Mavrud

Mavrud in full, off a parcel the estate planted in 2006 on SO4 rootstock, cropped at 7 tonnes per hectare and picked by hand into crates on 1 October 2022, the sheet recording ripeness at 25.7%. Mavrud comes in late and the estate's own calendar shows how late: harvest opened on 12 August with Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay, reds for rose came in on 24 August, Merlot for red wine on 5 September, and this was still hanging almost a month after that.

The grape is indigenous, and classically it belongs to Asenovgrad and the Plovdiv area, well to the northwest of here - Prof. Venelin Roychev of the Agricultural University in Plovdiv puts national plantings at 1,264 hectares in 2019, around 2% of Bulgaria's vineyard. Growing it down in the southeast is less of a departure than it looks, since the PDO Sakar specification a few kilometres away names Mavrud among its permitted local varieties. That PDO is not open to this wine, though: Katarzyna's vineyards sit in the lands of Belitsa and Lozen, in Lyubimets, outside the five Svilengrad settlements the Sakar zone covers, so the broad Thracian Lowland PGI is what the bottle can claim. It prints the designation as Thracian Valley, one of several English renderings of a name the EU register keeps only in Cyrillic; the specification filed with it uses Thracian Lowland.

In the cellar: grapes chilled for about twenty hours, sorted, destemmed, sorted again and crushed. 70% of the batch ferments in 400 litre French oak and the remaining 30% in steel tanks of ten and fifteen cubic metres. A cold soak at 7 to 10 degrees C for seven to ten days, fermentation at 27 to 29 degrees for a week or so, then up to six further days on skins at 26 to 28. Malolactic runs in 225 litre French barrels, and the whole blend then spends ten months in French oak, 40% of it new. 14.5%.

2022 was dry. The producer records rainfall for the year below the regional average at about 530 mm, with only 35 of them falling across July, August and September together, credits that for healthy fruit, and ventures that it may be the estate's most balanced vintage so far.