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Finding Common Ground with Paşaeli, Sıdalan, Karasakız, and Çakal

 

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This time of year is always fun for us winos. It’s usually this late spring time when wineries start to trickle release new vintages of whites, rosés, possibly bubbles, and even a few of the more crushable reds. The Paşaeli Kabuğunda Co-Ferment, which the winery first released this time last year, has been in my writing queue for a wee little bit. Now the new 2025 vintage is out and I figure now is a good time to intrigue people into looking for the new vintage. 

I’ve written about Paşaeli a couple-few times (well over two dozen times apparently!!). So, since this is already preparing to be a long post, I’ll let you check out some of those older posts for background about Paşaeli and we’ll jump right into talking about the wine. 

What Is a Co-Ferment?

What does it mean if a wine labels says “co-ferment”? Basically, it means you take two or more kinds of grapes, and put them through the fermentation process together. 

This is completely distinct both in process and resulting wine from a blend. In a blend, grape varieties ferment and often age (in barrel or otherwise) separately. A winemaker then creates a final wine by blending individual wines. With a blend, the winemaker can also make some adjustments. If a 50/50 Öküzgözü – Boğazkere is still too heavy, a little more Öküzgözü might be added, creating a final wine with 60% Öküzgözü and 40% Boğazkere. But with a co-ferment, you get one shot. 

Why Take the Risk??

So, yeah, that begs the question, why take the risk of co-fermenting grapes if you can have more control by blending them? Because interestingly, the resulting wines are totally different. Using the same combination of grapes as an example:

If you ferment Öküzgözü and Boğazkere separately and blend them (let’s keep the 50/50 proportion to make things simple), you should be able to pick out innate characteristics and flavors of each of the grapes in the final wine. This is that thing people who are well-studied and gifted with amazing palates do that amazes us wine peons. “Oh I believe this vintage is more of a 70/30 blend whereas the 2020 had a greater proportion of Boğazkere.”

Yeah, I can’t do that. I wish I could do that. 

Now, if you take the same proportion of Öküzgözü and Boğazkere and toss them in the fermentation tank together, there’s a whole different chemical sciencey thing that happens. The resulting wine contains elements, be those flavors or something else, neither wine individually nor blended could have achieved. 

Co-fermented wines aren’t a new thing in Turkey. Kayra might have been the first with its Rhone-style Syrah-Viognier. Arda has been playing with co-fermentation for some time and the Wine Experience Project’s WE 23 release included some elements of co-fermentation. Kuzeybağ accidentally was doing it before discovering that some of their Öküzgözü was actually Kösetevek. Selefkia’s Patkara blush also features a little co-fermentation.

These are only the examples that immediately leap to mind. I’m sure there are more out there and  it’s entirely possible others have used this technique but haven’t indicated so on the label.

Paşaeli Kabuğunda Co-Ferment, 2024

Çakal

The Çakal vineyard Paşaeli works with was planted in the 1940s and grows kind of between Sıdalan and Karasakız at around 450-500 meters.

Çakal is a thin-skinned grape that’s neither really black nor really grey. Because of its pale skin, even long maceration results in what could be called a dark rosé with low tannins and medium acidity. It earned its name, which means “jackal” because, as an early ripening grape, jackals come down from the mountains to eat the berries but ignore the nearby growing, later ripening grapes.

And Finally, Onto the Paşaeli Kabuğunda Co-Ferment

First, or maybe third at this point, let’s talk briefly about the name. Kabuğunda is Turkish for ‘on the skins’ and that reflects the winemaking style as much as does ‘co-ferment.’ All three grape varieties were carefully de-stemmed before fermenting together with their skins for 17 days. The wine then aged for three months on the fine lees before bottling.