Joe - As with anything, you need to start with the winemaker and the grapes. Then you need to decide what you want to accomplish with aging the wine.
You probably recognize that there are different kinds of wine from the region, so I assume you’re talking about Tokaji-aszu, which is what most people think about when they think of the wine. Those are the 3,4,5,6 Puttonyos wines, which have increasing levels of sweetness. But even at the 3P level, they’re pretty sweet.
If you like aged sweet wine, for example aged Spatlese and Auslese, then by all means, age your Tokaji. I suppose the more “serious” wines would be the 5 and 6P wines and there’s a stupid category called aszuesszencia which is higher yet. Once in a while you find Naturesszencia but that’s rare and I kind of think it’s mostly for the Americans.
At any rate, if you have a good year and a good winemaker and good sites, you can age those wines for at least as long as you’d age anything from Sauternes and probably even longer. So in a few instances, the wines going back to the 70s are in fine shape these days. Those going back even longer can also be in fine shape, but again, in selected instances.
The problem is that the communist regime really trashed the winemaking. A few individuals tried to do their best to keep their traditions alive and in some cases they succeeded, but even they were limited by the technology available to them.
For example, they had huge cement vats for the wine. Those vats are now used for private tasting rooms and storage in a couple of the wineries. The first stainless steel tanks were brought in after 1989. Sanitation wasn’t all that great either. So you ended up with an oxidized style of wine. Some of those older bottles are brown. Most of the wine didn’t come from specific sites either - it went into the state-run winemaking cuvee. Since it didn’t matter how good your grapes were, and since the idea was to produce quantity, inferior clones were planted and everything was dumped together. In some cases the wine was even fortified to aid in preservation.
As I said - in spite of all that, in some cases the wine was still good. Unless you know the wine however, I’d have a lot more confidence in today’s wines. If you like them aged, I wouldn’t worry about them in your lifetime. Personally though, I like them young. The best should age as long or longer than anything from Sauternes.