The Biggest Wine Region You've Never Heard Of

by Gretchen Roberts, Posted Nov 14th 2008 @ 2:00PM

Start a conversation about value wines and you may hear votes for Chile, Spain, and Australia. Try this one on for size: Bulgaria. As scarce as Bulgarian wines are in the U.S., distributor Steve Ondush of Grapes Unlimited, who was pouring a series of Bulgarian wines at the San Antonio New World Wine & Food Festival, told me that Bulgaria is actually the second largest exporter of bottled wine in the world. So how come we don't all drink it here?

For one thing, most of the wine is exported to western European countries, where it's regarded as a value wine. For another, though Bulgaria has been producing wine practically since time began, its industry has been interrupted a few times, first by a 500-year domination by the Ottoman Empire and later by Communism. The current wine industry is less than 100 years old in this little Eastern European country tucked between Romania, Greece, and Turkey.

I tasted through all of the Grapes Unlimited selection and can make these generalizations from the wines I tried:

1. The red wines are much better than the whites, which tend to be on the sweetish side, and not in a good way.
2. Reds tend to be old-world style, less fruity and alcoholic than American or other new-world red wines.

Favorite of the tasting was the 2003 Damianitza No Man's Land Gold from the Melnik region of Bulgaria. It's a blend of 65 percent Merlot and 35 percent Cabernet Sauvignon, grown on the five-mile strip of land that used to separate communist Bulgaria from its southern neighbors. The wine was good now but had firm enough tannins to make me think it could still age for a bit. Not bad for a "value" region.

Have you had Bulgarian wines? Will it be America's next go-to value wine?

Filed Under: Drink Recipes, Tastings
Tags: bulgaria, bulgarian wine, damianitza, eastern europe, europe, melnik, red wine, wine, wine tasting, WineTasting

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Reader comments (Page 1 of 1)

11-16-2008 @10:57AM Thanh T. said... Hi Gretchen. Very interesting article on wines.

Wines in the Bulgaria-eastern Europe region prospered under the Greeks and some historians believed during the Ottoman Empire-Turkish banned wine making altogether.

Communism had a strong influence in the 1930’s within the region and a state monopoly “Vinprom” took over responsibility for all imports and exports of grapes.

The government then nationalized wine production and private parties overtook Bulgaria’s vineyards in 1947.

In 1960 a soft drink company from the US wanted to expand its products and services in Eastern Europe and traded cola for Bulgarian wine.

That soft drink company was PepsiCo which develop a fruitful business relationship with Bulgaria and help improve the quality of Bulgarian wines through research from Davis University in California.

The Northern region of Bulgaria is the ideal location to produces Bulgaria’s best wines because more experiences wineries were located near the Balkan Mountains.

The Eastern region produces mainly white wines-Chardonnays, Sauvignon Blancs.

The Southern region produces mainly Cabernet Sauvigons and Merlots.

And the Sub Balkan region produces some of Bulgaria’s best Chardonnays.-The Global Encyclopedia of Wine.

I took a few classes on religious studies and ancient history of the world a few years back.

Very interesting stuff, most of today’s best restaurants have unique wine collections from around the world. : )

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11-16-2008 @1:29PM Gretchen Roberts said... Thanh, thank YOU for your comment. I had no idea about the Pepsi thing. Very interesting history, indeed.
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11-17-2008 @1:37PM Hande said... Bulgaria WAS for some time (before the 90s) the second largest bottled wine exporter. It is far from that nowadays.
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