ARTICLE Drinking to the Future: Wine in Communist Bulgaria Mary Neuburger Department of History, University of Texas, 104 Inner Campus Drive, B7000, Austin, Texas, 78712, USA burgerm@austin.utexas.edu This article explores wine production, consumption and trade in the context of late socialist Bulgaria and the wider Eastern Bloc. In particular, it connects wine to the process of building legitimacy in Bulgaria, as part of post-Stalinist culture of consumer abundance and even connoisseurship that was steeped in nationalist narratives and meanings, as well as utopian visions of the future. To complicate such narratives, it also delves into the contradictory ways in which late-socialist anti-alcohol narratives and campaigns similarly looked to local, if not national, precursors to ground their counter model of a sober socialist present and communist future. In 1980 three journalists from the city of Plovdiv set out on a journey to chart the geography and his- tory of Bulgarian wine. They spent nearly a year traversing the villages of the country’s far-flung wine producing regions – from Thrace and Macedonia to the Black Sea coast and the wide Danubian Plain. They interviewed elderly residents, people who, they noted, ‘had already come to the end of their life’s vine and now were tranquilly drinking their wine’. 1 The resulting publication, The Book of Wine (Kniga za vinoto), waxed nostalgic about the depth to which wine production and consumption were embedded in Bulgaria’s past and hence were inseparable from the ‘Bulgarian character’. 2 The authors reconstruct the history of wine in vivid and wistful detail, albeit in impressionistic, unfoot- noted vignettes. They enthusiastically describe wine as the elixir that famously bound and animated the culture of the ancient Thracians, some of the earliest known wine producers, who left their culin- ary roots and ancient vines in Bulgarian soil. The book celebrates wine production and consumption, not as a socialist achievement, but as an important part of historical national culture. Their book thus stands in stark contrast to earlier wine histories from the communist period that derided past practices and lauded the progress of the present towards a communist ‘bright future’. The Book of Wine was just one of the scores of publications written or released in and around 1981, the year of the 1,300th anniversary of the founding of the first Bulgarian state. This jubilee was cele- brated through an astounding number of publications, events, exhibits, parades and ribbon cuttings for new buildings and monuments. These happenings were part and parcel of the heightened nation- alist tenor in late socialist Bulgaria, with echoes elsewhere in the Eastern Bloc. Scholarship on the post-Stalinist Eastern Bloc has highlighted the use of nationalism but also the turn to consumer goods as ‘alternative sources’ of legitimacy, beginning in the late 1950s. 3 But only works in food stud- ies, it seems, have begun to connect the two parallel processes, most notably in relation to the © Cambridge University Press, 2020 1 Iliia Zai ˘ kov, Ivan Dionisiev, Georgi Petrov and Kosta Forev, Kniga za vinoto (Sofia: n.p., 1982), 16. 2 Zai ˘ kov et al., Kniga, 20. 3 On Bulgaria see Ivai ˘ lo Znepolski, Mikhail Gruev, Momchil Metodiev, Martin Ivanov, Daniel Vachkov, Ivan Elenkov and Plamen Doi ˘ nov, Bulgaria under Communism (New York: Routledge, 2019). For a bloc-wide analysis of nationalism and communism, see, for example, Martin Mevius, ‘Reappraising Communism and Nationalism’, in Martin Mevius, ed., The Communist Quest for National Legitimacy in Europe, 1918–1989 (New York: Routledge, 2011), 1–24. On consumer needs and legitimacy, see Paulina Bren and Mary Neuburger, ‘Introduction’, in Bren and Neuburger, eds., Communism Unwrapped: Consumption in Cold War Eastern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 8. Contemporary European History (2020), 29, 416–430 doi:10.1017/S0960777320000363 https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777320000363 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 54.224.163.7, on 02 May 2021 at 01:21:07, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at