Thanksgiving and Wine in Bulgaria

by June Brott

My most unforgettable Thanksgiving weekend took place in Bulgaria the year my husband volunteered as a legal liaison and I taught English. We left our Oakland home for Sofia early one November, and shortly after settling into an apartment we were scheduled for a conference in Petrich, a Bulgarian city near the Greek border.

Snowflakes swirled the day we set out, squeezing into a taxi with Albena, my husband’s associate, and her 8-year-old daughter Kari, while the grandmother sat in front. Kari, on her mom’s lap, giggled at our feeble Bulgarian pronunciation and insisted, “My name is not Kari; it’s Karrrrrrrrry!”

My husband and I practiced the Cyrillic alphabet by reading road signs—until one stopped us cold. Hand-lettered on cardboard, tacked onto a telephone pole, the sign said “Greece”-- with an arrow pointing to the right. Albena explained that many Bulgarian drivers get lost because metal road signs are missing, stolen by people who sell them for scrap.

In Petrich we were welcomed with a “Thanksgiving” dinner arranged in honor of the half-dozen invited Americans. The first course was rakia, (Bulgarian brandy), then shopska salata-- chopped cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers, and onions under a canopy of shredded white cheese; kashkaval pane, breaded and fried yellow cheese. The chef couldn’t locate cranberries or sweet potatoes, but platters of sliced turkey appeared, topped with an unfamiliar dressing, and surrounded by carrot slices, cooked purple cabbage, and a falafel-like mystery.

We Americans were seated at a long banquet table among Bulgarians. Some spoke English but all smoked feverishly before, during, and after the meal. At dessert time, lights went out, and waiters served baklava on trays with lit sparklers. After the second dessert—tikvenik, sections of baked pumpkin topped with honey and nuts, we fled outdoors to gasp some cold, clean air.

A new Bulgarian law was supposed to restrict smoking in restaurants but, as we discovered during our year living there, enforcement was casual. When asking for a nonsmoking section, we found that waiters usually spotted an empty table and simply plunked down a ‘no smoking sign’ --even the surrounding patrons were furiously puffing away.

At breakfast the next morning (cheese pastries called banitzas and fabulous Bulgarian yogurt), Christine, the wife of a French diplomat invited me play hooky from the morning session. With Andre, the Embassy’s Bulgarian driver, we set out for the Pirin Mountains to visit Melnick, a small town famous since the 1200s for superb wine as well as its strange, fantastical sand and limestone ridges and peaks.

In Melnick, Andre turned down a side street, stopping in front of a modest house that looked nothing like a winery. But he had recognized the ‘advertisement’ on the curb, where two large plastic soda bottles, one slightly yellow and one red, sat on top of a small cardboard box. To me it looked a bit like a child’s lemonade stand. Christine was suspicious.

Emerging from the car, we were approached by an overweight girl wearing a headscarf and bundled in multiple layers of clothing. From the red bottle, she handed Christine a small plastic cup, filled to the brim. Hesitating, with nostrils flared in disdain, Christine sipped and passed the cup to me. I, who rarely drink wine, barely took a taste.

“What do you think?” her raised eyebrows asked me. My shoulder shrug answered, “What do I know?” Andre, with closed eyes, sipped deeply, swished the wine around in his mouth, pursed his lips, smiled, and shook his head from side to side, indicating ‘yes.’ (Bulgarians nod up and down when they mean NO.) Christine haughtily declared in her French accented English that she would never ever buy wine in plastic bottles.

The girl’s weathered mother appeared, also with headscarf, several shawls, and thick slippers. Holding a large, empty plastic bottle in her roughened hands, she walked to the side of the house and turned on the nozzle of a pipe sticking out of the wall. She dripped a bit of water into the bottle, shook it around, then disappeared behind the house. Several minutes later she shuffled back, and presented Andre with the same bottle, presumably now filled with red wine.

Andre ordered thirty more bottles, so this procedure was slowly repeated while Christine tapped her spike-heeled boot and glared at her watch. Translating for me, Andre asked if we could go behind the house to see where the old woman was getting the wine. At first she delivered an emphatic ‘no,’ (nodding her head up and down) but then motioned us to follow her--past broken cobblestones, chunks of concrete blocks, a grape arbor with brittle branches from last year’s harvest, buckets of sand, and huge bags filled with plastic bottles, and another with plastic cups. Stumbling onto a dirt floor we entered a dark, dungeon-like room with a huge wine vat, surrounded by miscellaneous junk. The old woman-- crouching down into a deep-knee position I couldn’t possibly navigate-- opened the tap, releasing wine into a dingy container, then transferred the liquid into a smaller container with a spout. Then little by little she poured wine into a soda pop bottle.

“Under the strictest sanitary conditions,” I murmured to Christina.

“Well, it’s all alcohol,” she replied, rolling her eyes, “but even so…”

After Andre loaded his stash in the trunk, there was no time left for the miffed Christine to buy Melnick wine in proper glass bottles. We hurried back to the hotel in time for lunch and the closing presentation on border crime, fake ID documents, and human trafficking.

Back in Sofia, I described our Melnick wine encounter to new Bulgarian friends. They said, “Too bad you didn’t buy anything! Those little hole-in-the-wall places make the best wine in Bulgaria!”

I missed Thanksgiving at home but at least I had a Thanksgiving weekend story to tell our family.