Turkey: Ancient Wine Land at a Crossroads
Joel Butler MW 1.27 5.22.2023
22 MAY 2023
I met Seyit Karagozoglu, (Kara-go-zo-lu) owner of Turkey’s up and coming Paşaeli Winery, in 2010 at one of the first international judgings of Turkish wines in Istanbul. I was one of the judges. During the next two years while writing our book Divine Vintage…I spent a lot of time and drove a lot of kilometers in Turkey visiting vineyards and producers to understand the current state of wine in one of the main ancestral centers of wine-growing dating back 9000 years (give or take a couple of centuries).
Seyit founded his brand in 2000, but his first vintage was only in 2005 and he wasn’t able to sell this one wine until 2010. Making wine, or any alcoholic beverage in Turkey, especially since 2005, means jumping over interminable bureaucratic (and religious) hurdles, as well as battling the rising and persistent anti-alcohol policies of the Recep Tayyip Erdoğan government. Hence, I could not include his winery in our book, nor were the wines available outside of Turkey until 2015!
Thus, I looked forward to having dinner with Seyit and his wife here in Seattle a couple of days ago and tasting a half-dozen of his new wines. Not having seen him for a dozen years, there was a lot to discuss, not least of all the dire time Turkish wine producers are experiencing currently, and how the portentous, upcoming Presidential election will affect the future of the growing Turkish wine industry.
Seyit and me (above)) and Two of my favorite wines & labels from Pasaeli; a white and rosé version of the indigenous Çalkarasi red grape which Pasaeli has been instrumental in bringing back from near extinction in the Aegean area.
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My interest in ancient wine and Greco-Roman history sparked a keen interest in Turkey over many years. A lot of time spent there researching magnified that interest and increased my admiration for the country today and its ability to re-invent itself after the demise of the Ottoman Empire. But politically speaking, the recent past has offered little to be sanguine about. Especially after observing the constraints placed on wine producer friends by the government.
I don’t know how many of you have been following the current affairs about Turkey and its recent Presidential election. It will be close and Turkey’s future hinges on the outcome. Will there be increasing political and religious authoritarianism, or a return perhaps to more secular, parliamentary outward-looking governance and less xenophobia?
The run-off election on May 28th between current right-wing authoritarian/Islamist President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan (AKP-Justice and Development Party!) and long-time conservative/secular politician Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu (CHP-Republican People’s Party) represents not only a crossroads vote for Turkey’s nominal democracy and significant consequences for Turkey’s relations with the US and Europe, but also will have direct consequences for Turkey’s embattled wine industry.
The map below shows the results by region and party for the first round election a week ago.
023 Turkish Presidential Election Map. This map shows the winning vote share by province. , information: https://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/siyaset/son-dakika-ysknin-kesin-secim-sonuclari-resmi-gazetede-yayimlandi-2082958
If Turkey is substituted for the United States in this map, red here represents those provinces that voted for the coalition backing Kılıçdaroğlu and his more secular-democratic policies, while yellow/ochre represents that of Erdoğan with its right-wing Islamist, anti-Kurdish, anti-alcohol and nationalistic followers. This map looks like the blue state/red state map of America after the 2020 elections! Kılıçdaroğlu, interestingly, is a member of the Alevi Muslim movement, which dates back seven centuries and represents a significant (+-15%) minority of Turkish Muslims. Alevis do not outright condemn or prohibit alcohol; indeed some grow wine grapes and make wine, particularly in Thrace, west of Istanbul. Co-incidental or not, a large majority of Turkey’s wines are produced in the Red zones on the map above.
Most of the western Aegean/Anatolian area is strongly tourist-oriented and heavily commercial, with many archaeological sites and port cities from Istanbul south to Izmir and east along the coast to Antalya and Adana. Half of Turkey’s wine vineyards are along the Aegean coastal areas and on the European side of the Sea of Mamara, south of Istanbul. As Seyit noted in our discussion, people who live in Western Turkey are more open to the West, are more ‘cosmopolitan’; this is the “Turkey” that first welcomes visitors and forms their first impressions of the country, much as it did two millennia ago, when influential Greek city-states like Ephesus and Smyrna were major trade centers famous for their wines and later among Roman Asia’s most wealthy cities.
The eastern provinces are more heavily Kurdish, and generally for good reason unfriendly towards Erdoğan’s government. To the south around Gaziantep and Antakya (Antioch), the populace is conflicted, due to the recent tragic earthquakes and the resulting frustration with the government’s handling of the situation. The area is also fearful, however, of significant change relative to the massive Syrian immigrant problem if the opposition comes to power.
The vote here will be crucial to the success of either man. These east-central Anatolian regions are also noted for significant vineyards. Indeed, some of the oldest sites in Turkey with wine-growing history going back 8000+ years are found here, Göbekli Tepe being the most famous. Syriac Christian followers have maintained wine-growing traditions near the Syrian border east of Mardin since the 4th C. CE, too. The area around the ancient city Diyarbakir on the banks of the Tigris River is noted for its strong wines made with the local Boğazkere variety.
The point of the discussion above is to clarify why this Turkish election is so important not only for Turks, Turkish wine and spirits producers and hundreds of thousands of grape growers. It will also affect how Europe, the US and neighboring countries, including Ukraine will engage with a country literally at the crossroads geographically, politically and culturally.
Turkey’s wine producers, like Seyit Karagozoglu of Paşaeli are caught in the crosshairs of the divisions between Turkish traditional culture, agrarian, religious and conservative especially in the Anatolian heartlands, and the country’s desire to modernize, interact and engage with the greater western world that it desires to be part of – most clearly noticed in the more developed cities and coastal regions to the west of the country.
A brief review of Turkey’s recent ‘Wine’ history, along with thoughts on the new wines of Paşaeli will frame the follow-up to today’ post tomorrow.
