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Turkish Amber Wine and Fast Food

 

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One of the world of wine’s “everything old is new again” biggest topics must be skin-contact white wine. Call it skin-contact white wine, amber wine, or orange wine…whatever the color it’s a hot topic. While Turkey jockeys for position as ‘oldest winemaking country’ it certainly falls into the “everything old is new again” or “better late than never” category when it comes to amber wines.

Amber wine (my preferred name for this style) does not have to be made with any particularly special grape. It is not made from grapes that are orange in color. Nor is it made from oranges. Amber wine is a style of winemaking that treats white grapes similarly to red grapes. The color of red wine results because the grape juices stay in contact with the skin (and pulp and seeds but those rarely add color) for hours, days, weeks, etc. The length of time in contact with the skins gives wine not only color but those lovely lovely tannins I heart ever so much. You can do that with white grapes, too. When you leave the juice of white grapes in contact with their green-gold/yellow skins the wine ends up not the clear to gold color we associate with traditional “white” wine, but darker and in the amber-orange spectrum. Often the wine will also have a little touch of tannin and texture as well.

And that brings us to this month’s Wine Paired Weekend chat; hosted by Martin Redmond of ENOFYLZ Wine Blog. His chosen topic: skin-contact white wines. Join Martin and the rest of the #WinePW crew on Twitter this Saturday, May 9 at 11 AM EST, that’s 6 PM local time if you’re here in Istanbul. You don’t have to have written a post, or even be a wine blogger to join us! Follow the hashtag #WinePW and see what everyone cam up with for this month’s theme.

Gelveri Koku Üzüm 2017

One cannot talk about Turkish amber wine without starting at Gelveri. This Central Anatolian winery was the first to commercially produce amber wine here and has been doing so since 2002. With a production so tiny that only the geekiest, and hipsterest, Turkish wine enthusiasts know about it; I first learned about the winery at the 2017 Zero Compromises natural wine festival in Tbilisi, Georgia. Upon learning that I was “from” Turkey, a couple of the winemakers there asked me if I knew about the “mad German.” The mad German turned out to be Udo Hirsch, a German transplant who learned how to make wine in Georgia but set up shop in the wilds of Turkey. And as fantastical coincidence would have it; a man I met about 10 minutes later.

An ecologist and historian, making natural wine in an ancient manner appealed to Hirsch. So when he established his winery in Turkey he made non-interventionalist wines with chemical free grapes. All his white wines are aged on their skins, all the wines undergo spontaneous fermentation, have no added sulfur, are neither fined nor filtered prior to bottling, and all are aged in buried clay amphora, called küp in Turkish. Here also his love of history and dedication to tradition are evident. Several of his amphora date back to Byzantine and Roman times.

Hirsch works with a number of grapes that very few people know much of anything about. And since it has been languishing in my refrigerator for far too long, when this topic came up for May’s #WinePW; I selected one of the most esoteric: the Gelveri Koku Üzüm.

Not a lot is known about this particular grape. I reached out to Hirsch to see if he could provide me with some basic ampelographic information. Unfortunately, he’s had so few chances to work with it and only ever in such tiny amounts that even bares bones info cannot be confidently said. However, he did confirm a few things. The grapes are planted on their own roots, are phylloxera free (possibly even predate phylloxera), and mildew resistant. They come from volcanic tuff vineyards planted with a high level of biodiversity at 1500 meters. Koku Üzüm grapes are so rare that the bottle I have, with its label featuring the Sun Goddess of Arinna, was bottle #37 of only 210 made.

My visit here proved to be one of the most fascinating winery experiences I’ve had in Turkey. When this skin-contact subject came up I was so thrilled to still have a bottle left.

The Gelveri Koku Üzüm poured a beautiful deep amber. I have some good Baltic amber jewelry that’s not this pretty. Initially on the nose orange peel, red apple, peach, dill, quince jam, and honey…then when it got closer to room temperature there were whiffs of sweet hay and sandalwood. Palate flavors reflected the aromas with the addition of chamomile and elevated by peach fuzz-like tannins and lively acidity. Medium-bodied with 13% abv and fairly long finish; this was a special wine.

Chamlija Narince Kehribar 2018

About 900 kilometres across the country in the foothills of the Thracian Strandja Massif we find Chamlija. Under the leadership of Mustafa Çamlıca, Chamlija has evolved into Turkey’s most experimental winery. For years now Çamlıca has explored how different grapes, both domestic and international, do in the vastly varied soils of Thrace. He doesn’t stop there either. In the winery he and the Chamllija’s winemakers play with different methods. One such method debuted in 2019: nothing added, nothing removed. This was not only Chamlija’s first attempt at an amber wine, but the first one to be widely available in Turkey.

Made with 100% Narince grapes via spontaneous fermentation and bottled with no added sulfur, fining or filtering is the Chamlija Kehribar (kehribar being the Turkish word for “amber”). I’ve had the opportunity to drink this one several times, it being far less rare than Gelveri’s wines. A less intense amber in the glass than the Gelveri, the Chamlija Kehribar showed a kind of atomic orange with golden undertones. Very fruity on the nose with peach, apricot and apple cider vinegar. And I mean that last note in the very best way. Sipping revealed a surprisingly refreshing character. When I want a refreshing drink I don’t generally gravitate towards wine. My mistake apparently! Palate flavors reflected the nose and while I didn’t get the feeling of tannins the wine did have a slight effervescence.

Fast Food Turkish Style

I truly had no idea where to start trying to pair Turkish amber wines with food. I really only knew that I wanted the food to be as Turkish as possible. With a little help from my food guru Istanbites, I settled on a selection of Turkish fast food including: lahmacun, gözleme, içli köfte, and çığ köfte. We’re not talking McDonalds fast food here, rather simple, quickly made, and widely available foods often used as snacks and sides. I liked the idea of pairing the rather esoteric wines with food that is more ubiquitous.

I chose a variety of lahmacun. While all were topped with the traditional tomato paste and meat, once also had walnuts, another garlic, and one was spicy. My favorite way to eat lahmacun is to load them with arugula and generously squeeze lemon over everything before rolling up and chowing down. Sadly these didn’t come with arugula. They really needed it though.

For the gözleme, most easily described as a savory crepe, I went simple with a feta-like cheese filling. The içli köfte with their spiced meat and walnut filling inside fried breading and the spicy bulgar and tomato paste çığ köfte were, like the lahmacun, treated to a generous amount of fresh lemon juice. As a starter I added a little locally produced, semi-hard goat cheese and pastırma, a spice-rubbed cured beef.

How did the wine end of up pairing with the food you ask? Not terribly successfully I’m sorry to say. Both wines went beautifully with the aged goat cheese, did pretty well with the içli köfte, and not too bad with the less spicy lahmacuns. The addition of fresh lemon juice to those complimented the wines well. However, the pastırma was a failure, it completely overwhelmed the wines. The spicier lahmacun and çığ köfte I think made the wines angry so I won’t be trying that again!

More Adventures in Amber Wines 

Don’t forget to check out what the rest of the #WinePW crew got up to and what they discovered in their skin-contact white wine journey!

• This month’s host Martin at ENOFLYZ Wine Blog is serving up “A Cadre Of California Skin-Contact Wines Paired With Ethnic Fare”
• Camilla of Culinary Adventures With Camilla will be “Diving into the Skin Fermented Wine Pool of Two Shepherds Winery”
• Wendy of A Day in the Life on the Farm presents Donkey and Goat Skin Fermented Roussanne; A Baaaaad Ass Wine”
• Olivier of In Taste Buds We Trust will be “Trying Orange and non-Orange wine with Jamie’s Kinda Niçoise salad”
• Lori of Exploring The Wine Glass asks “Orange you glad I have wine? “
• Jeff of FoodWineClick offers “Wine 201: Orange Wine Primer
• Jill of L’Occasion will have us “Thinking Wine: The Engaging World of Orange Wine”
• Linda of My Full Wine Glass will be “Revisiting NY Finger Lakes Skin-Contact White Wines”
• David of Cooking Chat proffers “Cauliflower Bacon Spread with Orange Wine from Georgia”.
• Gwendolyn at Wine Predator will be featuring “Orange Wines from CA and Italy by Accident and on Purpose Paired with Shrimp curry #WinePW
• Lauren at The Swirling Dervish shares “He Said, She Said: Ryme Cellars and the Tale of Two Vermentinos”
• Susannah of Avvinare serves up “Orange wine from Slovenia’s Movia Paired with Homemade Sushi”
• Katrina Rene of The Corkscrew Concierge wonders “Is Orange (Wine) the New Everything Wine?”
• Nicole at Somm’s Table will be “Cooking to the Wine: Kabaj Rebula and Chicken w/Mushroom Escabeche and Lentils”