Between the Bodrog and the first folds of the Zemplén hills, Sárospatak is a town you ride into slowly, because the streets are cobbled, narrow and full of people who are in no hurry. The Gomboshegy cellars lie barely a kilometre from the centre, on the slope where the vineyards begin, and that closeness is what I like about them: the wine is not a trip out into some remote estate, it is a few minutes from the bakery. Furmint and Hárslevelű are the grapes you will hear named, the two workhorses of the Tokaj region, and they make everything from dry whites with a flinty edge to the legendary sweet Aszú.
The history of the town runs through the Rákóczi family, the Hungarian princes who made Sárospatak their seat. Their castle, a mixture of a medieval bastion and a Renaissance palace, stands by the river and has a famous Red Tower. Zrínyi Ilona, the wife of Ferenc Rákóczi I, lived here before she defended Munkács castle against the imperial army, and her son Ferenc II became the leader of the great uprising of the early eighteenth century. Alongside the castle, the Reformed College has trained generations of teachers and ministers and houses a library that has survived wars, fires and regimes, which says something about the stubbornness of the place.
Practically, Sárospatak is a town of fourteen thousand, so fuel, a supermarket, a bank machine and a thermal bath are all on the doorstep. Tolcsva, nine or ten kilometres south, is a small wine village with a couple of cafés but little else, so use Sárospatak as your base. Hungarian wine cellars often belong to families who keep irregular hours, and many of the small ones in the hills are open by arrangement only, so do not expect a door to be open just because it is lunchtime.
The riding is easy and unhurried. Roads run along the Bodrog's flat valley, and then rise gently through cherry orchards and vines to wooded ridges, with views of the Slovak border hills to the north. Traffic is light, tractors are common at harvest, and the tarmac is patched but sound. Autumn mist often sits in the river valley in the morning, then burns off to leave clean light on yellow leaves.
A bowl of fish soup, a plate of sausage and a slow afternoon seem the right way to treat the place, and if you decide to stay the night, the town has guesthouses at moderate prices.