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Who’d be a Turkish wine producer?

Turkish wine should be great, but President Erdoğan’s regime is making things very hard indeed




© Debora Szpilman

It had been 15 years since I’d been to Turkey, or Türkiye as it is now officially known, to study its wines. Much had changed, for good and bad.

In 2009 the country was still feeling the effects of a 1990s renaissance in Turkish wine. Boutique wineries were popping up all over the place, focusing largely on Turkish versions of international grape varieties such as Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Chardonnay.

But President Erdoğan’s regime has been no friend of wine production. Today, there are strict controls on where and how wine can be sold. It’s a crime for anyone to mention wine on social media. And from May this year, those who make wine for sale, on however small a scale, have been required by law to set aside millions of Turkish lira as collateral in anticipation of future taxes and fines.

The result is that there is a culture of fear among the country’s 191 wine producers. Inspectors can turn up at random and make what seem to wine professionals crazy demands. It’s illegal to trade used barrels, for instance.

I visited one producer in Cappadocia who shall remain nameless. Like producers all over the world, it makes its wine in clay jars, deemed unhygienic by the local inspector. Now it must pretend to make its wine in a small stainless steel tank, which the inspector comes every month to check. Another Spanish winemaker had to be talked out of returning to his home country after a particularly heavy-handed inspection.

Foreign visitors can be affected too. My wine writer colleagues Oz Clarke and Caro Maurer were due to attend a big wine fair in Istanbul in May, but it was cancelled at a moment’s notice when the organiser failed to get permission for an event that would involve actually serving wine.

The Root Origin Soil conference that I was invited to address last month had been carefully designed not to ruffle any official feathers. The only wine served was a solo tasting of an array of truly exciting wines made almost exclusively from indigenous grape varieties. This was organised for me by wine-mad Ankara architect Umay Çeviker, one of the four founders of Heritage Vines of Turkey, an organisation devoted to keeping these promising vines in the ground.

Between 2018 and 2022, Turkey lost more than 38,000 hectares of vineyards (for comparison, New Zealand has roughly the same amount of vineyards in total), although many of those lost were destined for dried fruit or distillation, with farmers switching to more profitable crops such as apples and nectarines. And there is little respect for old vines, which should be viewed as one of the country’s richest wine-related resources given they tend to make better wine, and can withstand the vagaries of climate better than young ones.

The 84 wines I’d tasted in Istanbul back in 2009 featured a grand total of six Turkish grape varieties, mainly only as minor components in blends with international varieties. But producers are now far prouder of their indigenous grapes. Çeviker managed to field 31 different Turkish grape specialities in the 64 wines he showed me, and told me that there are now as many as 68 featured in wines in commercial circulation, many of them advertised proudly on the front label as single-variety wines.

The national grapevine collection at Tekirdağ includes at least 854 different varieties. Not all of these are wine grapes, however. Despite recent shrinkage, Turkey still has the world’s fifth-biggest area of grapevines and is still the biggest producer of raisins, while only 3 per cent of the country’s vines produce grapes destined for wine.

But what wines! There is such a panoply of distinctive flavours and styles, partly thanks to the creativity of the winemakers. I tasted wines made from arboreal vines (grown up trees), wines in concrete, egg-shaped fermentation vessels, wines aged in egg-shaped barrels to encourage the circulation of lees, a rather Riesling-like wine made in oak from the grape responsible for sultanas, a fashionable pét-nat and a white wine fermented with grape skins left from making red wine.

Between 2018 and 2022, Turkey lost more than 38,000 hectares of vineyards (New Zealand has roughly the same amount in total), with farmers switching to more profitable crops such as apples
Thanks to the country’s geography and geopolitics, there are many non-Turkish influences too. Turkey borders, in a clockwise direction, Georgia, Armenia, Iran, Iraq and Syria. I tasted a wine grown on the Armenian border at 1,780 metres (higher than any European vineyard); wines made from Georgian, Syrian and Cretan grape varieties; and wines from the Kurdish zone that was a no-go area not so long ago.

Then there was the infamous "population exchange" of a century ago when Greeks were expelled from Turkey and Turkish nationals resident in Greece forcibly repatriated. Many of the Greeks were skilled and enthusiastic winegrowers. Their exodus considerably diminished such wine culture as Turkey had after centuries of Ottoman rule. It would be no surprise if some of the grape varieties thought to be Turkish turned out to have Greek origins.

Having seen, indeed encouraged, a global increase in the appreciation of Greek wines, with their similar wide range of grapes and terroirs, I would love to see Turkish wine more widely appreciated outside Turkey. (There’s also a parallel with another wine-producing country that can offer a stimulating range of indigenous wine styles and flavours, Portugal.)

But for the moment, in the US for instance, the offers for "Turkey" on Wine-searcher are dominated by Wild Turkey whiskey. Only a handful of Turkish wines are available in the UK, and even Turkish Master Sommelier Isa Bal, ex-Fat Duck and now with his own Michelin-starred restaurant Trivet in London, has remarkably few Turkish producers on his exceptionally eclectic wine list. Turkish wine exports currently represent just 3 per cent of the country’s production, and are worth only £8.5mn, about one-tenth as much as a single release from a Bordeaux first growth.

During my speech to the Istanbul gathering of wine lovers, winemakers and wine professionals, the hall erupted into knowing laughter when I suggested that the only way they would make headway exporting their wine was to work together.

However, when we were all sipping wine beside the Bosphorus at the reception after the conference, Yiannis Paraskevopoulos, another speaker and head of the Greek wine producer Gaia Wines, agreed with me, and added, "If we Greeks can co-operate with each other, then surely the Turks can." He also pointed out that "one company managing to sell abroad means nothing. You need a generic body."

Wines of Greece somehow manages to navigate a path between individual producers and government, but Wines of Turkey has shrivelled to a shadow of what it was between 2008 and 2014. So, for the moment, it’s probably best to try to find wines from the country’s biggest producers, Doluca, Kavaklidere, Kayra, Pamukkale and Sevilen, who are most likely to have taken the trouble to export.

Best-known Turkish grape varieties

The big producers are still managing to export wine to the UK

WHITES

  • Emir
    Mineral, crisp Anatolian
  • Narince
    Widely planted friend of oak used for both wine and dolmades
  • Yapincak
    Highly distinctive, recently rescued Thracian
REDS

  • Boğazkere
    Traditional blending partner of Öküzgözü, providing structure
  • Kalecik Karasi
    Lots of sour cherry flavour from near Ankara. Possibly a Hittite legacy
  • Öküzgözü
    Provides the juicy fruit for blends with Boğazkere
UK importers of Turkish wines are Berkmann, Gama Wines, Graft Wine Co, Hallgarten & Novum, N’Joy Catering, Taste Turkey and The Wine House Warwick
Tasting notes, scores and suggested drink dates on Purple Pages of JancisRobinson.com. International stockists on Wine-searcher.com

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