As we are approaching the end of the year and this is our last issue, this will also be the last of my essays for the year, allow me to lighten my style a bit! So, when I got knowledge about the new bottling plant of Grand Tokaj and even the plans for a full-fledged wine complex in the future, I toyed with the idea of what criteria I would have used instead of Grand Tokaj's management to decide in which company I would have manufactured the tanks for the new bottling plant.
So I wandered back in time and remembered the arguments my wine acquaintances and friends had made for their own decision and choice. I remembered the words of Mrs. dr. Beáta Pühra, who answered my question as to why she chose ÉLBER Ltd. for the expansion of the Nyakas winery's tank farm:
- The first 3,000 hectoliter tank farm was already manufactured by ÉLBER. These tanks were absolutely reliable, I had never had any problems here in 17 years. They had no holes, not even a spot of rust, the legs did not bend, did not collapse, nothing happened that could be heard from others. I followed the principle "never change a winning team" and therefore also entrusted the further expansion of the tank farm to ÉLBER.
When I asked about the tank farm at Weingut Kreinbacher, I received this answer from managing director Sándor Baráth:
- We want to be the best in our own genre. Our champagne is made by a Champagne cellar master who visits the winery monthly. On his advice we bought two traditional Coquard presses from France and sourced casks from Austria to make the champagne more sophisticated. Fortunately, we no longer had to go abroad to equip our winery with the highest quality fermentation tanks, because with ÉLBER Ltd. we have such a company in our own country, where these world-class products are manufactured.
Sándor Mérész, the responsible winemaker in the curia of Etyek, answered the question:
- During the construction, we had weekly cooperation discussions with the designer, the contractor and the wine process manufacturers, as the walls built with the concrete structure could have been modified only afterwards with great effort. ÉLBER Ltd. regularly took part in these discussions and promoted the solution of technological challenges with constructive suggestions. The activities of ÉLBER Ltd. did not end there. We are in constant contact to carry out a follow up study to monitor the state of the tanks manufactured by ÉLBER and so they can help us if necessary.
ÉLBER Ltd. was of course among the companies chosen and it is a happy coincidence that they also won the public tender and were then able to support strenuously the work of the architects.
I think that - if I were responsible for the decision - these arguments would convince me that I should choose ÉLBER GmbH. Finally, on this subject I also asked the chief designer of the architect’s office responsible for the design of Grand Tokaj. When ÉLBER Ltd. won the public tender, they started working on it with full effort. I quote the architect's answer:
”ÉLBER Ltd. has developed a great solution how this new development can be implemented here on a slope with a gravitational system on such a large scale. ÉLBER made excellent drawings of how much space the tanks would take up and how they would be connected together. They worked together with Albert György, who supplied the bottling plants, of course we also consulted with them a lot, but Pál Kovács' team helped a lot, that's for sure.”
As also the decision of Grand Tokaj.