{"id":7313,"date":"2013-05-17T17:05:12","date_gmt":"2013-05-17T17:05:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/?p=7313"},"modified":"2013-05-17T17:05:12","modified_gmt":"2013-05-17T17:05:12","slug":"in-bulgaria-judging-wines-of-the-balkans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/uncategorized\/in-bulgaria-judging-wines-of-the-balkans","title":{"rendered":"In Bulgaria, judging wines of the Balkans"},"content":{"rendered":"

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I am currently in Sofia, Bulgaria, where I am judging the\u00a0Balkans International Wine Competition<\/a>, along with a merry band of excellent judges <\/a>from different Balkan countries, plus three of us from outside the region.<\/p>\n

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We have spent two days judging and we have just finished. The competition was flawlessly run and this afternoon – where all of the judges got to retaste the gold medal-winning wines to decide the trophy winners – showed just how good some of these wines are. I’m really eager to find out the names of some of the winners.<\/p>\n

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Last night we had dinner at Kotileto restaurant. It’s owned by a Bulgarian, but the chef and cuisine are Serbian. The Bulgarians put a greater accent on vegetables, while the Serbians place more on meat, and especially barbecued meat. The key meat is pork, with veal and lamb second, apparently.<\/p>\n

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The food was hearty, rich and enjoyable. The wine was all Bulgarian, with a couple of very nice bottles.<\/p>\n

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This fresh, intense white was a blend\u00a0of four grape varieties, made by Marash winery.<\/p>\n

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A convincing Gewurztraminer<\/p>\n

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 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I am currently in Sofia, Bulgaria, where I am judging the\u00a0Balkans International Wine Competition, along with a merry band of excellent judges from different Balkan countries, plus three of us…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7313","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7313","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7313"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7313\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7329,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7313\/revisions\/7329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7313"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7313"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wineanorak.com:\/wineblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7313"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}