wines from Bulgaria

contact the Embassy. The Embassy in Wash. DC is pushing quite hard on these wines, and has information about them.

I remember buying several cases of Trakia Merlot about 20 years ago for $1.57 US/bottle. It was a little light in body but decent quaffing wine - certainly better than the $2 stuff currently on the shelf at Trader Joe's. Here's some more recent info:

Tom S

Tom, your memory is certainly different than mine ;^) - the few bottles of Trakia I consumed 'way back when were pretty miserable, I wouldn't even have put them in "decent quaffing" territory. The equally few bottles of Two Buck Chuck I've sampled would actually stack up pretty well by comparison - at least the good ones would. As has been pointed out in other threads here, quality is widely variable between different lots of the stuff. The other thing to keep in mind is that there's been roughly 80% inflation in the past twenty years so, while still cheap, that $1.57 would be more like Three Buck Charlie now. Not that any of this should stop the original poster from checking out the Bulgarian wine business, of course!

- Mark W.

I've had a bottle of Domaine Boyar (merlot) and found it excellent considering its price (under $10 I think, I didn't buy it but drank it at a gathering). I've heard that this outfit is Bulgaria's largest and has benefitted from some outside capital (EBRD loans and the like). They might be aiming to produce Australian-style reds but I did like what I had.

dcr