What's Wrong with Turkish Wine?

No Classic Turkish Wines. Yet

Despite the horrendous jetlag and something that I will describe as the Turkey trots--not in any way due to unsanitary conditions in a country that is scrupulous about cleanliness--I feel compelled to offer a few thoughtful points about Turkish wine. 

First, in every hotel and restaurant that we went to, both in Istanbul and the provincial towns, there are a limited selection available.  Except in a few places that catered exclusively to European travelers, the wines were always Turkish.  That's fine--we were there to taste what the country had to offer. 

Not so fine was the fact that two producers had a stranglehold on the wine lists, Doluca and Kavakildere.  While some of their wines were quite good, the flavor profiles were a bit limited and were imitative of popular "international" styles.  Other wineries' appearance on the lists as house wines meant you were in for something truly nasty, an industrial product that I'd be hard pressed to pair with any food eaten by humans, even German package tourists.  (There goes my German fan base of one.) 

In other words, there was a lot of fruit forward, sometimes heavy and sweetish plonk--oaky Shiraz wannabes.  Not enough acidity, especially in the whites--generally not much of a lively mouth feel.  A pity because the food demands a sort of complementary acidity and tartness.

Above: on the citadel of Pergamum, standing over the modern city of Bergama.

My second point this evening is that wine prices do not seem justified by the quality of the products.  Even given the overall level of consumer prices in Turkey--high compared to average salaries--retail prices of 15-25 lira (roughly $11-19) for stuff of supermarket quality is rather offputting.   When you pay $25-60 for such distinctly ordinaire wines in a restaurant, it's outrageous.  (How I suffered for my art!)

This pricing strategy reflects the viewpoint that wine is a luxury item and not what the Italians would call an "alimento" -- a form of and enhancement to food. 

I don't think this reflects any sort of Muslim puritanism regarding alcohol.  Everywhere you go in Turkey, alcohol is easy to find and consumed with enthusiasm by the Turks themselves and not simply visiting Westerners.  Hard liquor, raki, beer--they are everywhere and considerably better value for the buck or lira than wine.

The situation strikes me as especially odd when you consider that you see vines growing everywhere, very often on small peasant holdings, mixed in among the fruit trees and alongside the olive groves.  Granted, table grapes are the desired crop here, but I'll bet not always.  And the dead giveaway would be that vines are often seen in infertile, inhospitable environments, like the Cappadocian scene in the photo just above.  You don't plant there for an abundant crop of raisin grapes; you're after vino.

The good news is that some wildly original and distinctive wines are being made in Turkey.  But distribution of them is still a problem...no doubt due, in part, to what our Istanbul guide referred to as "our mafias," those tight webs of associations that puts a stranglehold on so many types of enterprise in that part of the world.  And to which our multinationals no doubt aspire.

Soon I will report on a tasting of two such fascinating wines from a winery in Urgup, Turasan.

In this photo, a vine has been trained through a hole in a tufa rock in the "fairy chimneys" area of Cappadocia, near Goreme.  To me it symbolizes, most poignantly, the state of the Turkish wine industry.  Not least because of the many obstacles it has had to face in that country for generations.

Comments

[Greg Somerville]

Interesting and strongly-worded viewpoint, yet oddly unrepresentative of my own restaurant experience in New York City, where for example the excellent Savann at 414 Amsterdam Avenue offers two reasonably priced Kavaklidere labels, of which I prefer the $28 bottle of Selection White 2002, containing a very well made blend of Narince and Semillon.

[Terry Hughes]

To mangle a cliche', that was there and this is here, or something like that. While in Turkey, I had a strong sense of a cleavage between Turkish wine as consumed domestically and as marketed and sold overseas. To me the average Turkish drinker seems like a "middle American" type of drinker: interested in beer and hard liquor (in this case raki), sort of indifferent to wine. Most of the people I saw consuming wine in restaurants and cafes were foreigners.

BTW, I thought narince was a very interesting grape with a ton of potential. The falanghina of Turkey, so to speak.