Winemaking has a long history in Bulgaria, having survived both the Middle Ages and the Ottoman rule. According to archaeologists, it may well be the first geographical region where vines were planted and wine produced. I visited Byala, a small town on the Black Sea coast famous for its viniculture and as a place where the renowned dimyat wine is produced.

On a bend in the road on the city limits of Byala, there is a sign in bold red letters shouting "Wine Test". It stands next to a small whitewashed building, which looks nothing like a vineyard, but holds a profusion of surprises.

From ages back
Petko Polychronoff is 65 years old. He is a jolly man with a warm, sun-tanned, round face. "Come and see my cellar," he waves and we pile through the oak gates into a courtyard: a cornucopia of scrap metal, garden tools and old barrels greet us. It is tidy with everything neatly stacked in outhouses, but it still doesn't look like a place where wine is produced.

He leads us `round a corner to a whitewashed wall covered in grape vines and shows us a wooden cart with a bowed bottom. It is 100 years old. His ancestors used it to harvest the grapes. "Everyone would climb onto the cart and tread grapes with their feet; it adds to the aroma," he jokes. Petko explains that "wine-making has been in Byala for 2500 years at least. Everyone here makes wine".

I ask him why there are not more wineries like his own and he explains, "The other people in the town, they only make it for their private use now. It takes a lot of time and work to produce larger quantities." He leads us into a cool musty-smelling cellar. "I wish this was a Coca-Colarie," my son adds in earnest. Along the right hand side, oak barrels, varying in size, are neatly stacked.

"I run the business with my wife and my son, Hristo. We are only small producers. We make 15 tons of wine a year, that's 5000 bottles. ... We have eight different types of wine, you will taste them."

"I'll never get my interview sorted if I drink eight wines," I joked.

The wines were neatly stacked in stone alcoves in Petko's cellar; everything looks well organised. Petko is a tidy man. His appearance is neat and everything about him tells me that he is methodical, and well ordered.

"We keep the wine in the oak barrels for only six months, then it is ready to taste."

Bottles on the table
He leads us out of the cellar to his vineyard at the back. And he points to a tree bearing a rich crop of kiwis. They look healthy and somehow survive the winter here, even though it can reach minus 20C. "The kiwi is easy to grow, the grapes much harder. There is a big problem with wasps, so we have to protect the fruit." He points to each of the large juicy green grapes covered with polythene, another example of his meticulous order.

"Now you taste my wine," Petko says, inviting us into a cosy courtyard, partially covered and lined with wooden benches and tables. Flowers and bells hang from the old beams and there is a water fountain in the middle. On the wall opposite, there is a picture of Petko with President Georgi Purvanov. I ask if the president visited the winery. "Yes, he came here on August 25 2005. It was a good visit," Petko said proudly.

As the first of the eight bottles is lined up before me, I ask how many wines Purvanov tasted. "Only three; he said it was protocol not to drink any more than that." Obviously, Purvanov does not see himself as the next Boris Yeltsin.

The dimyat
Petko introduces us to his son, Hristo. He is a handsome 35-year-old and the spitting image of his father: neat, round and jovial. He brings me some pitka (a large, soft bread roll), a plate of sirene and kashkaval cheeses and a bottle of mineral water and then he pours the first wine, a dimyat dry white with 11.5 per cent alcohol content. We put the glass to our noses as if we are some kind of connoisseurs; my eight-year-old son follows suit. "It smells like rakiya," he exclaims. The Polychronoffs laugh politely, "No, it cannot smell like rakiya, it is good wine."

"Out of the mouths of babes," I thought and sipped on the dimyat. It had a vanilla aroma, a little pine taste. Hristo brought over a pint glass and I started to get worried, then he explained, "In case you don't like the wine." He told me: "Dimyat is the name for a grape and a wine. Dimyat grapes make good champagne and brandy as well as wine."

I savour the taste and then decide that if I am to out-drink Georgi Purvanov I had better go easy, so I pour the remains of the glass into the pint pot.

Wine number two is a dry white chardonnay, 12.5 per cent. Like an expert, I drink some water, then sniff the wine, then pass it to the rest of the family to sniff. Nobody holds an opinion on this one and its taste does not suit my palette, but then I am no connoisseur.

Family line
Hristo tells me about his family. They were originally from Greece; Polychronoff is a typical Greek name. His forefathers came to Bulgaria more than 2000 years ago, settling around Byala, where they could make wine. Hristo spent 10 years living in Varna. He studied business and had an office job there, but yearned to return to the peace and quiet of the White Rocks. He was only 50km away, yet he never felt like he belonged there.

"Wine is in our blood, it is our instinct. When I was a small boy, I would watch my grandfather making wine and he would make grape juice for me. I still like to drink it when I drink rakia. I always knew I would make wine, this is my heritage." He looks pensive; we eat the delicious cheese and tear into the pitka.

The traminer
Hristo returns with wine number three, a dry traminer. "Traminer grapes are rare white grapes; you can pick them late in the season because they grow in cooler temperatures." The wine is 12.5 proof. I taste it and it is highly aromatic with a bouquet of roses. One of my sons asks if I am drinking perfume. It goes very well with the saltiness of the white cheese. I down the glass: this wine is good.

Wine number four is added to the line up, a Varninski misket. Hristo explains: "This wine is a cross between a very old Bulgarian dimyat and a German riesling. It has only been around for 30 years." It tastes fizzy; the word sends my sons fighting for the glass; fizzy can only mean it is the closest they will get to a cola here. I point out to Hristo that each of the wines looks the same clear golden colour and he replies, "Colour and taste are not friends." I asked him where he sells his wine and he laughs, "We only sell it here in Byala. You cannot find it anywhere else in Bulgaria. It is made in such small amounts, we only sell it at the tasting."

He hands me a menu listing each bottle - there is not one under 15 leva. "Our customers are mainly Bulgarian, English, Russian, but this year we have had a lot from Latvia and Estonia as well. I speak four languages," he beams.

The merlot, and again dimyat
So far, I had soaked up all of the wine with lashings of pitka and cheese, but I have just popped the last piece in my mouth and wine number five has just been presented to me. It is the first red wine, a merlot, the strongest so far at 13 per cent. It has a woody taste. I prefer red wines to white, so I down this one with ease, while Hristo tells us that white grapes grow best along the Black Sea coast. He maintains that the best examples of Bulgarian Black Sea wine are dimyat, merlot and Varninski misket.

When the next bottle is brought to the table, I think I am starting to see double. It is another bottle of dimyat, or maybe the first bottle has multiplied. I look at him confused. "This dimyat is a bit different to the last one, more like a cabernet sauvignon." I sniff; I'm starting to feel like I know what I'm doing. It is very perfumed and tastes like those little purple Parma Violet sweets I ate when I was a child. My husband settles on a piny-rosy taste, but he has described the last three wines as pine tasting.

Hristo laughs at our descriptions, he can see through our fanciful sniffs and wine slurping `round the mouth. He points to the label and tells us: "The European Union, they tell us that we have to now put the label first in Cyrillic, even though most customers do not read this alphabet." He turns the bottle to the back and there is a much smaller label written in English. Then he points to a gold band across the front of the bottle. On the first dimyat, this read "Black Sea Region", but it is blank on the new EU version.

"All politics is very stupid," Hristo confirms what we've all thought for centuries. "The EU wants lots of documents. We can not say we are a Black Sea wine because we have not paid for a licence, even though, as you have seen, we are directly on the Black Sea." In my dimyat haze, I shared his dilemma. What was the point to all that paperwork, when this family had happily made their wines for thousands of years?

Cabernet and Rose
The next bottle appears as if by magic. It is a cabernet sauvignon, a dry red with 12 per cent alcohol. I sniff and sip, it is good, but the glass disappears before my eyes as my husband takes an instant liking to this wine - it must taste similar to Zagorka. Hristo consoles me with his piece de resistance, a semi-dry red called Rose. It is a raspberry red colour and looks like pop. It tasted like liquid loukoum, the Bulgarian version of Turkish delight.

Hristo chuckles: "Nobody has ever said that before." I ask him how many bottles of wine he drinks. He answers without thinking, "One or two each day and I can still drive well."

Now it is me laughing. He is an amusing man with a great sense of humour. We chat for longer about mad Bulgarian drivers and then both father and son see me safely to my car. To my surprise, I can still stand and I don't feel in any way befuddled. Maybe it's the sea air, or perhaps the quality of the wine, or even just the fact that I out-drank Georgi Purvanov.