"bulgaria" news and stories

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?