Turkish Wine Selection: The Turkish Champions of Rodeo Uncorked! 2025
- Andrea Lemieux
- Mar 4
- 3 min read
March 2025
Not sure yet about Turkish wine? Trust the experts! Eleven of our fine Turkish wines won medals at the 2025 Rodeo Uncorked! International Wine Competition! And among those eleven wines, three received the prestigious “Class Champion” or "Reserve Class Champion" designation!
So, as the Houston Rodeo season gets going this month, our featured selection will be the three Turkish Champions of Rodeo Uncorked! 2025:
Odrysia Narince, Arda Gala Papazkarası, and Gurbuz Hieron Oros.
The Rodeo Uncorked! International Wine Competition is one of the largest wine competitions in the United States, with wines judged by a fantastic panel of wine experts using a double blind procedure that is audited onsite by PricewaterhouseCoopers.
If wine professionals judging with these stringent rules say that Turkish wine is among the best in the world... how can you go wrong?
First up, winning a Gold medal with a Reserve Class Champion designation is a Narince from Odrysia’s Kırklareli estate in upper Thrace. The local Turkish grape variety, Narince (pronounced "nah-reen-jeh"), originates in the more temperate climate along the Black Sea but has adapted well to the colder, more continental climate of Kırklareli. Odrysia’s Narince comes from the winery’s “Grey-White” parcel. So named for its sedimentary, alluvial soils full of silt clay with sandstone and granite substrates, it gives a more mineral-forward expression to the wine.
Tasting Notes: Bright aromas of ripe apple, lemon zest and white peach open to light and airy notes of grapefruit, lime zest, apricot and tropical mango. Undertones of savory herbs, salinity and minerality round out this fruit forward and strikingly fresh wine made from one of Turkey's premier local white grape varietals: Narince.
Winning a Gold medal with a Class Champion designation is the red Papazkarası from Arda’s Gala series. Papazkarası is the native grape of Thrace, existing here for centuries, the legacy of which can still be seen in the many old, bush-trained vineyards. Arda’s grapes come from 40+ year old bush vines grown around Lake Gala’s sandy and loamy soils and farmed with Turkish Government-approved Good Agricultural Practices. This stunning medium bodied red wine displays one of the truly fantastic unique expressions of the Turkish Thracian terroir.
Tasting Notes: This lovely dry red wine made from the local Turkish black varietal, Papazkarası, begins with aromas of dried flowers and potpourri along with intense earthiness over black pepper spices. The palate brings gorgeous bright red cherry, crushed raspberry, and red currant flavors, cut with savory white pepper and olive brine, all rounded with a subtle musk and silky tannins to establish this medium bodied wine with a gorgeously long balanced toasty finish.
In the Şarköy district of Turkish Thrace sits a small mountain called Mt. Ganos. The Orthodox Christians who once heavily populated this area considered Mt. Ganos (Ganos Dağı in Turkihsh) to be holy and called it Hieron Oros (old Greek for “sacred mountain”). Monasteries would have dotted these hills, the ruins of many remain, and monks and priests here would also have dominated the wine industry at the time. Inspired by this local history, Akın Gürbüz named his Bordeaux-style blend after the mountain. It seems the judges agreed with his expectations for the wine, having awarded it with a Double Gold medal and choosing it as the Class Champion of the "Bordeaux Rouge - Old World" category!
Tasting Notes: A rich and very complex "Bordeaux" style blend, reminiscent of a gorgeous Left Bank expression with a jammy fruity nose, crushed red and black fruits on the palate with black and red currant, cranberries and plum leading to a lovely finish and notes of smoke, cedar and vanilla. Robust complexity with medium acidity and tannins make for easy but extremely rewarding drinking.
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.
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