Sopron
This article was first published in Hungarian Review in January 2019 First we heard what sounded like gunfire, then came a shrieking sound like a festive rocket being launched. Only then did we see rising in the sky above the vines a great mumuration of starlings, circling and swirling in great arcs, coming together, coming apart, reforming. Thousands of starlings in a fast-moving cloud of their own making. For ten minutes we watched the spectacle as afternoon turned to evening and the rain set in and the hailstones began to fall. "We do have problems with hail, and with the 'frozen saints' - late frosts in mid-May. But the starlings are a bigger problem." A flock of starlings can strip a vineyard of its ripe grapes in a very short space of time. We sat indoors at the Taschner Winery, a modern building that houses an expanding enterprise, on the road out of Sopron that leads to Balf. Kurt Taschner opened a bottle of 2018 Irsai Olivér - a white grap