Natural Wine in Bulgaria

I tasted 14 wines to get a feel for what's going on in this south-east Balkan nation

It shows my age, but I must have drunk a fair bit of Bulgarian wine in the late 1980s. What we saw in the UK was cheap and cheerful - mostly ripe, boisterous reds if memory serves. Almost three decades later, in 2015, a wine conference gave me the excuse to visit for the first time. By then, Bulgaria’s wines were nowhere to be seen in my chilly corner of northwest Europe.

The visit was largely disappointing. I was surprised by the lack of anything that could be described as artisanal, never mind low intervention or natural. For a country that was one of the world’s largest wine exporters during the 1980s, it seemed to have had quite the fall from grace.

Reading Dr. Caroline Gilby’s historical summary in the Oxford Companion to Wine and her book The Wines of Bulgaria, Romania and Moldova helped provide the background. Bulgaria became a key supplier to the Soviet Union from 1948 and on, and its vineyard landscape was remodelled to focus on quantity. Large plantings of international varieties and notably Rkatsiteli (to serve the Russian market) date from this time. Production was centralised and state-controlled as in all soviet and Balkan nations at the time.

I don’t want to imply that quality was bad. Bulgaria impressively modernised and skilled its wine industry over the second half of the 20th century, with considerable amounts of French expertise. There’s a reason my misspent youth was partly fuelled by Bulgarian Cabernet Sauvignon - the country’s reputation was built on accessible, well-made wines

Everything changed with the fall of the iron curtain in 1990, and not for the better. Vineyard land previously co-opted by the communist state was haphazardly handed back to its original owners, whether they had any desire to farm it or not. The following decade saw thousands of hectares abandoned and production figures decimated. As old family estates were left to rot, capitalism took hold. Overseas investors smelled opportunity and new privately owned estates started popping up.

From disappointment to hope

This was what I saw in 2015 – shiny new wineries whose investors expected slick, Parker-style wines to roll out the back door. It was hardly exciting. As Gilby notes, wine production was divorced from the actual business of viticulture - “the larger wineries still seemed to believe that grapes grow in the back of trucks.” Where were the small, quirky family estates? Where was anything authentic, anything with a story to tell about Bulgaria itself? Heavily oaked faux-Bordeaux blends and flabby Muscats seemed to be about it.

Gilby provides an incredible statistic. Even as recently as 2020, there were only 282 registered wineries in the whole country. That’s less than the UK¹. Perhaps it’s not surprising that there has been precious little to get excited about.

There are signs of change. Earlier this year, I met three promising Bulgarian growers at Karakterre. A colleague of mine, Dilyan Kolev, who’s involved in distribution in both the UK and Bulgaria, offered to get me in front of a wider selection of the country’s natural wines.