Nearly ten times has decreased the area of promising vineyards in Bulgaria over the past twenty years. Bulgarian wine sector joined the common European market with an area of 135,760 hectares of vineyards, of which 111,323 ha of grapes for table wines and 24,437 ha for production of quality wines, experts remind. Since then, the newly planted vineyards in the country come to about 120,000 decares, while twenty years ago they were nearly 1.5 million decares, according to the Agency on Vine and Wine.
For planting quality vines large investments are required with long-term returns, but the crisis has made it increasingly difficult to do so. Increase has been observed in abandoned vineyards, which respectively give much lower yields. Problems in 2012 are more than ever, due to the extremely low winter temperatures in 2011-2012 when some vine froze. What exactly the damage was will become clear in May.
During the last campaign, Italian buyers of Bulgarian grapes turned up. They looked mostly for white grapes, which this year will reduce the production of local white wine by about 30 percent. That will have a positive effect – wine producers will have to negotiate with growers the purchase of the crop yet in the spring, to be sure they will have grapes.
