Villa Melnik, Aplauz Mavrud, 2017

Once a thriving centre of trade, situated as it was at the crossroads between Eastern and Western Europe and south in to Turkey and Greece, Melnik is being re-born as a wine tourism destination.

Based here in the Struma River Valley in South West Bulgaria, Nikola “Moustache” Zikatanov and his wife Lyubka are making some of the country’s most exciting wines since the new, modernised gravity fed winery at the estate opened doors in 2013.

Mavrud is Bulgaria’s signature red variety, and whilst it can make inky, saturated wines, dark fruited, powerful and tooth-staining with rich tannins, here it is more deftly done with no trace of rusticity. Full of plums and mulberries, polished cherry wood and cacao nibs, bound by well-modulated tannins, and supported by eighteen months in oak, this is a delicious barbecue red.