Bulgaria – the inside story

It was hopelessly difficult to try to squeeze everything I wanted to say into my FT article. I quite understand that most purple pagers will think their wine drinking rather superior to most Bulgarian wines but some seriously interesting wines are now being made.

General observations

  • Reds are generally better than whites.
  • Bulgarians have at last got the hang of making fresh white wines but most grapes seem to be picked too early in the ripening process to have developed much fruit flavour (either because of excess vigour or excess caution).
  • Autumn rains and cold can threaten the vintage...