Max Frisch once said that technology is the knack of arranging the world so we no longer have to experience it. I was thinking about that in a hotel room in Istanbul, on the way home from the Digital Wine Communications Conference in Izmir. The call to prayer was bouncing between the minarets across the city, and I was wondering what makes Turkish wine so distinctly Turkish. I already suspected there was no easy answer.
Where do you even start with a country as complex as Turkey? I first heard of Thrace in ancient history lessons at school. It covers parts of what are now Turkey, Greece and Bulgaria, and its people traded wine with the ancient Greeks and were feared for their skill as warriors.
Plato disapproved of the Thracian habit of drinking their wine neat. In the Laws, he complained that “both men and women drink unmixed wine, which they pour on their garments, and this they think a happy and glorious institution.” He wrote this at a time when wine had become a symbol of Greek culture, with the shared cup standing for democracy, civilisation and refinement. The Greeks were also among the first to draw a line between East and West, and Thrace sat right on it.
Thrace is about an hour and a half’s drive from Istanbul, though the city refuses to let go for the first 60 kilometres or so. Eventually the countryside takes over, dry and ancient and criss-crossed with power lines, before giving way to forest and the occasional horse-drawn cart.
Our driver is Ozcan Arca, owner of Arcadia Vineyards, the first official vineyard in the area for a very long time. He’s 70 years old and was up all night dancing at the conference party. He hasn’t slept, yet his energy reminds me of Angelo Gaja.
I ask Ozcan what first drew him to wine. “When I finished university, we went on holiday to the sea and drank a dreadful salty wine that had seawater in it, to avoid alcohol taxes,” he says. “Five or six years later, I was determined to change that attitude and learn more. The first great wines I had were Barolo and a Grand Cru St-Émilion.”
Thrace is home to many Alevi communities. The Alevi follow a branch of Islam that prays in Turkish rather than Arabic, and their rituals include dance and, in some cases, wine, though getting drunk is frowned upon. Some families keep wine cellars in their homes and make wine underground for their own use, much as they do in Georgia. After a lunch of Thracian lamb chops with tomato and red onion salad, our hosts at the local restaurant say goodbye with a hand placed on their hearts.
Istanbul straddles Europe and Asia, divided by the Bosphorus, and Turks often describe their country in the same way. For the most part, the division is geographic rather than cultural. Thrace sits on the European side. At the conference in Izmir, posters proclaimed Turkey a wine culture with more than 6,000 years of history, though it’s a history with a good many gaps in it.
Only after the vineyard was planted did Ozcan come across old maps dating from the Capitulations, the trade agreements between France and the Ottoman Empire. They showed his vineyard sat very close to an old road once used to carry wine to the Black Sea. According to Ozcan, when phylloxera devastated French vineyards, the French produced vast quantities of wine here to make up the shortfall at home. The Ottoman Empire took stamp duty on every litre, but by the First World War the whole industry had vanished. After surveying landscapes all over Turkey, Ozcan had stumbled upon those forgotten vineyards without realising it.
When Hikmet, the 26-year-old winemaker, applied for his job at Arcadia, he was asked whether he had any experience. He said no. “That’s good,” Ozcan explains, because they wanted young people with no preconceptions who would build something for the future. The team is guided by consultants Michel Salgues, who set up Roederer Estate in California’s Anderson Valley, and Professor Alain Carbonneau from Montpellier. The vineyards are also close to the technical college in Tekirdağ, which specialises in agriculture, viticulture and oenology.
Before building his winery, Ozcan visited 50 or 60 wineries around the world. Around the same time, his daughter Zeynep decided to study wine at UC Davis.
One of the team had to take his young child to hospital that morning. He returns later for the tasting, exhausted. “Babies grow like that,” Ozcan tells the young group around the table, philosophically.
Ozcan, the Arcadia Vineyards winemaking team and Sarah Abbott MW
Arriving in Turkey from France, the first thing that strikes me is the energy. It’s an old culture full of young people, with a population far younger on average than those of France or Italy.
The stainless steel tanks are fairly small, and the winery uses gravity to move the grapes rather than pumps. We taste the new whites straight from the tank. Hikmet tells us about his experiment of adding Sauvignon Gris lees to the fermenting Sauvignon Blanc, which tames the Sauvignon Blanc while giving it texture.
The fruit is there, but subdued. It reminds me of Hayrabolu, a local dessert you expect to be intensely sweet, only to find it’s made with soft cheese. The wine is closer to Sancerre than to New Zealand Sauvignon Blanc, though even that comparison sells it short. It’s a French variety, yet the wine has a self-assured quality, as if it has no interest in being anything other than itself.
Later, at a truck stop where the food is local, fresh and very good, we try the Cabernet Sauvignon. Dishes arrive on silver plates one after another: soups, meatballs and veal brains, which I try because I can, though nobody else joins me.
The Cabernet surprises me. I’d been expecting something like the other Turkish reds I’d tasted, heavy with oak and better suited to a packet of Marlboro Reds, or perhaps a big New World Cabernet. Instead, it has a lightness and freshness, with crunchy red fruit, and even sitting in the sun it’s refreshing. Over lunch, we talk about the Sufi poets and their many references to wine, and whether they meant it symbolically or literally.
In the Cabernet Sauvignon vineyard
Wine sits at the heart of Hafiz’s poetry, and how you read his wine shapes how you read him. The Sufi teacher Inayat Khan offered one interpretation I find beautiful. He suggested that Hafiz saw the whole world as a wine press, and that every person drinks the wine that matches their own stage of life. Each of us, whether wise or foolish, believer or not, is drinking a particular wine, and the intoxication it brings is what makes us who we are. When a person changes, it is because they have started drinking a different wine.
We take a bottle of the 2009 Finesse Sauvignon Blanc–Sauvignon Gris back to Istanbul for our last night in Turkey. We go to Arşipel, an upmarket fish restaurant on the waterfront. The owner joins our table and tells us about managing a circus in Tanzania before coming home to open the restaurant. The dishes are inventive, with tuna cured like pastrami, excellent calamari and local fish. The wine is superb with the seafood, carrying both the meal and the conversation, soothing and smooth.
That weekend marked the anniversary of the death of Atatürk, the founder of modern Turkey. Among his many reforms, he replaced the Arabic script with the Latin alphabet. Over dinner, we talked at length about Turkish history, with Ozcan filling in the gaps and offering an Eastern view of what we thought we knew.
The restaurant was full of groups enjoying dinner and wine, and it could have been a top restaurant anywhere in the world. Then again, seafood speaks of its place even more clearly than wine does, and this was so fresh that the meal could only have come from here.
Wine is where culture and land meet. In Turkey, it’s woven into a complicated history and carries a nation’s hopes for its future. This is a new and ancient wine country, waking up.
Image: Turkish-Danish artist Evren Tekinoktay
Many thanks to my friend Sarah Abbott MW, who took me to visit Arcadia Vineyards, and a special thank you to Ozcan Arca for driving us and for his generous hospitality.
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