Turkish Wine Selection: The Fabulous Wild West of Winemaking
- Andrea Lemieux
- Apr 1
- 4 min read
The Turkish wine industry offers winemakers a FABULOUS and vast landscape in which to play. Like the storied "Wild West," there are few rules and a lot of freedom to do what you want. Because the country has no appellations and few regulations, wineries enjoy the freedom of experimentation. All grape varieties (native and otherwise), wine styles, and techniques stand at their fingertips ready to carry out a winemaker’s wildest desire.
This month, Fine Turkish Wine offers you a trio of some of the more unusual wines in our portfolio. These three wines epitomize the adventurous, untamed environment in which Turkish winemakers thrive.
Akın Gürbüz made his first skin-contact Sauvignon Blanc in 2020, but did so with great skepticism. A few amber and “natural” wines had debuted in Turkey’s market at this point, but the popularity of the trends had yet to truly take hold and Akın was not sure that the few hundred bottles he had would actually sell.
Sold they did, almost immediately in fact, and the rest, as they say, is history. The wine is now one of his most popular wines with both consumers and Istanbul’s high-end restaurants.
A little has changed since the first release. He now blends Sauvignon Blanc with a little Bornova Misketi. The grapes macerate on their skins for 13 days giving the wine a delightful sunset tint. They ferment entirely on native yeasts and the resulting wine is bottled without filtering, fining, or adding sulfides.
A blend of native and international grapes and rediscovered ancient winemaking techniques, the Gurbuz Natural Orange Wine, made from Sauvignon Blanc and Muscat, truly embodies the adventurous and experimental spirit of Turkish winemaking!
Tasting notes: This natural orange wine has a beautiful bouquet of orange blossoms with a spritz of lemon that invites one to textured tannins and pleasant acidity structuring gorgeous notes of dried tangerine peel and bruised apple and a slight vegetal and nutty finish.
Wineries like Büyülübağ, Paşaeli, Gelveri, and Kastro Tireli had been quietly making wild fermented wines for years before the trend caught hold in Turkey. Like Akın’s skepticism over his skin-contact Sauvignon Blanc, Odrysia founder Zeynep Arca Şalliel was not convinced about adding a wild ferment wine to her portfolio. But also, as with Akın, the instant popularity of her new wine made her a believer!
This wine blends together two native grapes, Papaskarası and Öküzgözü. To create it, hand-picked, whole-cluster Papaskarası grapes macerated in small fermentation tanks and fermented with wild yeast, initially through carbonic maceration before pressing. The Öküzgözü grapes, on the other hand, are destemmed before wild yeasts begin the fermentation process. Once blended, the wine ages in second and third use French oak barrels for four months before being bottled with only gentle filtration.
While all the grapes used in this blend come from Odrysia’s estate and neighboring vineyards, only the Papaskarası is native locally, while Öküzgözü (originally) comes from the other side of the country in Eastern Anatolia. Separated by such distance, they are not common blending partners!
Tasting notes: Delightfully balanced displaying notes of red cherry and pomegranate, enlightened by herbal tones of cardamom and eucalyptus with undertones of tamarind that lead to a wonderfully lasting finish.
Arda’s winemaker Şeniz Saç is certainly not one to shrink away from trying new things in the winery! In addition to stretching Papakkarası to its limits, Şeniz has experimented with extended macerations, a dry late harvest Merlot, an Amarone-style Merlot, co-fermentations … and she’s not done yet!
This Gamay & Shiraz “Cofermentation” blends two international grapes. Shiraz is the most planted international variety in Turkey, but Gamay is a heritage variety. One of the first international grapes brought to Turkey nearly 100 years ago, plantings and wineries that work with it today are few, but passionate. This 50/50 blend macerated together for 35 days before fermenting in stainless steel, followed by a short time aging in multi-use French oak barrels before being bottled unfined and unfiltered.
Şeniz does not balk at taking risks! She sees this co-fermentation as one of the biggest ones she’s attempted as she knew she couldn’t change the blend after the fermentation. She could only hope that the two grapes, in equal proportion, would balance each other in the end. And oh did they! The result, a gorgeously unique expression.
Tasting notes: Deep ruby color with big powerful tannins and lovely acidity display delicious notes of black fruit, including blackberry and black currant followed by a lasting finish of oaky chocolate and charred wood.
You can enjoy and purchase each of these wines at the Fine Turkish Wine Bottle Shop + Tasting Room, located in Houston's Montrose District at 1909 Dunlavy Street.
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, and she is the founder of The Quirky Cork blog which is dedicated largely to Turkish wine.
Comments