Arda Kuşlu Solera Misket
What do you get when a popular wine bar and a great winery form a partnership? A whole mess of new wines, that’s what! New wines like the Arda Kuşlu Solera Misket.
Arda and Solera
Solera is one of the longest-lived and successful wine bars in Istanbul. It also happens to be my local! So I have a soft spot for it and for owner Süleyman Er. Imagine my delight to learn that that for some years now he’s been cultivating his own vineyards. Süleyman has made some progress towards renovating a 100 year winery on the shores of the Sea of Marmara as well. But for the time being, he sells his grapes to other wineries. In the past, he sold them to Akın Gürbüz. However, as of last year, he sells them to Arda. 
Arda produced his Bornova Misketi under its “Kuşlu” label but also marked the label with the Solera name. This was their first venture together, and now they have several wines made with Süleyman’s grapes and (now) bottled under the Kuşlu – Solera label.
Arda Kuşlu Solera Misket, 2020
Solera’s grapes hail from Ganos, Şarköy in the Marmara growing region. After surviving the trip to Edirne to Arda’s winery, grapes were whole bunch pressed and spent one month undergoing a cold fermentation. The resulting wine fell into the semi-sweet Bornova Misketi category. A category that seems to be dying out as the dry versions maintain more popularity.
Pale lemon bordering on pewter in the glass. Aromatic and floral the way Misket is: melon, white rose, orange blossom, and citrus all wrapped up in the sweetest perfume. But delicately so. The aromas were all there but not in the bombastic way that Misket can often have. On the palate, weight from the residual sugar was obvious but subtly so. It did not in fact taste so much semi-sweet as felt it. Beyond the weight, the wine offered flavors reflective of those found on the nose but again, delicately so.
Charming, pretty, nicely pairs with lightly spicy foods and more delicate Asian foods like Singaporean Hainanese Chicken and my favorite Asian-inspired noodle salad. BUT. However pretty this was, it had nothing on the staggering beauty of the dry wine Gürbüz previously made with the grapes. I don’t know why that relationship fell apart but we lost a magnificent wine in the process.