Low Intervention at Its Best: Kastro Tireli Kalecik Karası
It’s a little strange for me to post about wine today in Ash Wednesday. Today is a fast day which means I will not be drinking any wine at all. Sad for me. And yet, it is #WineWednesday so, here we are!
I’ve flirted with some of Kastro Tireli’s other low intervention / “natural” wines. My favorite still being the Hermos Bornova Misketi. I recently realized that I had not yet tried the Kalecik Karası though so I moved to immediately rectify that!
Kalecik Karası hails from Central Anatolia, just outside the capitol Ankara, in Kalecik. Whence the grape’s name. You can read more about the grape here! Kastro Tireli is not a Central Anatolian winery. It sits in the inner Aegean in Manisa. Nor does the winery source its grapes from anywhere other than its own vineyards. The different climate and soils found in Manisa vs Kalecik will already give Kalecik Karası wines different characteristics. Similarly, any manipulation during the winemaking process will change the grape’s profile. But the latter is exactly what Kastro Tireli strives to not do.
Kastro Tireli Kalecik Karası, 2020
All of Kastro Tireli’s wines begin with organic grapes. During harvest, workers do the first grape selection in the vineyard, ensuring only the best fruit reaches the sorting tables. From there, winemaker Işık Gülçubuk follows a “low intervention” process, fermenting the wine with native yeasts and bottling it unfiltered. The label makes no mention of oak, nor did I pick up anything overt on the nose so … probably not used.
The nose offered a mixed orchard of sour cherry and black, cranberry, tangy black olive, and fresh rosemary. Sipping revealed a fruit-forward wine with flavors similar to those sense on the nose accompanied by deer antler fuzz tannins and nice acidity. Good balance on this with the fruit evening out the 14% abv which contributed to an over-all medium body.
I am often the first one to scoff and roll my eyes when the topic of “natural” wine comes up, for so very many reasons. One reason being that the moniker seems to cover up so many winemaking sins thereby subjecting drinkers to really crap wines. I’ve had a lot of really crap “natural” wines. Without staying on my soapbox for too long, I will say I find the difference comes only when the people behind the wine a) have talent, b) work with quality products, and c) work cleanly and carefully. This is what Kastro Tireli does.