Bulgaria’s 2010 wine year will be a memorable one for all the wrong reasons, it seems, with a harvest yielding grapes of poorer quality than last year, and domestic sales and exports down. Mass-circulation daily 24 Chassa said that the quality of this year’s grapes was significantly poorer than those of 2009, making them more appropriate for rakiya (grape brandy) than turning into wine. For the world wine industry, the global financial crisis brought a severe blow in 2009 as tipplers reduced consumption, and current figures for Bulgaria are not encouraging. Bulgaria’s domestic market accounts for only up to 20 per cent of production, while sales of bottled wine reportedly have plummeted by about 30 per cent, a problem compounded by the significant share of the market held by the shadow economy.