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JR's notes:

This article has never appeared in print and was written especially for PLANET RADFORD in the early days, appearing in October, 1998. A great deal has happened since in Bulgaria but this remains a true record of my first impressions on my first visit to a very beautiful country.

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BULGARIA TRIP - September 1998

First thoughts - terrible, terrible, terrible Heathrow Terminal 3 with - unless your taste runs only to sticky buns and coffee - the world's worst food (The Village Grill makes the average motorway service area look like a haven of quality and value for money) and appalling rip-off prices for everything. I have arrived far too early, of course - consequence of a lifelong paranoia about being late, but I'm here. Where is the check-in for Balkan Air? 'Over there' says a helpful airport official waving at a row of check-in desks several kilometres long. Thank God for the mobile 'phone, and the intelligence of the Bulgarian Wine Guild for including the number of the devastating Stephanie Morton-Small, who appears moments later in pre-Raphaelite orange, not three metres away. Our fellow traveller is David Hoppit, editor of 'Vintage Times' no, not the former newsletter of the Sunday Times Wines Club but a magazine for the more mature reader. meanwhile Stephka (as she is to become known) has elbowed her way to the front of the queue and is demanding that, as a party of internationally-respected journalists on a mission to benefit the Bulgarian export sector we should be upgraded to Business Class. Balkan Air staff do not stand a chance and give in gracefully. We make jokes about there being a better class of beetroot in rows 1-9...

RECEIVED WISDOM

...Which begins the roll-out of our preconceptions about Bulgaria. First there were the Turks (no wine at all) and then the Russians (awful mass-produced oxidized sweetened rubbish for the Moscow market) and then PepsiCo, with the stars-and-stripes flying and brass band playing, marched into the vineyards and wineries with new technology and new-world winemaking skills and saved the nation's wine from oblivion as the Russki market collapsed. This is the Hollywood version of the story, of course.

What really happened is more complex. This part of the world (The Balkans and what we now call the middle east - around the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean) is where wine was probably born: the very first vineyards have been traced to this area and winemaking was probably part of the agricultural mix in what is now Bulgaria even before the Greeks invented democracy. The Turkish domination effectively ended any major development in Bulgarian winemaking for five hundred years until 1878, and whatever advances were made between then and 1948 were stifled yet again by the treadmill of production under communism. However, there was a strong tradition of wine in the country even if investment had been low and many of the wineries seemed to have been built like tank factories. So, although good, even occasionally great wine was being made, it was very much in the minority. When new-world winemakers did come in - indeed, as part of a quid pro quo deal with Pepsico - standards of eq uipment, winemaking and, above all, quality control rose to meet the effort and skills of local winemakers, and the result was the renascence of Bulgarian wine in the early 1980s with the quite astonishing quality - and consistency - of its new-wave Cabernet-Sauvignon, Merlot and Chardonnay.

We really shouldn't be surprised at this. Bulgaria is, after all, the legendary 'Land of Wine and Roses', source of the fabl'ed attar or rose which perfumes traditional Turkish Delight. Indeed, given its range of mountain and valley microclimates, the Black Sea coast and a latitude between 42° and 44° north (equivalent to Bordeaux in the north and Barcelona in the south) there's no reason why Bulgaria shouldn't produce the finest wines in the Balkans as well as being the breadbasket and market garden of south-eastern Europe. Or, rather there is, and that reason is land reform.

The Bulgarian government is doing its best to return land to the people who owned it before the communist takeover, but this is proving very difficult. The first problem is to establish exactly who owns which patch of land after the collectivisation of farming and everything else under the enlightened tutelage of Moscow; the second (from the farmers' point of view) is being able to buy that land from people who'd like to sell it.

THE STATE OF THE ART

Today, the wineries are in transition: some are still in state hands, others have been the subject of management buy-outs and a few have actually been handed back to the original owners, but investment is tight, the Bulgarian economy is fragile and the desperate shortage of land for the planting of new vineyards means that some wineries cannot be as rigorous as they would like to be in selecting grapes of the right quality for the wines they want to make. However, the wine business as a whole is inching forward and most of the producers have joined in with the general feeling that the country's future lies in producing better wines to sell at higher prices - as it were, levering Bulgarian wine out of the £2.99 price-trough which has been its lot until now. You may already have seen, for example Czar Simeon, an experimental consignment of which flew of Sainsbury's shelves at £6.95 a bottle, proving two points. The first is that, as ever, British wine-drinkers are the most open-minded in Europe and, second, that the Bulgars really can produced wine of exemplary quality. They've made the effort in terms of training (the University of Plovdiv now offers a state-of-the-art oenology course), equipment (stainless steel is not universal but it's everywhere that matters, and increasing yearly) and commitment to lower production of higher quality wines. What's needed for real 'lift-off' is the land-reform that will deliver the uncultivated, fertile hills and valleys of this beautiful countryside to the vine-growers. Once the wineries are in a position to dictate real quality terms to the growers - and once the growers realise what financial benefits are likely to accrue from producing a smaller amount of better-quality grape, Bulgaria could very well become the 'Australia of Europe' if you'll forgive a rather convoluted metaphor.

But that's in the future. What's the immediate situation? Back to the tour: Bulgaria is a poor country by western-European standards but, as it often the case with poorer countries, it offers a warmth of welcome and levels of hospitality and service from which, quite frankly, we could well learn a few lessons in the west. Hotels tend to be monolithic though comfortable, like the Novotel in Plovdiv, or charming and idiosyncratic, like the Price Cyril in Nessabar, on the Black Sea coast, but the approach in all of them was warm, friendly and obliging. Food is simple and wholesome, generally speaking. Surprisingly, potatoes, although widely available, are seldom seen at table - they prefer lightly-toasted wholemeal bread - and despite a well- developed dairy industry I never saw a bottle of milk. Yoghourt is served with the (copious, fresh and delicious) salads which begin every meal, and sheep's, goat's and cow's-milk cheese are available everywhere, and the ice-creams they make here are rich, creamy and positively illegal, but when I asked for milk for my breakfast coffee in one hotel I was brought a tin of baby-formula milk powder. It was delicious, but... Oh, and Bulgarian tomatoes are the biggest, ugliest, horniest, tough-skinned tomatoes, and the best you ever tasted. They drink straight grape brandy with the salad and that's the first course. Indeed, wine-consumption is strictly old-world - that is to say it's traditional part of the meal rather than a drink in itself, as it is in France, Portugal, Spain and Italy: the 20th-century Anglo-Saxon innovation of wine as a drink in its own right is still relatively new in these parts. Main courses tend to the casserole style: meat (typically pork or chicken - beef and lamb are fabulously expensive) chopped up with onion, peppers and cheese and served with toasted bread, fresh yoghourt and - for the bold - chillies so hot they'd make a Mexican blanch. Puddings also tend to be milk-based, but everything pales befor e the magnificent ice-cream.

TOURING AND TASTING

I have 35 pages of tasting notes which I'll try to keep to a minimum. We visited the old towns of Plovdiv (beguiling, Roman remains, ancient, cobbled streets) and Nessabar (charming seaside resort) and the modern city of Sofia (wonderful old Skoda trolleybuses, and potholes the size of municipal swimming-pools) and the wineries varied from Soviet-style monolithic concrete vat-farms to sparkling modern installations winking with stainless steel and humming with computers. There are two major groups which handle exports to the UK, and within their own corporate domain they may have something as hands-off as a contract to market a winery's wines or as hands-on as a share in the winery itself. In the UK we know them as Domaine Boyar and the Bulgarian Vintners' Company, and our hosts were their representatives Margo Todorov and Chavdar Vesselinov, respectively.

Our first call was the Perushtitsa Winery, south of Plovdiv. This is a fairly old-fashioned installation (founded 1934) turning out mainly mid-range to good quality wines from Cabernet-Sauvignon and Merlot but also doing good work with native Bulgar varieties such as the Mavrud. The best wines on this showing were a lightly-oaked Pulden Cabernet from the 1994 vintage and the 1993 Pulden Mavrud which showed excellent fruit and tannin keeping qualities. My highest mark (15) at the tasting went to a Cabernet-Sauvignon/Mavrud mix from the 1990 vintage with a silky, oaky feel and a style not a million miles from a good old gran reserva Rioja (showing my prejudices, here!).

After lunch we went to Vinzavod Assenovgrad, south-west of Plovdiv, and old-established outfit which prides itself on making some of Bulgaria's finest wines even before the 'wine revolution' of 1977/8. Mavrud is well-represented here including a good Mavrud Reserve (14 - available in Unwin's, Tesco, Sainsbury's at around £3.50) with big, soft ripe warm fruit and a pleasant length. Merlot and Cabernet-Sauvignon are represented by an excellent Plovdiv Cabernet 1995 (15) and a very subtle, stylish and 'laid back' Assenovgrad Cabernet Special Reserve 1992 with impressive complexity an almost startling ripeness (16). Best of the lot, however, and confounding history was a truly magnificent 1974 Mavrud from the winery's private reserves (so this is the stuff they used to send off to Moscow?). Made from a native variety, and long before the New World winemaking techniques which change the Bulgarian wine landscape, it exhibits beautiful, perfumed nose and soft, rich, powerful fruit wi th just a tickle of tannin to make the length go on for ever. Quite simply superb (18).

Day two began at the Stambolovo winery at Haskovo (Haskovo is the regional name, Stambolovo the 'appellation'), where the Merlot is king (or queen, if you prefer). The complaint here, as everywhere, was the difficulty of getting hold enough top-quality grape to meet the market's needs, but the seventeen wines on show demonstrated very careful batching with some excellent examples. The 1993 Haskovo showed warm, oaky ripeness and good, firm tannins with an impressive length; the 1990 Stambolovo had a very stylish, mature, elegant perfume on the nose and solid power, fruit and tannin on the palate; the 1987 was, if anything, a little tougher on the tannin but none the worse for that (all 15); and best of all in this group was the 1988 which took all the ingredients of the '90 and just wrapped them up in a more mature and elegant package (16). So far, so good... And out came the big guns. Sakar is a district within Stambolovo (erm, as it were, to take an analogy, Haskovo is cognate wit h Bordeaux, Stambolovo is cognate with the Médoc and Sakar is cognate with St.-Julien: get the idea? This is nothing to do with style or quality, just a way of describing the regional shakedown). The Sakar 1994 showed warmth and a slightly more southerly ripeness but with a full, rich and perfumed style, as did the 1990 with darker, fuller fruit and still some active tannins (both 15). The 1991 was almost hot with fiery tannins and golden, ripe fruit flavours and tremendous length (16). And then there were the Special reserves. Stambolovo 1996 Special Selection showed that deep, dark, ripe, raisiny fruit balanced with full tannins (16); The Sakar version from the same vintage had that dark, almost closed, bitter-chocolate Merlot nose with solid weight on the palate and a word I haven't used for years but was delighted to resurrect: real, old-fashioned 'grip' (17). A sample of the 1997 Sakar 'ecologistikh' (yes, I think that's what it means) showed enormous, wild summer fruits o n both nose and palate with an undertow of tannins balanced by enormous richness: a stunner (17). And these people complain about the fruit they take in?

Onward, then to Stara Zagora and the wines of Domaine Sakar near Lubimetz which includes within its group activities the old-established (1901) firm of Menada-Syarov Brothers, whose best-known brand-name in the UK is Orachiovitsa, which is a region to the north-east of Stara Zagora. This group became a plc in 1994 and handles some 16,000 tonnes of grapes per harvest. The Stara Zagora winery itself is very smart, showing considerable investment, and the company is one of the major exporters to Scandinavia and the Benelux countries. We tasted twelve wines, four from Sakar and eight from Orachiovitsa, and all made from CabernetSauvignon, Merlot or a combination of the two. There was a palpable difference in winemaking style here from Stambolovo: the Orachiovitsa vineyards are further north, the climate cooler and a fresh acidity and tannins more prominent in the wines, which might indicate that they would repay keeping. The Sakar '97 Merlot had the lovely perfumed nose that we had com e to notice from that region (14), but the northern grape showed its mettle in the 1996 country wine blend of Merlot and Cabernet - some oaky 'notes' on the nose and a tightly-packed, deep, dark fruit (14). The Orachiovitsa 'appellation' wines were the best of the lot, especially the '93 CabernetSauvignon which showed considerable power and plenty of tannin and fruit to carry it through, and the 1992 Cabernet-Sauvignon, still strikingly youthful with a long spiciness starting to show on the length (both 15).

Wednesday and this must be Vinis Ltd at Yambol, heading east towards the Black Sea. The winery is privately-owned and, indeed, the Chief Executive is Margo Todorov himself, as the Domaine Boyar Group expands into production as well as distribution. We're about the same altitude north as we were at Stara Zagora, and here, too, the Merlot and Cabernet (joint or severally) are the main crop. There's also some useful experimentation here with barrel-ageing, and the 1994 Cabernet-Sauvignon showed very well with a lovely oaky nose (my Rioja roots showing again!) with good, ripe, warm fruit and a nice, spicy, oaky length (14). best of all, however, were the Cabernet-Sauvignon Special Reserves from 1992 and 1991, the former with a subtle, deep, berry-fruit nose and a fine, if rather austere structure to the palate with plenty of tannin and good length. The 1991 had a ripe, old-fashioned 'gamey' hint on the nose and a broad, elegant style and structure, plenty of both tannin and fruit to ke ep up the equilibrium (Both 15).

Sliven in the afternoon, sharply north into the sub-Balkan region and Vini plc, the largest winery in Bulgaria, and capable of processing 100,000 tonnes of grapes. To give some idea of the shortages facing winemakers hereabouts, last year Vini managed to buy just 23,000 tonnes of grapes to supply its markets. The Sliven name will be familiar to supermarket shoppers in the UK (Bestway, Unwins, Booker, Co-op, Safeway, Tesco, Morrison's, Thresher, Victoria Wines etc.) and we tasted fourteen examples from a country wine called simply 'white wine of the Tunjda Valley' to Cabernet-Sauvignon Special Reserves. There were five white wines to start- the first of our trip, and the very first was a blend of Rikat (the Russian Rkatsiteli), Misket (not the Muscat but a local variety according to the growers. Hmm...) and Dimiat - slightly off-dry and very 'gluggable' with an unmistakeable muscat-type nose (12): pleasant enough, though overshadowed by the Chardonnay/Misket which had good Chardonna y fruit with a delicate musky perfume provided by the Misket (14). However, we had learned that Bulgaria is a red-wine nation if nothing else, and the reds went on to greater things with Sliven Cabernet showing very well from 1994 and 1995 (both 15). But there was better yet: the 1994 Merlot Reserve and CabernetSauvignon Reserve are beautifully-crafted wines with classic varietal style, tight, ripe fruit concentration and yet an elegant and stylish finish (both 16 - and remember we have yet to cross the £4 a bottle barrier at UK prices). The 1988 and 1987 Cabernet Reserves showed what these wines are capable of achieving, with the '88 gamey, powerful, long, dark and still rich with fruit and the 1987 all of those plus a delicate, subtle, elegant finish to celebrate its 11th birthday (both 17). These are fine wines by any criteria.

Our final day, and the Black Sea Gold winery at Pomorie, right on the coast after a night spent under the stars - eating that is, not sleeping. This winery was a voucher management buyout, in which the investors have to come up with 10% of the money up-front and pay the rest back over an agreed number of years. I'm told that the purchase price of an average Bulgarian winery is about $6 million so all you need is $600,000 sit-down money and you're in business. Here we saw the best white wines of our trip, including a barrel-fermented Chardonnay with the right balance of varietal style, richness, austerity and spicy oaky elements plus a rich, long-golden-autumn finish (15 - available in Somerfield for £3.85). Most astonishing of all was a Chardonnay/Aligoté blend of positively Chablisienne style - that 'green' fruit flavour, a hint of almonds, deliciously light, lipsmackingly crisp, giving way to an inner richness. I adored it it and told them I though it was a masterpiec e of creative winemaking. Stephka told me that you can buy it in Tesco for £3.29 (I kid you not)(16). Amongst the reds Cabernet and Merlot once again topped the poll: the 1996 straight Cabernet showed textbook Cabernet-Sauvignon 'blackcurrant' character with an excellent structure. Classic winemaking, here, including the 1997 Merlot/Cabernet blend: berry-fruit, spicy-jammy nose, big, dark tannic deep-down fruit, good structure and excellent length (15 - and £2.99 from the Co-op. It's beyond a joke, really, isn't it?).

Memories of Bulgaria: Lovely scenery, some awful modern town architecture, beguiling old-town architecture with overhanging first floors, a generous welcome, good, simple (and healthy) food, Stephka swimming in the Black Sea in an impossibly (Moreton) small bathing-suit, big black Mercedes with smoked-glass windows outside the casino in Sofia. Those splendid, lurching, grinding Skoda trolleybuses, Magnificent Byzantine churches; my first Eastern Orthodox Monastery (mindblowing) the price of icons (even more mindblowing), Bulgarian jokes which go on for ever and have punchlines concerning agrarian reforms and industrial privatisation... And the brandy, drunk with salad as the first course of every meal, a thing of intense pride in every different part of the country... But that's another story.

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