Feature: The Story Behind The Essential Guide to Turkish Wine
- Andrea Lemieux
- Nov 1
- 6 min read
One of the first questions people ask me is, “Why Turkish wine?” Honestly, the answer is: geography. I live in Turkey, and that’s what we have. I think a better question is: “If I didn’t live in Turkey, would I be writing about wine?” I truly think the answer to that is: no.
I tried to tell many different types of stories over the years through blogging and several failed attempts at writing a book. It wasn’t until I found wine, wine with a story that wasn’t being told, that I finally found my voice. More than finding a voice, I discovered a mission.
Early Explorations into Turkish Wine
A single glass can hold history, culture, and identity all at once, but when no one tells the story, it’s forever lost. I did not start out my wine journey thinking I was going to tell that story. That was not even a baby thought in my head. I wasn’t really even “into” wine when I moved to Istanbul in 2013. The short story is that, yes, I drank wine, but my interest wasn’t truly piqued until I saw shelves with wine featuring grapes I’d never heard of. Emir, Narince, Boğazkere, Kalecik Karası … and those only scratched the surface.
When I first began exploring Turkish wine, there was almost no information available, just fragments of history and scattered voices. I learned about wine through reading books and blogs, Wine Spirit Education Trust (WSET) courses (which, humblebrag, I did in Turkish, thank you very much), and later the Wine Scholar Guild. But none of these things could teach me about Turkish wine. So, I drank. A lot. At the same time, I blogged about my Turkish wine explorations.
From Drinking to Writing about Drinking
Early posts (on an old now-defunct blog) showed my lack of wine knowledge, but I like to think that was balanced by my sincere enthusiasm and fascination for this largely unexplored wine country. Eventually, I created a new website: The Quirky Cork, dedicated to wine writing and to introducing people to a wine country that was probably entirely unknown to them. My plan then was actually to leave Turkey and continue wine education in Europe. Visa issues got in the way, as they so often do. I gave up that dream, and kismet sent me a different one. A much harder, more frustrating one. But also one more rewarding.
After returning from a holiday on which I’d visited several wineries and bought a book on “wines of wherever I was,” it struck me that Turkey doesn’t have a book. Why doesn’t Turkey have a book? For a country known for its tourism and gastronomy, this seemed like a pretty significant gap. I sat around for a while, assuming that one of the Turkish wine bloggers was surely doing this. But as far as I could tell, no. That’s how I ended up writing The Essential Guide to Turkish Wine.
What followed would be more than four years of research, travel, writing, rewriting, and depressing attempts to pitch this to publishing houses and book agents. More than four years, yeah, that long. Advertising alcohol in Turkey is illegal. Wineries more often than not don’t have websites, or websites that are anything more than placeholders. There were few ‘about us’ sections and no media packages. Which means we visited almost every winery in the country in order to interview and photograph. Since we could only do so every other weekend at most and the majority of our time was spent driving between wineries, it took a long time.
Picking My Partners in Wine
Early on, I recruited a friend, Emma Aslıhan Başer Rose, who was my navigator and did the talking when my brain was too tired to speak Turkish after a 6 am flight followed by three hours of driving. She was also my cheerleader, main tasting partner, and did the principal photography for the first edition.
Through research, travel, and interviews with winemakers across the country, I began piecing together the story of Turkish wine. That process became as much about translation as discovery: translating not only language, but also place, tradition, and perspective for a global audience that often overlooks regions like this. And that was really my goal. It was less about writing a book and more about trying to introduce people to Turkey as a wine country. Part of that meant that I was deeply determined that it should be more of a coffee-table-style book. It needed more than text; it needed images and graphics to help draw people into Turkish wine country.
For the graphics and book design, I pulled in Başak Gökkılıç, a local graphic designer I met while giving a wine tasting. She, Emma, and I worked closely on creating infographics for the grapes we were learning about. That was often not a simple task. Sometimes, there was only one wine available made out of a certain grape, or a winery didn’t respond to my (many) requests for basic information about it. There were a few sessions involving the three of us, a bunch of wine, a Coravin, and an aroma kit as we decided what we were going to say about the flavor profile!
It Was Finished! Or Was It?
Eventually, at long, long last! I declared myself finished. New wineries and grapes were popping up all over the place, but if I didn’t call a halt, I would be writing the book forever. While Başak worked on the design, I continued to shop it around to publishing houses, but to no avail. That took me into self-publishing research. Do I love having to self-publish? No. But by the end of 2021, I had a printed book in hand. It was on Amazon and available in Istanbul bookstores and wine shops.
If you have any dreams of making money from writing (and self-publishing) a book, then let me dash them now. I spent far more money making the book than I ever made on it. They say that the definition of crazy is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Call me crazy then, because in 2023, I decided to start edition two.
It was easier, if not necessarily faster, this time around. Emma and I visited new wineries, and Başak created infographics for new grapes. For wineries I couldn’t visit, I was able to set up online meetings (thank you, COVID, for normalizing that at least). Because I was so horrified by the editorial mistakes I let slip through on the first book, Başak and I went through something like six or seven rounds of edits, getting dummy books printed, marking them up, comparing the markups to all the previous copies…
I for sure procrastinated during this process, and in getting it to both the local printer and the print-on-demand company I use for international sales. The huge expense of having it printed again (more than twice the cost of the first edition for half the print run!) and the worry that I’d once again missed some major edits were daunting. Finally, I bit the bullet. The Essential Guide to Turkish Wine EDITION TWO!! is now available.
Living and working in Turkey has shaped me profoundly. As an outsider, a woman, a foreigner, an independent writer, and a somewhat reluctant Turkish wine specialist, I’ve learned resilience and that hope is never foolish. Most importantly, I’ve learned that, while good wine wins awards and high sales prices, remarkable wine tells a deeply moving story reflecting the history, culture, and identity of the people who pour their souls into the making of it.
I Write Because I Can't Not
If there are any editorial issues, please don’t tell me! Be kind, remember that this is a labor of love. I knew back in 2017 when I began this journey that I wasn’t going to become rich doing it. In that, I’m similar to a number of the winemakers here. With the high cost of production, ridiculous taxes, and low domestic consumption, few wineries make big money. Especially not our small winemakers. People here make wine because they can’t not make wine. Because it’s their history, their culture, who they are. That’s why I wanted to tell their stories. Because apparently, that’s who I am.
Andrea Lemieux is an international wine expert with particular expertise in Turkish Wine. She is the author of The Essential Guide to Turkish Wine, the world's only comprehensive English language book on Turkish wine. She is also the author of The Quick and Dirty Guide to Greek Wine and the founder of The Quirky Cork blog which is dedicated largely to Turkish wine.
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