Bulgarian wines have a friend in Robert Hayk
January 12, 2016Bulgarian wines have a friend in Robert Hayk
By Dave McIntyre from The Washington Post
Wine wasn’t Robert Hayk’s first career. He was a financial adviser for Merrill Lynch, and before that worked for three years at the U.S. embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria, during the heady post-Soviet 1990s. When he decided to forge a new path in wine, Hayk drew on his Bulgarian contacts to help answer the market’s craving for wines from a new region offering exceptional quality for the price.
Two decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain, Bulgaria was ready.
Southeastern Europe, especially the Balkans and Turkey, might be the next region thrilling us with bargain wines that taste expensive. The formula for success appears to be a combination of modernity and tradition: State-of-the-art winemaking techniques taught by “flying winemaker” consultants from France and elsewhere provide a boost in quality, while indigenous grape varieties give local flavor to blends based on more familiar international grapes, such as cabernet sauvignon and merlot.
When Hayk decided to import Bulgarian wines to the United States, he looked for family-owned producers who could help him “create a decent-quality wine that surpasses its price in value,” he says. He found “a vineyard manager so old, nobody knows how old he is,” and a winery in Bulgaria’s Thracian Valley that served as a production facility for several producers.
“Traditional wine, made with as little interference as possible, is a better wine at all levels,” Hayk says.
The result was Bulgariana, a brand that sells in the $10-to-$15 range with excellent cabernet sauvignon, merlot and pinot noir, among other wines.
“With Bulgariana, the goal was to create a decent-quality wine that surpasses its price in value,” says Hayk. “It was a way of establishing a benchmark for Bulgarian wines.”
