Blog

Büyülübağ Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon 2005

 

---

Büyülübağ winery is located on the island Avşa in the Sea of Marmara. When the Istanbul-levelling earthquake people keep predicting finally comes, Avşa is where you want to be. The island’s composition is pure granite down to the sea bed with decomposed granite soils. That island’s going nowhere. While Büyülübağ does have Cabernet vineyards on the island, those grapes are used in the winery’s wild ferment Cab. For the reserve line, the grapes come from Çeşme in the Aegean region.

Çeşme has a much warmer climate and richer, more fertile soils resulting in bigger and bolder wines. 

I’ve been lucky enough to have a number of older vintage reserve wines from Büyülübağ. When I visited the winery a few years ago, I picked up the 2006 and 2008 vintages from the winery’s shop – vintages not available in Istanbul. From what I’ve heard, they not available at all anymore. However, what blew even those out of the water was a bottle a friend kindly shared with me…the Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon 2005. A vintage which, per a comment on Instagram, was legendary.

And it was.

Büyülübağ Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon, 2005

This vintage spend 16 months in new French oak before bottling. And then of course another 16 years in the bottle before I got my hands on it. 

The wine poured a dense ruby leaning garnet. We decanted this for some time before drinking but the more it lived in the glass, the more it evolved. Broody notes of cigar box, tobacco flowers, and black pepper wrapped around dried figs. Swirling released notes of eucalyptus, mint, and tar.

Büyülübağ’s Cabernets can have quite a bit of tannin. The younger they are the more aggressive they are (as is often the way with this grape!). But the tannins in even the older wines have some fight in them. Mouth-filling, brawny tannins carried intense flavors, many sensed from the nose. A nice acidic structure brightened the fruit notes so they veered away from dried black fruits to brighter, fresh red fruits. Flavors journeyed from fruit to savory and herbal with a progression of tomato leaf, fresh mint, tobacco and tobacco flower.

Over all, full-bodied with moderate (and surprisingly low!) alcohol at only 13.5% abv with a long, lingering finish. Legendary indeed.

A note about Turkish language and why I find it so very frustrating. Turkish is an agglutinative language which basically means that complex words are formed by adding suffixes to the end of the basic word. There seems to be no end to the suffixes you can pile onto a word. Naturally, the back label for this wine was written in Turkish and in describing how long the wine aged in oak, the particular word used was: olgunlaştırılmıştır. Let’s break this down. 

Olgun – is the stem for the verb olgun olmak: to be mature

Olgun-laş – adding laş to the end of olgun changes the meaning to: to mature thus making the verb active vs. passive

Olgun-laş-tır* – tır is kind of tricky to explain. In Turkish class they call this a passive suffix but it’s not passive the way we use passive in English. A more direct translation of this would be: to have something matured

Olgun-laş-tır-ılmış – ılmış is now really getting into the weeds. It’s a grammatical distancer. Essentially what this construction does is to say that something was done by something. In this case: to have been matured by something 

Side note. Olgun-laş-tır-mış, without the ‘ıl’ means: to have been matured by someone (and generally you would know who that someone is).

Olgun-laş-tır-ılmış-tır – this ‘tır’ has a completely different meaning than the previous ‘tır’. When at the end of a verb, ‘tır’ formalizes the verb and makes it a fact, like: I know absolutely for a fact that this was matured by something.

Now I only think I’ve broken this down correctly. None of the books I used in my Turkish classes actually provide explanations for anything because why would they??? And the only proper Turkish grammar book I have is in German. And I also pulled in several friends on this! So. There’s a lot going on. But, I think this still gives you, dear reader, an idea of what Turkish can be like and why when I say that I “speak” Turkish, I always use air quotes.

*And yes for any Turkish speakers reading this, olgunlaştır is a command, but I didn’t want to add ‘mak’ to the mess here!