I journeyed to Bulgaria between July 3rd and the 5th this year. My previous journey to Bulgaria had been … well, when exactly? The worst catastrophe that can befall a journalist is losing his or her notebooks on the way home, and that was exactly what happened to me on that last occasion.

It must have been in the mid-1990s. I travelled with the much-missed Richard Neill, who was writing for the Telegraph at the time. (Much missed, because nobody else in the UK has ever written as amusingly about wine as Richard did; he was our very own gangly Cork Jester. If you like music, Cuba and travel writing, by the way, you’ll relish his Looking for La Bomba, published by Penguin.)

We stayed in some louche hotels, failed to taste much good wine, and had a front seat for the impending disaster which has befallen Bulgarian viticulture ever since. The vineyards we saw, in other words, were in bad shape, and if there is one immutable truth in the wine world, it is that shambolic vineyards equal bad wine. Yet that must also have been the point at which Bulgarian wine exports to the UK hit their peak, and a colossal peak it was: 29 million litres in 1996, worth £22.5 million. In 1996, Russe winery (which Richard and I visited) was the biggest single unit supplier in the world to the UK. This year, Bulgaria will count itself lucky if it ships 3 million litres to the UK.

What’s gone wrong? Two colossal setbacks, only one of which was avoidable.

The unavoidable setback was snowballing competition on the UK market from Australia, California, Chile, Argentina and South Africa. That is the floodtide of history: something that all European countries, regardless of their market fitness, have been walloped by. Climate, infrastructure and land-ownership patterns make it very hard for Europe to compete in the production of good, simple, fruity wine with these southern hemisphere and American rivals.

And the avoidable setback? The precise system of land restitution adopted by Bulgaria was one of fatal punctiliousness. Each plot of land, as defined in the cadaster of 1947, was handed back to “the persons who were therefrom expropriated or to such persons’ heirs by law.” Wherever they may now be living. Seventy per cent of the Bulgarian population lived in the countryside in 1947; 75 per cent of the population is now urban. A million Bulgarians left the country after 1989. Remember, too, that Bulgaria’s farm land (vineyards included) had been heavily collectivised. The result was that Bulgaria’s existing large vineyards were suddenly owned by thousands of people scattered all over the country and the world. Hence the vegetative chaos they were just beginning to collapse into when Richard and I visited.

Could Bulgaria’s land reform have been administered differently? I am not an expert in this recherché field, but I was told in Bulgaria that Hungarian land restitution was not based on precise plots being restored to those with watertight legal entitlement to them, but on the land being amassed into workable units and then being given back to those with an entitlement on a pro rata basis. This seems more sensible.

Anyway, ten years on, those with determination (and a lot of capital) are slowly beginning to amass workable vineyard parcels, replant them, instal new winemaking facilities, and give Bulgaria the competitive wines which have been missing for the last decade. I visited three vineyard projects of this sort, and heard tell of others.

Bessa Valley vineyards and the Rhodope mountains

The first is Bessa Valley Vineyards, a joint venture between Stephan von Neipperg of Château Canon-la Gaffelière and La Mondotte in St Emilion and a financier friend of his called Karl-Heinz Hauptmann, of Europa Capital Management. These vineyards lie near Pazardzhik, to the east of Plovdiv (Philippopolis in Byzantine times); you can see the Rhodope Mountains stretch away to the south. This is one of the viticultural heartlands of southern Bulgaria, on fine loamy limestone terroir, yet when I looked at the area around the vineyard, it seemed lonely and empty, with most of the visible land under the hills used for grazing and little else.

Alex Kanev of EniraIt took the Bessa Valley team four years to get these 300 ha together, painstakingly purchasing the land from 800 individual owners. So far around 140 ha have been planted (at 5,000 plants per ha). I’ve rarely seen such high security at any vineyard anywhere: emphatically dissuasive fencing right the way around the vineyard; barriers at the entrance; and a 20-strong guard team on duty 24 hours a day. Why? “Welcome to Bulgaria,” said Alex Kanev, who runs the estate. Without these arrangements, he says, everything would be gone in a day or two: wire, posts, the lot.

I travelled much in Eastern Europe before 1989, and have been fascinated to see the changes there since. Superficially, these changes occur very quickly: nothing could be speedier than putting on a new set of clothes, for example; all it takes to buy a new car is a wad of cash. Underneath, though, the more important changes unravel very slowly: the built fabric of Eastern Europe will take fifty years or more to change, for example. The looks on people’s faces change slowly, too, because wealth and prosperity and the mental landscape of possibilities which those benefits imply seep only gradually and erratically into societies which have been deprived of the chance to evolve, and where change has instead come suddenly, from above, like a thunderclap.

The Bessa Valley wines (Enira and Enira Riserva) are very good, made with modest yields of 40 hl/ha, and with all the delicacy and concern for ripeness which marks Neipperg’s work in Bordeaux; I have posted tasting notes for the Riserva in the ‘Tastings’ section of this site. Vines, winery, technology, aesthetics: everything is fine-tuned to contemporary international standards. Yet as we drove away through the nearby village I saw no fewer than six donkey carts clattering along the road loaded with cabbages and hay, and a man stripped to the waist returning from his fields with a scythe in his hand. The contrast was jangling.

I also visited Catharina (Katarzyna) Estate, near Svilengrad, a 360-ha estate on the border with Greece, and with Turkey just a few kilometers away, too. Old Cold-War watchtowers now lope through the vineyards, surveying nothing except the humdrum tedium of inter-EU trade, and the busloads of agricultural workers who cross to Greece daily where the pay is a little better. This estate is owned by Belvédère, a Franco-Polish company with capitalisation from Angostura’s CL Financial (the owner of Hine Cognac and Bunnahabhain on Islay, surreally enough). This company has big bulk-wine sales (43 per cent of all the Bulgarian wine sold in Europe, and 70 per cent of the important Polish market); Catherina/Katarzyna is its bid for a high-quality renaissance.

Catherina's orgy mural

It’s the first winery I’ve ever visited when the walls are covered with a mural of an orgy. Tastefully so, of course: this is a homage to the Thracian mysteries (both Orpheus and Dionysus are said to have Thracian origins). Winemaker Konstantin Stoev, formerly of Perushtitsa, has made an impressive start: soft, ripe, hugely enjoyable reds with that kind of lazy, good-natured charm which Bulgaria can do so well. It’s a similar appeal to that of Chile in the Southern Hemisphere: wine whose birthright seems to be roundness, comeliness and comfort. The very definition of consumer-friendly, in sum, so there is everything to play for.

OK: big money from outside in both cases. Big money can always make things happen. But the third estate I visited is home-grown: vines which have grown, if you like, on top of a mountain of cucumbers and tomatoes. This is Terra Tangra, not far from Catherina in Sakar, where Emil Zaichev and his family have built up a 300-ha domain on the profits from their major vegetable-growing business.

The Zaichev family of Terra TangraEmil was hugely enthusiastic, and was making some great Cabernet. (By the way, I kept asking about Bulgarian native varieties and tasted some excellent Mavrud at Catherina. Emil has planted 30 per cent Bulgarian varieties, too – though he says they are "just for export". The remarkably buoyant domestic market prefers international varietals, something I also noticed with consternation when I was on the Greek island of Ithaca last year.)

Those with an interest in EU politics might be interested to learn that half the money for all three of the vineyard developments above has come from the EU’s SAPARD programme (Special Accession Programme in Agriculture and Rural Development). In Western Europe, in other words, the EU pays for unwanted wine to be distilled and vineyards to be uprooted, while further east it pays for vineyards to be planted. Ridiculous? Only if you think that pure economics is all that matters. The moment you introduce the social dimension, it makes more sense. Those who are trapped in hopeless viticulture in Western Europe produce wine no one wants and as a consequence live blighted lives which are a drain on their societies. Bulgaria, by contrast, needs exemplary wine estates to point the way for those who are struggling to improve. The social dimension should, in the long run, bring economic benefit, too.

Of course those working on these new estates are the lucky ones: they have impeccable if young vineyards to work with, and cellars full of freshly unpacked, up-to-date equipment. On the way back to Sofia, I also visited Peshtera (which lies just to the southwest of Bessa Valley) – the eponymous group is the domestic market leader. This is a vast old communist-era winery, and its vineyard supplies come from what we might call salvaged but unreconstructed vineyards. Its owners (and the EU’s SAPARD programme) have invested in the winery, but in terms of pure quality it cannot yet compete with Bessa Valley, Catherina or Terra Tangra.

When it comes to selling to the UK, though, everyone runs into the same brick wall. Namely, that the half-dozen buyers who control access (via the supermarkets) to 70 per cent of Britain’s wine market, and almost 100 per cent of the Bulgarian share of that, only want cheap wine. I talked to export specialist Nikolaya Shileva in the early evening sunshine at Peshtera, as hundreds of martins flew noisily to and fro across the winery courtyard, and she described with some feeling how difficult it is even to get UK supermarket buyers to consider anything which would retail at above £3.99. Their interest only really quickens when £2.99 is mentioned.

The wine in a bottle retailing at £2.99 in the UK cannot under any circumstances cost more than 25p; the rest is accounted for in tax, transport, retailer margins and ancilliary costs. This puts Bulgarian winemakers in a poverty trap. They want to improve and progress, but their customers, like feudal barons, will not allow them to. The plan for Neipperg’s Enira was to sell 80 per cent of it on export markets, and 20 per cent in Bulgaria. In the event, 80 per cent sells in Bulgaria and just 20 per cent gets exported – and the Bulgarians themselves pay more than export buyers are prepared to.

Perhaps, though, that’s no bad thing. Self-respect is vitally important, too. Spain’s great wine renaissance has been built on a surge of wine interest in the country itself. On the last evening, I ate out in an open-air restaurant in Sofia with Ivan Zahariev of Stork’s Nest Estates, who had been kind enough to drive me between my appointments (and to make them in the first place), and it was wonderful to see families, students, holiday-makers and locals all enjoying that civilised pleasure. I remembered my early journeys into Eastern Europe, when it was hard to find any sort of a restaurant to eat at. If the doors did swing open, most of the menu was unavailable, the staff were bored and surly, and the other diners were policemen of various sorts whose heavy jowls and dark stares did little to quicken the appetite. That is now a historical memory, and one that will die with me. Bulgaria’s school leavers have grown up in a different world.