Wine officer

The name vinar is Slavic in origin and is derived from the word for wine. In administrative usage it did not mean simply a wine producer, but an official with fiscal responsibilities. Wine officers are mentioned in the Virgino, Mrachka, Rila, and Vitosha charters. The term has also been proposed as a reading in the Vatopedi Charter, although this identification is disputed. The documents refer to a category of officials without naming any individual officeholders.

The wine officer’s principal duty was probably to collect the wine tithe. Here “tithe” means a levy on production, not necessarily an unchanging rate of exactly one tenth. Comparable taxation existed throughout the medieval Balkans. In Byzantium the wine tax was called the oinometrion (οἰνομέτριον), but the Bulgarian office cannot be regarded as a direct borrowing of a Byzantine institution: its name was Slavic, and the chief similarity lay in fiscal practice. No surviving Bulgarian evidence permits the revenue from this tax to be calculated, although the economic importance of viticulture suggests that it was substantial.

A particularly useful parallel is provided by the charter of the Serbian king Stefan Uroš II Milutin for the monastery of St George near Skopje, concerning lands that had formerly been Bulgarian. It mentions the wine officer together with two distinct levies: the “wine tithe” and the “wine surcharge.” The former was the principal tax, while the latter appears to have been an additional payment. The language of payment used in the document and its distinction from priselitsa—a billeting and maintenance obligation—show that the surcharge was a separate fiscal exaction. It may have provided remuneration for the official collecting the principal tax, but this remains a well-founded interpretation rather than an explicitly recorded rule.

Comparisons with Wallachia and Moldavia also help clarify the nature of the office. There the wine tax was known as vinarici, and names derived from the same term were used for its collectors. Later evidence shows a transition from collection mainly in kind to combined payment in produce and money during the seventeenth century, and then predominantly in money after the beginning of the eighteenth century. This parallel does not establish the precise Bulgarian practice, but it illustrates how an official such as the wine officer might have assessed and received either quantities of wine or their monetary equivalent.

In the Bulgarian charters’ lists of officials, wine officers occupy positions between seventh and ninth overall and rank third among fiscal officials. This suggests a relatively prominent place in the provincial tax administration, although the order of names in such documents should not be treated as a fully formalized table of ranks. The rates of both the principal tax and the additional wine surcharge probably varied and cannot be reconstructed precisely. The office must not be confused with the obligation to supply wine to a passing army, which was a form of angaria, or compulsory service and provision. The sources establish that the wine officer existed during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, but they do not reveal when the office was created or formally abolished.