Drinking to the Future: Wine in Communist Bulgaria

Abstract

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.