Mavrud

Mavrud is Bulgaria's flagship native red grape, a late-ripening Thracian variety grown above all around Plovdiv in the country's southern Thracian Valley. It gives deeply coloured, full-bodied wines built on dense dark-berry fruit — blackberry, black plum and dried cherry — laced with black pepper, tobacco, leather and sweet spice, and framed by firm, muscular tannin. Slow to ripen and slow to reveal itself, Mavrud is famously age-worthy: young examples can seem tight and rustic, but with time in oak and bottle they soften into rich, brooding, savoury reds. Long regarded as the noblest of Bulgaria's indigenous grapes, it is the proud, tannic face of the country's revived wine tradition.