over 2000 years ago by the Romans and is the 5th largest town in Hungary. It is famous for a few things but two of the main ones are: it is home to the first university in the country (14th century) and was once the capital of Europe's fine glovemaking industry (19th century).
Today we visited one of the more famous glovers in Pecs - Szom Hor. I met up with the lovely Bernadett Hornicz and spent two hours watching as her team made up a special pair of driving gloves ... just for me! It is a HUGE process and very, very skilled. The end product is quite unique ... I even chose the colours (racing red leather with yellow inards). The factory employs 70 people who produce 70,000 pairs a year - ALL made by hand! Awesome!
From there we drove 45 minutes to Villany and to the Sauska Winery.
Apart from Tokaji (& maybe Bull's Blood), Hungarian wine is relatively unknown and generally quite awful. Along comes businessman Christian Sauska (& daughter Steffie) ... he buys a piece of land fit for wine, builds an amazing winery and starts producing wines that are not only drinkable but now very exportable. We had a fun afternoon talking wine, examining wine and drinking wine! What a day ...
The weather was miserable BUT the forecast for tomorrow is positive! Yay!
