WINET

How and why a wine-maker from Varna resurrected a real wine once drunk by the ancient Thracians

Ancient Thracians liked their wine full-bodied, fruity with a delicate aftertaste of… beeswax. A wine cellar in Varna offers a journey back in time with a grape variety they resurrected from the time of… Homer’s Iliad. This is no joke or cheap marketing trick, it is the result of a series of archaeological and chemical studies and experiments lasting more than 14 years. Atanas Karageorgiev, a winemaker from Varna, has patented his creation and, a few days ago, started marketing, experimentally, the first bottles of wine with a history going back 3,000 years.

7 unique Bulgarian wine varieties you must taste

Did you know that Bulgaria was the second largest producer of wine in the world in the 1980s? Today, the country may not be producing wine on such a massive scale, but its thousand-year-old winemaking traditions continue to deliver high-quality and affordable Bulgarian wine.

Indeed, vine growing and winemaking have been part of Bulgarian culture since time immemorial. Thousands of years ago in what is today Bulgaria, the ancient Thracians were consuming wine from elaborate gold vessels in the shape of animals and mythical creatures. And who wouldn’t grow wine in Bulgaria – its sunlit hills, fertile soils and geographic latitude (equivalent to central Italy or southern France to the west) provide the perfect vine growing conditions practically all over the country.

All You Need to Know about Bulgarian Wines

Bulgaria was the world’s fourth-largest wine exporter in the 1980s, and most of the production was in bulk and destinated to the USSR, but the industry starts to decline when During 1985–87, Mikhail Gorbachev carried out an anti-alcohol campaign with partial prohibition, colloquially known as the “dry law”. Prices of vodka, wine, and beer were raised, and their sales were restricted in amount and time of day.

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