We reached the centre of town just as the viticulturists and band and mayor and winery employees and people in traditional costume and field-trucks made their way down the main road. A baba looked upon the parade with tears streaming down her face – as to why remains unknown – and the priest came over to, oh, bless her, to set a hand upon her. Or maybe he was her son and she was happy.

Given the below-zero weather, everyone then jumped in cars and made their way to the vineyards about two kilometres out of town.

There awaited more people in national dress – various interpretations, with the current mode for young men seeming to be a traditional white blouse with red embroidery and a black vest, sometimes sequin-edged, with blue jeans instead of the traditional black woollen jodhpurs-type bloomers and leg wraps; for girls it was tightly pleated, sequinned black skirt, embroidered apron, similar white blouse and similar vest, again decorated with sequinned designs, and, more often than not, tall black or brown boots to ward off the cold; most had wreaths of vine twigs, or, for men, a haiduk-like black or brown hat decorated with flowers fake or real, white beads and vine clippings.

Some of the men had a wooden "manerka" holding wine, and a type of aged sausage called soudjouk, hanging from their belts.

So there at the Sakluka vines, someone had set up a table and was pouring crisp wine into plastic cups. For those who did not have flasks of wine at their waist, they could take a cup and drink the frothed beverage, and also pour it on the place from which they had clipped a piece of vine, because that is tradition.

And the priest, reported to be Metropolit Grigorii, so identified by one of the women in our minibus full of Sofia-based journalists, because he had "nothing holy and wholly earthly" about him, led a celebratory Trifonovden mass in the presence of State Administration Minister Nikolai Vassilev (appropriately dressed in blue jeans, black shoes and a brown coat), German ambassador Michael Geier and guests from Macedonia, and surrounded by a hoard of people. A few bars of Mnogaya Letya were played, and the vines had received their blessings.

That being over, everyone – about 150 to 200 people – headed off to have lunch in a field (called Vurbaka) in the freezing air, where lines of wooden benches had been set up, and a special table designated for the special guests, these being the jolly priest and such.

And after having eaten the cold chicken, cold banitsa, cold kyufte (all homemade) and cold salami that had been dished up and washed down with young cabernet sauvignon, courtesy of the local winery, Lovico Suhindol, the music started, courtesy of the same band that gave rhythm to the parade. Led by a trumpeter with a Chicago cap, the musicians – a couple of drummers, trumpeters and oboists – started up the horo, and people stepped up to dance. Somehow, people still know how to dance the horo, in all its variations.

Now, that could sound petty and simplistic; please do not take it that way. Most of the people who danced till the end were under the age of 25, and they were all able to distinguish the changes in rhythm that distinguished one type of horo from another. Most people start learning with the pravo horo ("straight horo"); many people, and most foreigners, never progress beyond it.

(This could be, in part, to the 13/16 and 5/16 and like rhythms that characterise the dance; most Western countries make music at 3/4 or 4/4 time.)
It also makes one thankful that there are still places where traditions such as this are respected and carried on, for inherent societal soundness and out of love, and not to make a show for tourists.

There were a couple of tourists, though they did not attend the field lunch.

They instead reappeared back in the centre of Suhindol, after lunch, for the second parade of the day, where lads on a Lovico Suhindol (LS) truck passed out cups of wine siphoned from a massive barrel, two couples in traditional costume danced and the king of the vine sat, clothed in a hot pink polyester robe, perched on top of chair on top of something else, goblet of red wine and sceptre in hand.

Given that it was LS that had invited the journalists from Sofia for the event, we were then given a tour of the facilities, and had a short meeting with the winery’s executive director, Tzvetelin Bratoev.

The grape-growers’ and winemakers’ co-operative that was founded in 1909 in Suhindol was the first-such on the Balkan Peninsula, yet even before that, residents of the town had a history of grape growing and winemaking – when it was established in 1871, Suhindol’s chitalishte (community centre) was named Trezvenost, which means "sobriety", by local priest Matei Preobrashenski.

The co-op itself was initiated by Marko Vachkov (1866-1936) after he returned from a business trip to France; he went on to be one of the region’s most successful wine producers in the 1920s and 1930s.

His winery was nationalised in 1952, and became one of the largest in Bulgaria in terms of production. In 1992, descendants of the winery’s founders bought it back from the government, thus making it the first independent winery in the country after the end of communism.

Much of the original facilities are still intact – including the unique glass tile-lined bins designed by Austrian engineers in 1917, and a refrigeration room that used to be filled each year with ice, and now holds bottles of the winery’s vintages from 1954 and 1958 and earlier. (They are for sale at a few locations in Bulgaria for prices of 1000 leva and up a bottle.)

Bratoev tells us that LS has received and successfully realised funding for two Sapard projects, along with being certified to sell on international markets including the United States and the United Kingdom.

Annual production is about seven to eight million bottles, though capacity is near 17 million bottles a year. Of this, about 3000 to 8000 bottles are made of high-quality wine aged in barriques of French oak, a project that is just in its second year – and the result of a Sapard grant. On average, 65 per cent of total production is exported, mostly to the UK, Sweden, Poland and Russia.

Early in 2009, Lovico (an acronym of lozarska i vinarska kooperatsiya – vine and wine co-operative) Suhindol sent two crates of 1800 bottles each to China, just in time for Chinese New Year. Was it successful?
"Well, they paid me," Bratoev says.

The winery works with more than 300ha of vines, of which most are rarely encountered gamza (гъмза) along with cabernet sauvignon and merlot. Bratoev calls gamza the grape variety that is "the most Bulgarian" of all native ones, such as mavrud and Melnik and rubin. In the past few years, LS has planted more than 50ha of vines, including petit verdot and malbec. Yet Bratoev believes that it is gamza that will be the winery’s success.